Recently, I had the misfortune of being without internet for a couple of weeks. To put it simply it was rather inconvenient. I couldn’t play most of the games I’d been working on, couldn’t watch a lot of TV and couldn’t really do any writing. Even so, it was kind of nice in a way. I was able to spend more time on other things, including getting back to one of my old favorites Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. It’d been a few years since I’d last played it, so I wasn’t sure if it’d still be a fun experience. To my mild surprise though, it’s held up pretty well.

To start, Metroid Prime 2 benefits greatly from running at 60fps. Movement feels snappy and sharp, and the visual style is still nice and clean despite displaying at a now measly 480p. Its smart use of lighting and well-crafted art style also help to keep it from looking overly low-res and dated. It’s not a “pretty” game (it never was), but it still looks darn good all things considered.

Additionally, systems I didn’t much like back in the day wound up feeling better this time around. In particular, the dark/light ammo system actually makes more sense now. Un-like the elemental beams in Metroid Prime 1 (sanse the ice/plasma combo), Dark and Light beam shots are greatly effective against oppositely aligned enemies. If they weren’t limited in some way, it’d be all too easy to just plow through the game with them, so some limitation makes sense.

Whenever I played the game before, I was always afraid of running out of ammo and so hardly used them. Of course, holding back like that made combat more grindy and annoying than it needed to be, which I remember souring my previous playthroughs a bit. This time though, I used both special beams liberally and wound up with combat that delivered a much punchier and faster tempo experience. So yeah, combat was a lot more fun this time around, and that helped greatly with the backtracking sessions. Backtrack-ing was still a bit too prevalent of course, though, and the game isn’t without its otherminor flaws.

Well-crafted as it was for the time, the game’s single-stick movement and aiming abso lutely feels dated and clunky these days. I’m very glad we’ve moved beyond it in favor of the current two-stick scheme. The lack of indicators for cleared rooms and bare-bones tracking for items and scans is also quite noticeable now. Also, while it’s great against certain enemies, the Dark Beam is largely pointless. It’s supposed to be effective against most enemies found on Light Aether, but they’re comparatively few compared to dark-aligned enemies. It also doesn’t help that it’s designed more to hinder than do damage, as it makes just using the much faster Power Beam and missiles a much better choice
most of the time.

Another issue is that Metroid Prime 2 is kind of lopsided when it comes to upgrades. The first two areas have two or three important upgrades each, but the third area, Sanctuary Fortress, is absolutely stuffed with them! It feels good in that you get a lot of power in a
short amount of time, but it’s all coming at the end of the game so you don’t actually get very many chances to use a lot of it. I mean I think I used the beam supers maybe once
each, not great.

All said though, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is still very much worth playing today. It looks great: its music is still awesome. its lore and story are still epic, and its combat is still pretty fun. It suffers from some lopsidedness and some old-fashioned design conventions, but they don’t actually dampen the experience all that much. If you have a copy or know how to get it running on PC, I highly recommend firing it up again sometime!

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How do you feel about the Prime series these days? Which entry is your favorite?

Image from Nintendo.com.uk