It's well known that I'm a lover of the Metroid franchise. Samus is one of my favourite video game characters, and is near and dear to my heart. Does Metroid Prime 2 live up to my expectations of the Metroid franchise? Read on!
The game starts as Samus is respoding to a distress signal from an unknown planet. Her ship is damaged in the landing, so she begins to search for the people that sent the distress signal while her ship auto repairs.. and thus the adventure begins.
The first thing I noticed about this game is the atmosphere. You land in a creepy cavern, with vines hanging from the roof, its dark and kinda eerie. Then undead soldiers start coming alive, and it just feels so right. The great atmosphere continues throughout the game as you explore the Agon Wastes, the Bog, and the Tower (can't remember the real names, sorry). Another twist that this game has is that there is a light world and a dark world to each area. The light world acts just like areas in Prime did, but in the dark world, the atmosphere damages Samus, and so it is necessary to stay in light "bubbles" in order to stay alive. I've heard some people say they don't like this mechanic, but personally I didn't mind it. The bubbles were close enough together that it wasn't inconvenient to use them. With one exception: the boost ball guardian. This is a tough fight, and you have to do it with no light bubbles, which makes it even tougher. I would argue that this is the toughest boss in the game by far! Here's a Youtube link as my cast of this part has unfortunately been deleted ><.
Another difference in this game from normal Metroid games is the amount of usage the morph ball gets. In most Metroid games the morph ball is just one more tool Samus uses to get through small areas, but in Prime 2, the morph ball is used for platforming and boss fights. I thought this was really great, as I enjoy the morph ball a lot, so it was nice to finally get to use it (see the final boss fight, phase 2 for an example). I enjoyed the ammo system in this game as well, the light and dark beams were a nice change from the normal Ice beam, wave beam etc.
I also enjoyed the boss fights in this game a lot more than Metroid Prime 1. I found a lot of the bosses in Prime 1 to be very gimmicky. However in Prime 2 the bosses require you to use all the tools available to you at the time, and often have very interesting mechanics (for instance Quadraxis which uses spider ball, sound visor and all your ammo)
Here's the vid of me defeating the final boss, it showcases some of the different mechanics in the game (note, I have a suit that stops me from taking damage in the dark world)
Overall I truly enjoyed this game, and would definitely rate it above Prime 1. This was one of my favourite Metroids, I would rate it second only to Super Metroid. Thanks a lot to Drakeonk for donating it, I had a blast!
Rating- 4 spider ball boosts out of 5
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