Metroid Prime 2 Echoes: New Screens

Catching up with some lovely new shots.

To mark its appearance at Nintendo's impressive Game Stars Live booth last week, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes got the new screens treatment, so allow us to play catch-up, and post them here.

Samus is on a mission on the planet Aether to locate and assist a group of federation troopers, but later she discovers the planet has been struck by a phazon meteor and ripped into two dimensions, dark and light. Space Pirates have been drawn to the energy emitted from Aether and have been conducting experiments on the two dimensions, as well as Metroid and Phazon experimentation.

Samus stealthily follows some Space Pirates through an activated portal and finds herself in the dark world, a pirate corpses littering the floor. In the dark world you will loose energy simply by standing still, so you need to use your light beam to shoot crystals, which in turn create balls of light, acting as safe zones for Samus.

Eventually you encounter Ing warriors, spider-like shape shifters made of dark energy who inhabit the dark world. You can take them out easily with your light beam, but if you're out of ammo the power beam will have to do.

Two new beams complement the light and dark worlds, unsurprisingly labeled the light and dark beams. Unlike previous Metroid games they both use light and dark energy which works like ammo and needs to be collected from crates and enemies like missiles or energy. Scanning has also been enhanced, and objects are now colour coded depending on what they are, for example critical mission objects show red, scanable objects and hostile creatures also show up different colors.

The art in Metroid Prime 2 is, once again, simply gorgeous. Samus' ship's landing gear now opens up and retracts to land on the surface, Space Pirates now actually look like Space Pirates and the Samus model has been completely remade and actually looks a whole world better than the previous model.

Click here for our previous coverage on Echoes.

Adam Doree / Andy Robinson
Editorial Director / Contributor, Kikizo.com