Developed by: Retro Studios | Published By: Nintendo | Played: 12/13/04

Reason for not finishing: Last boss too hard, and game not original enough to keep me interested.

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Plenty of variety. You can shoot enemies of all different kinds and attack patterns, go through small tunnels in a ball, do jumping puzzles, open gates, and much more. This is not only an action games, but also has many puzzle-solving elements seamlessly interwoven. The richness, seamlessness, simpleness of the gameplay makes for a very well-designed game.

The gameplay employs both reactionary and puzzle-solving elements seamlessly interwoven with each other. You have to go through obstacle courses, often having to time your movements right, each room has some puzzle to solve, and each enemy has an attack pattern, strengths, and weaknesses that make fighting enemies a puzzle-solving experience. Executing the strategy for defeating them is where the reactionary part comes in.

Nice look and feel and some of the best graphics found on GameCube, just like the last Metroid Prime.

The menus that rotate around for you to select whichever item is closest to the screen is the cooler than any other menu than I can remember ever seeing. Excellect idea. It also helps keep things fresh.

It starts you off by showing you the basic abilities and then slowly builds from there. It makes the game easier to learn, easier to get into, and easier to have fun playing.

It's pretty lengthly for and action-adventure game.

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The power-ups are not held by giant bird statues like in the original Metroid games. It is one thing that is very untrue to the originals.

It's just another Metroid Prime game. There isn't much here that's different from Metroid Prime one. There's the scanning stuff to open gates and collect data, some new power-ups and the puzzles they bring, and new bosses and story, but other than that just more of the same. It is not the dramatic improvement from the first that it ought to be. They made it a little bit different, but failed to make it a little bit more or better.

Nintendo really has to get on board with the story thing. All of their games have characters that don't talk, everything is conveyed with text, and the plots involve pretty much no drama at all, if you could even call them plots. It's just like, "Here's the bad guy. Doesn't he look bad? You need to defeat him," and then you do defeat him. The End.

After playing Halo 2 right before this game, it is easy to see how primitive this soundtrack is. It often sounds cheesy and sometimes repeditive and annoying. It's not the well-composed emotionally moving and mood-changing masterpiece that Halo 2 had.

Halo 2 also dwarfs this game in terms of graphics. Aside from the limitations of GameCube compared to Xbox, many of the animations of things in the environments look wooden and rigid, as do the movements of many of the enemies. It doesn't have nearly the same level of detail, smoothness and naturalness as the animations in Halo 2. Oh yeah, and Halo 2 had this kick-ass physics system... which is where most of the smoothness and naturalness came from.