The last new 2D Metroid game Nintendo published came out in 2002. In the years since, we have seen Nintendo remake and rerelease the first three Metroid games. We’ve seen Metroid Prime and other 3D games. And we’ve seen the metroidvania, a genre pioneered in part by Super Metroid, become a dominant force on the independent games scene. And all that time, Metroid Dread, the planned sequel to Metroid Fusion, languished in development hell.
Well, not anymore. Nineteen years after Fusion, Metroid Dread is finally here. But can it live up to the expectations of a fandom waiting literal decades? Not to mention all the progress made by the metroidvania in the years since 2002?
Read on for our review of Metroid Dread.
“What is happening on ZDR?”
You are Samus Aran. Ostensibly a bounty hunter, Samus experienced a fateful mission on Zebes, a planet infested with a monstrous alien known as ‘the metroid’. Metroids are fast, dangerous creatures, capable of surviving in space and absorbing energy from electronics. Ever since that encounter, Samus dedicated herself to fighting metroids. Until one day, Samus killed every last one of them.
Unfortunately, metroids weren’t the only deadly lifeform on Zebes; part of the reason they thrived there was that they were natural predators to a parasite known as ‘X’. X is a mimic parasite, and with metroids gone, they quickly began to expand and mutate. Only Samus resisted assimilation, her broken body saved by metroid DNA. She destroyed the space station they were infesting, hoping to contain them before they could escape into the galaxy.
She failed. A video has arrived showing an X in the wild. Samus flies to the planet ZDR to investigate. There she finds the ruins of the expedition that came before, its drones hijacked by a Chozo warrior, the same people who raised Samus and created her armor. The Chozo warrior attacks Samus, stranding her deep underground. Now she has to figure out what the Chozo want with ZDR, stop him, and escape the planet safely.
“Is the planet really infested with X?”
On its face, Metroid Dread plays much like Super Metroid. Samus has to explore a sci-fi horror-influenced underground world. Assisting in this is her power suit, which lets her fire lasers, missiles, bombs and more — in addition to giving her the ability to jump extra high, survive extreme temperatures, or even roll up into a ball. She runs. She guns. Aside from a much larger map, the formula seems to be pretty staid.
This is where Dread introduces two new elements that work exceptionally well. The first is an improved combat system. She runs and guns, yes, but it feels incredibly fluid. The combat is fast and fluid, encouraging player experimentation. This is in part because the series has introduced a melee system, largely used for parrying enemy attacks. Rather than plink away with your blaster, you can attempt to parry enemy attacks for an instant kill. It’s remarkably satisfying — and provides you with way more health and missiles when you successfully pull it off.
And you’ll get plenty of practice, because another element the game introduces here is stealth. Certain regions of the game are patrolled by the aforementioned drones, called EMMIs. They can hear you, and they track you relentlessly while you’re in their territory. You can’t fight them without a special weapon you can only find by exploring the EMMIs region in depth, so you have to run and hide — and if you’re caught, you have a very narrow parry window to escape their instant kill.
The EMMIs are tough, but they’re well balanced — only in the final EMMI encounter did I really struggle to figure out how to navigate its space without triggering it to come for me. Crucially, the EMMIs are mostly moving at the same speed as you, which means that as long as you’re attentive to your surroundings and don’t let yourself get backed in a corner, you’ll rarely need to physically confront one of them. This suffuses their encounters with, well, dread. You know you need to explore those areas. You also understand quickly how deadly those encounters are. The game uses them sparingly, but well.
“As the only one immune to the parasites…”
There are, however, things Metroid Dread does less well. For many of the game’s enemies, it is easy to tell when you are doing damage and what weapons you should be using. This is not always the case, however. Some of the late-game fights feature enemies that no-sell your shots to a degree where I couldn’t tell if I was actually have an effect. This matters because you have a variety of weapons. If the missile doesn’t appear to be working, I’ll try the charged shot, for example. But what do you do if nothing appears to work?
This is part of a broader problem the game has with signposting. I won’t spoil much about the final boss, but I will spoil one thing: Past a certain point, you can no longer really ‘do damage’ to this boss. Instead, you have to provoke him into a certain attack, which you then parry. This is already a small problem, as his signal that he is ready to attack involves him stepping back and tauntingly waving you closer — something I thought suggested that he would parry me, rather than the other way around. But let’s say you figure this out, as I eventually did. You still have to shoot him within the parry cinematic, something the game has never suggested you can or should do.
This is the clearest example of a basic game design flaw Metroid Dread has periodically. It overexplains some things, giving you a pop-up when you acquire a new ability telling you exactly how to use it, despite using a brief cinematic and level design to show you how to use it earlier. Other things, often to do with the specifics of various boss fights, it offers no advice at all. I don’t want a pop-up window to appear — the game would be better designed if it got rid of them completely — but if you expect the player to do something in a key moment, you should force them to do it before then as well.
“… it’s up to me to go there and find out.”
And yet, despite those issues, I had a genuinely fantastic time with Metroid Dread. The movement here feels better than any Metroid game ever has before, and the maps are beautifully designed. Like, yeah, the navigation is good. I’m a terrible navigator, and I was rarely lost. But beyond that, the maps are just really lovely to look at. I find the sort of 2.5D style of Metroid Dread rarely works for me, often misusing the added background depth. Here, however, they use it to craft a more thorough and lovingly developed sci-fi horror setting. It works phenomenally.
The thoroughness of the background design is key to what I love about Metroid Dread. This is not a sloppy game soldering on parts from years in development hell and shoving it out the door. Nor is it just a nostalgic retread of what came before. Developers MercurySteam have built something new and exciting in a space Nintendo seemingly forgot how to navigate. They built a game that feels like what I remember Super Metroid feeling like when I was young and nervously exploring Zebes for the first time, amplifying the eeriness and making the action more intense and demanding.
Metroid Dread is a challenging and evocative conclusion to one of Nintendo’s most underserved franchises.