Metroid Dread is the long-awaited sequel towards the 2D Metroid series, produced by Nintendo and Mercury Stream and authored by Nintendo. After her misadventures in Metroid, Metroid Samus Returns, Super Metroid, and Metroid Fusion, Samus continues to be influenced to a mysterious planet ZDR by a video of the stray X Parasite.
There is a reason why a whole genre of games is known as, partly, following the Metroid franchise. I’ve played a lot of Metroidvanias over the years, and almost none compare to the progenitors. Metroid Dread proves the series’ mastery over progression in adventure games once more. Metroid Dread is an easy game initially. You begin having a mystery, your powers are (shockingly) gone, and all sorts of you have at your disposal is your trusty arm cannon, a parry move, a jump, and a slide. But with time, you will amass all kinds of powerups, gadgets, weapons, and capacity increases. With each new acquisition, you’ll have to retread old ground and explore familiar locals anew to be able to progress and find all of the game’s hidden secrets.
This style of gameplay is becoming fairly ubiquitous over the decades, but Metroid Dread does it expertly. It’s not a game where your new unlock gets you somewhere obvious from at the start of the game once after which doesn’t matter much later, like a lot of its brethren. Yes, the game is more or less linear. But it’s filled with twists and turns across a well-constructed map and encourages constant exploration in equal measure to second-guessing whether you’re going the proper way. I understand the bioluminescent bugs that fly under lights letting you know you’re going the right way from time to time, but I’ve also had probably the most fun getting lost I’ve had in a game in certain time.
Samus is up to her old tricks and some new ones while you acquire more and more powerups. They’re all as satisfying as always to make use of, even though the control scheme for aiming your cannon and switching to missiles feels somewhat unintuitive or clunky. The interest rate where you unlock something totally new is ideal, keeping you feeling like you’re progressing at a great pace despite the fact that there's always so, a lot more to become done still every time. Absolutely gorgeous graphics, including intricately designed movement for Samus’s model, assist the game stand out, feeling very current and very engrossing. There's also a number of different types of instances where the perspective briefly shifts away from 2D for QTEs, cutscenes, or certain actions that add to the modern feeling of the sport.
Metroid Dread also earns its name, in particular. The game isn’t just a retread of the identical gameplay from entries past. Seven robots called E.M.M.I.s were delivered to ZDR in advance of Samus to investigate the planet, however they have each been corrupted into terrifying and deadly menaces. Throughout the game, each E.M.M.I inhabits a certain area, clearly demarcated by special doors, dreary music, and grey, icy visuals. These murderous fiends can crawl through small access spaces and sneak up on you for near-instand kills. You must find constant ways to dodge them, run past them, and otherwise avoid them until you can buy powers that let you take them out. The only method to survive them once they’ve spotted you, other than running as fast as you can and escaping their zones, is a quick time event that never has the same timing twice and is genuinely difficult but very satisfying to pull off.
Difficulty in general scales great in Metroid Dread. Enemies are constantly evolving being more and more hard to kill as your weaponry advances together with them. And also the boss battles are equal within their challenge scale. They have familiar weakpoints to any veteran Metroid player, however their patterns are difficult to learn and fun to understand.
The only real issue I discovered was that, especially playing with Joycons, it wasn't always as smooth to manage Samus as I’d hoped it would be. The worst was when it came to jumping and moving at the same time, where I would often simply not go any other direction besides upwards, regardless of the inputs I figured I made. It was also the case with attempts to grab ledges, where it felt completely unintuitive without success generally. Crouching and Morph Balling felt similarly too.
Metroid Dread is not just an excellent game and return of a beloved franchise, it’s emblematic of all things that defined the genre in the first place in a way that many modern Metroidvanias simply aren’t. Its exploration, upgrading, and re-exploration will never be spoonfed for you and feel constantly like great accomplishments with great difficulty scaling and thrilling new mechanics and atmosphere.
Metroid Dread is available now on Nintendo Switch.
