E-Mail This Article to a Friend Prime cut Metroid Prime 2 is a game to sink your teeth into BY MITCH KRPATA
	Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Published by Nintendo. Developed by Retro Studios. For Nintendo GameCube. Rated T for Teen.

The promise of video games has always been to create fantastic new worlds that allow the player to lose himself in a fully-realized virtual environment. But although we've seen earthly renderings of remarkable verisimilitude, such as those of the Grand Theft Auto series and the outlandish, logic-defying landscapes in games like the Super Mario Bros series, no franchise has ever consistently delivered settings at once bizarre and familiar as has the Metroid brand. With Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, Nintendo once again delivers an astonishingly complete gameplay environment that raises the bar for all other game publishers.

Metroid's premise should be familiar by now: intergalactic bounty hunter and tough chick Samus Aran receives a distress beacon and sets down on a mysterious planet that appears to be infested to its core with some unspeakable evil. The besieged planet this time around is called Aether, and Aether, it seems, has been split into two. Light Aether, a peaceful realm, is losing its energy to an extra-dimensional counterpart, Dark Aether, which has been overrun by an evil race called the Ing. It's up to Samus to leap back and forth from one dimension to the other and save Light Aether before Dark Aether swallows it up for good.

The gameplay is close to that of the original Metroid Prime. None of the controls have changed – the game still plays as intuitively as ever. In fact, the interface is so smooth and instinctive that it seems as though there is no barrier at all between the player and the game. The player can lock on to targets with the L trigger, but simply releasing and clicking the button again cycles through the remaining targets on screen. It's never a trial to keep an adversary in sight, and screen-filling battles never become disorienting. And this remains the only first-person shooter I've ever played in which jumping is, instead of an exercise in futility and fury, a downright pleasure. Play control this exact seems so effortless, it's a wonder why it's so rare to find.

What is new in Echoes is the Light World/Dark World dynamic. It smacks a bit of A Link to the Past, but last I checked that's not a bad thing. Light Aether follows the model of earlier Metroid games, which is to say that it's a stunning, ecologically-convincing world. Samus travels seamlessly between cramped industrial quarters and expansive, living vistas ranging from deserts to forests to swamplands. In addition to your enemies, you'll see grasses and trees growing, and small, innocuous faunae flitting about. These little touches are what set Metroid apart.

In contrast, Dark Aether's design suffers a bit from homogeneity. It is, quite literally, a very dark world. Despite the bilious purple gases and amorphous enemies, it's still less visually interesting than Light Aether's varied environments. But the wrinkle is that the air in this other dimension slowly poisons Samus, who can find refuge near light crystals, which fortunately recharge her health. As a result, gameplay works differently on Dark Aether – the environment is as much of a foe as the Ing. It's a cool feature. But if the game has a single serious flaw, it's that the light recharges your energy much too slowly; you may spend a few lengthy minutes standing in the healing glow of a light crystal before moving on, which can grind the game to a halt (good time for a bathroom break, though).

Many of your favorite toys return from previous Metroid games. Samus can acquire Super Missiles, the Grappling Hook, and, everyone's favorite, the Spider Ball. As before, missile upgrades and additional energy tanks are hiding in every nook and cranny both Aethers have to offer. A key difference in Echoes as compared to the original is in the beam weapons: rather than a Wave Beam, an Ice Beam and a Plasma Beam, Samus instead gets a Dark Beam and a Light Beam. Each has its own applications depending on the enemy you're fighting and the dimension you're in. Maybe in principle it's not that much different than having weapons that shoot fire, ice, and electricity, but damn it, it feels different.

Another neat improvement in Echoes is the way in which you earn most of Samus's powerups. Defeating bosses is still the way to get most significant upgrades, but this time those super-powered enemies incorporate the coveted technology into their attacks – so the boss whose demise will grant you the Space Jump can leap several stories in the air, and the one guarding the Boost Ball zooms around the arena like a pinball. I liked this feature for two reasons: one, it let me know exactly what the spoils of victory would be, and two, it allowed me to plan an appropriate strategy right off the bat.

The boss battles are truly amazing. Although Metroid's gameplay has always been more about exploration than about combat, its massive boss confrontations have been the franchise's crown jewel. Here again, Echoes doesn’t disappoint. It'll take every weapon in Samus's arsenal to put down these monsters, and it struck me that such encounters were a bit more difficult than in past installments. The Boost Guardian, in particular, had me scrambling back across the map in search of more Energy Tanks.

As if all that weren't enough, Retro Studios has also added a multiplayer component to this go-round. I'd approached the prospect of a Metroid deathmatch with some trepidation – how could a game with an automatic lock-on and homing missiles possibly provide anything but a dull multiplayer experience?

Fortunately, the multiplayer in Echoes is surprisingly good. I wouldn't call it great – no one's going to be forsaking Halo 2 to play their buddies in a Samus Aran free-for-all – but it's more than serviceable. The maps provide several spots to grab temporary upgrades, which are things like unlimited ammo, massive damage, invisibility, and the "death ball," which essentially turns Morph Ball Samus into an electric wrecking ball.

In addition to standard deathmatching, there's also "Bounty" mode, where the object is to collect more coins than your opponent. Given the choice, I'd take the deathmatch. There was no easy way to tell who was in the lead, and the two of us playing were both stymied by the onscreen directive to "Find the coin box!"

My fear was that development time spent on multiplayer would ultimately dilute the quality of the single-player campaign, but this is not the case. Metroid Prime 2 is more robust than its predecessor, and its scale is ridiculous. Every new area was intimidating in its heft, but that's all the more satisfying as one progresses through the game.

Rarely are we treated to a game world as convincing and complete as this one, and the gameplay exemplifies the best traits of the action-adventure genre. By turns intriguing, frightening, and exhilarating, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes delivers as all sequels should. The decent multiplayer is just icing on the cake. Here is one of the best games of the year.

Score: 9.5 (out of 10)