I dread just to think about it.
For the first time in what seems like forever, the story is moving forward, so this game takes place AFTER Fusion, so Samus is sporting a shiny new post-fusion Power Suit. But, sadly for Samus, she meets an evil Chozo, Razor Beak, who slaps her so bad the trauma makes her lose all of her abilities, like usual, so now's she gotta defeat this dude and restore her abilities. And thus begins another traditional, 2.5D Metroidvania adventure in which Samus gets to earn her classic abilities, like the Screwattack, the Wave Beam, the Power Bomb.... as well as a few new abilities, like turning invisible.
I'd actually like to praise the level design. The game never sets any markers on your map, and yet, it always feels very easy to figure out where to go next. I don't know just how many objectives can be completed in different order, but I can tell you that the game feels fairly open, there's always somewhere you can go. The game's world is divided into about 7 areas, which are fairly large, but they are fairly dense with pick ups. Whenever you are not backtracking you won't go too long without a new power up. I was a bit worried at first when I saw how much God of War 1's director was whining about the bad level design, but he was either very unlucky and didn't realize something could be broken or isn't good at exploring a Metroid game, as you'll intuitively gain an instinct to realize where destructible blocks lie.
The new invisibility ability gains its meaning, besides going through a few doors, due to the new EMMI stalked zones. Every area in the game has a few zones in which an indestructible robot, the EMMI, lurks. You'll have to traverse these zones avoiding them.... at least until you find the OMEGA CANNON of the are and are finally able to face it and rendering out of service for good. I wasn't a big fan of these segments, as the EMMI can kill you in one hit, unless you time the counter, but bosses and EMMIs come with a compromise: These are the only checkpoints in the game. If you die to a boss or an EMMI, you'll restart close by so you can quickly try again. Dying to a normal enemy or to the environment, however, will send you back to your last save. On that note, the game offers a TON of savespots, unlike Samus Returns, so dying doesn't feel too unmoralizing.
Samus plays like she always had. She can shoot beams or missiles, turn into a morph ball, perform the screwattack, etc. The counter from Samus Returns, well, returns as well. Using the counter is specially encouraged as enemies will drop overly generous amounts of health and ammo pick ups when defeated with a counter. There's a golden glint whenever a counterable melee attack is incoming, so it's easy to perform too. Performing a counter on a boss will reward you with a badass cinematic scene in which you can mash the shoot button to deal a ton of damage.
The map.. I didn't like it too much. Something about it is a bit hard to read, maybe the colors? It has some neat advantages, like being able to place a marker, and the game remembers what type of barrier you found, so you easily can tell what ability you were missing. That said, placing a marker won't show it on the mini map, so you must still pause to remember where you were going. I would have liked the ability to hide icons on the map too, as discerning which pick ups I got and which ones I didn't isn't easy at a first glance. Sure, you can press Y over one and the game will highlight every icon of the same type, greyed out if you picked it up or gold if you didn't. But I'd like to be able to skip that step. Just toggle whichever icons I want ON or OFF so that I can more easily tell what I want. So yeah, the map has its neat things, but I think it could've been easier to read.
At first I was gonna complain about how the game is rather large, and I would've liked some sort of HUB, as it was a pain in the butt to have to go through multiple zones if I wanted to backtrack to a certain area. Well... as I scourged the 'net for the game's cover I discovered... that after you find the final area in the game, if you decided to go back... you'd have discovered that every teleporter is now linked together. An in-game pop-up or alert would've been nice, as I definitely would've backtracked to complete the 20% I was missing in pick ups. Still, backtracking before finishing the game could've been made more convenient. By the time I got the power bomb I had already backtracked a few times before through every area, but I didn't feel like going through the entire map again, but since I had pretty much maxed health tanks and about 200 missiles I didn't feel like I need to.
The difficulty curve has many ups and downs, but I feel like it works well. For starters, I had to fight every boss pretty much twice. On my first attempt I'd get murdered while I learned the pattern, and then my second attempt would be successful as I'd know what to do. The only exception to the rule was the three-phase final boss, that one required about six attempts. As for the game itself, at first the game gets easier as you start getting more health and upgrades.... and then the X Parasite makes its grand return, and so the game gets harder, enemies are much tougher and if you don't absorb the parasite they'll regenerate. So then starts another rise to power, and by the time you get the Screw attack the game gets super easy as you can pretty much cream anything by screwattacking them. It also makes exploration faster.
Metroid Samus Return wasn't just a great Metroid game, I also felt like it was one of the best I played. Well, Metroid Dread is just as good. It plays just as well, taking the elements that worked well there, but with a few tweaks here and there that makes it slightly better. The fantastic map design makes it easy to explore without markers, and I really liked having the midpoint of the game making me feel weak again, as it made getting stronger to face the new threat much more satisfying.
9.0
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