Metroid Prime 2 Echoes Preview

The light and dark worlds play a huge part in the game though as you’ll be going from one world to the other quite often. We don’t know yet how it’s going to affect the game, like if it’s going to be something similar to Zelda where you’d do something in the light world and it affected the dark one. In the demo that we’ve played, dark portals were created by a huge cannon engineered by the space pirates, and a light portal appeared out of nowhere after a battle, although it seems like it was made out of a light crystal. Again, pure speculation, but we’ll know for sure soon enough.

Samus is now able to use light and dark beams as weapons though, and the dark beam is used to do unlock stuff in the light world and vice versa. The light beam is also very powerful against dark enemies, but that was a given. The dark world’s atmosphere is deadly to human beings though, so you’ll have to jump from one energy field to another at the beginning. Energy fields are made from light crystal, and some of them need to be shot with the light bean to charge them and create the energy field. It is known though that there is a Dark suit and that you’ll be able to travel anywhere in the dark world once you get it. It has a very dark look to it and looks badass!

Samus also gets a few new moves and weapons this time around. She gets seeker missiles. You get to lock on to five enemies at the same time and fire 5 seeking missiles at once. In one of the videos we saw this used to unlock doors as Samus needed to shoot 5 switches at the same time. There’s also the return of the screw attack which gives Samus the ability to jump from one wall to the other and get to higher areas. We also saw Samus jumping in the air in third-person view like she used to do in Super Metroid. This opens up a lot of possibilities and there probably will be a lot o=f hidden missiles and health expansions hidden that you will need to find using those new moves.

The scan visor has also changed. Everything that you can scan will appear in red on screen, and once you scanned them they will become green. It works a lot better than before and it looks really cool! The dark visor will be used to see invisible enemies in the dark world. And finally, there’s also another visor that gives you the ability to see sound, or something like that. We’re not really sure about this one yet has Retro hasn’t revealed anything about it except for a few seconds of video. It probably has a huge part to play in this game, and we can’t wait to see how it works and what it can do.

Another cool addition to the game is the multiplayer mode. People had asked for it in the first game but Retro didn’t have enough to do it. This time though it seems like they worked really hard and brought us a very slick multiplayer mode. A few modes of play will be available like Death match and Bounty where you have to collect cash that players leave on the ground when they die, but there are as well a few interesting things like cannons that can launch you while you are in morph ball as well as being able to give disadvantages to your enemies by scanning them. This will inflict them conditions that will make their life more difficult. Up to four players will be able to join on the fun, and we hope that Retro will surprise us with the inclusion of LAN play though this is quite unlikely at this point.

While it may seem difficult to believe, the graphics engine is even better than the last! Well, not that much, but there seemed to be a few little additions to it. It seems like a few little details were added here and there to make it look a little bit more realistic. Samus looks better that’s for sure, and the animation seems to have been upgraded. The weight shifting on Samus when she walks looks incredible and all of those little details make for a more complete experience.

This seems like a serious contender for game of the year since Resident Evil 4 has been pushed to 2005. Metroid Prime was one of the best games on the Cube yet, and since the sequel is going to be even better, not only could it become the best game of the year, but could also become the best GameCube game yet. Look for our review soon after the game’s release!