metroid prime 2 stars lol

what a fall from grace this one was. first thing's first, this Dark World shit has got to go. the level design in this game - while sometimes promising from room to room - is so fucking boring as it is. the environments of Echoes are so dull and uninteresting to explore due to their extremely muted, similar color palattes and generally dry aesthetic. every area feels the exact same and that is only accentuated by the Dark World putting a purple filter over everything and constantly killing you by existing in them. it is not made more interesting to explore these boring ass worlds by making me hit the Stop N Go barrels from DKC every time i just want to not die, so why the fuck do i have to do it twice over. its made even fucking worse by the enemies they throw in there which oh MY GOD NEW PARAGRAPH

FUCK THE ENEMIES IN THIS GAME. combat has never, ever been Metroid's strong suit so god only fuckin knows why Retro keeps pushing it further and further. the sheer abundance of enemies that vanish into thin fuckin air or generally gain invincibility between bursts is absurd. the enemy encounters in this game seek only to waste your time, often locking doors behind you and more often throwing you into scenarios where combat is purely reactionary to whatever repetitive attack cycle the enemy is set to do. there are some cheese strats for certain enemies, but they often aren't possible until the end of the game, at which point it hardly matters. for 90% of the game, the sluggish controls often dont mesh well with the high-octane nature of this game's arena-based enemy encounters, and especially not the boss encounters (all of which are either too easy or too hard, with very few standouts to speak of.)

there are hundreds of little things about this game that make it so inferior to its predecessor that i truly cannot believe it's by the same team. thats not even to mention that the beams have ammo now which fuckin THE BEAMS HAVE AMMO NOW LIKE FUCKIN