Metroid Dread is not limited to a 2D game on a home console but takes advantage of the duality of the Nintendo Switch.
Metroidvania is a word that describes not only a genre but also a mentality on which to build a game. In recent years, indie game developers have adored revisiting the formula perfected by Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and for a good reason. The games are challenging but rewarding. Tough but fair. They reward exploration, ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance. And they tend to be 2D, so they don’t require the same amount of power a regular 3D does. But for every Ori and the Blind Forest, for every Hollow Knight out there, there is a series where it all began, the Metroid games.
Unfortunately, Nintendo has been doing a disservice to the franchise for a while now, almost forgetting about its existence. At least, that’s what one would think when looking back at the development process of Metroid Dread, the latest and possibly last installment in the Metroid 2D era of games. A game whose prequel, Metroid Fusion, came 19 years before its release and that came out of nowhere well past the prime of the 2D handheld games. However, and this is a big one, the game is superb.
Through Metroid Dread, Mercury Steam, and Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development, capture the essence of the genre its predecessors defined and demonstrate why the Metroid name carries a ton of weight. Metroid Dread is not limited to a 2D game on a home console but takes advantage of the duality of the Nintendo Switch. The result is a game that satisfies both newcomers to the series and long-time veterans who claimed for a game like this for literally decades. Is Metroid Dread worth your while? Definitely, and we will tell you why.
Metroid Dread picks up where Metroid Fusion left off. However, you do not need to have played the game to enjoy Dread. Most probably, many players were not even born when Fusion hit shelves, and the Game Boy Advance came out in 2002. So, Nintendo, in a show of common sense, instead opens Dread with a recap of what happened previously to get everyone up to speed. As always, there is a good reason Samus loses all of the abilities she had won previously, and it makes sense within the game’s story. But we will not delve into spoiler territory.
There is a new menace on a nearby planet, and Samus is tasked to investigate this new alien life form. But once there, she is trapped and tasked to return to her ship and make it out of there alive—a classic Metroid scenario. But, alas, Samus was not the only one to be commanded into the planet. The Galactic Federation sent out a batch of EMMIs, Extraplanetary Multiform Mobile Identifiers, to investigate first and take care of the issue.
The bad news is these sentient robots went rogue, and now they turned against Samus, who will be hunted down and killed on sight. This ramps up the formula of previous Metroid games. Whereas Metroid always has had a halo of horror, a la Alien or something Gigeresque, the franchise itself does not belong in the horror genre.
This changes a little bit with Dread because, for the most part, the EMMIs are invulnerable and impossible to get rid of. So Samus, and by Samus, we mean you, the player must use stealth to get past them. But if they detect you, you will be forced to escape the area as soon as you can. These encounter areas are perfectly well crafted to create an actual sense of, well, Dread.
It is often by the skin of your teeth that you will be able to escape an encounter, and this creates a new atmosphere previously unseen in a Metroid game. The EMMIs remind you of the Xenomorph in Alien Isolation, an impossibly fast stalker that wants you dead but one that you cannot kill, only hurt or stagger long enough to secure your escape.
As one might expect, gaining new weapons, unlocking new abilities, and backtracking are back on the menu. There is a lot to discover within the game, as the map is huge, and, being a Metroid game, there are a lot of hidden passages, earthed secrets, and rewards for trying out every single idea you have in mind in order to achieve that infamous 100% completion. This becomes especially hard with EMMIs hunting you down in some sections of the game.
One of the new abilities Samus gets is one imported directly from Metroid: Samus Returns, the great remake of the Nintendo 3DS. Metroid: Samus Returns presented us with the parry, a well-timed hit that needs to be executed carefully when an enemy telegraphs its attack. Here, the parry provides a level of fluidity to the game that most experienced players will welcome.
There is a lot of fine-tuning to make to dominate the parry, but once you manage to time perfectly your counterattack, most enemies will fall prey to your quick reflexes. In this sense, the parry becomes an integral part of the Dread experience, even working against bosses or even becoming an absolute necessity in some cases.
Metroid Dread takes full advantage of the Nintendo Switch’s processing power and presents a beautiful game with great world-building, set dressing, and character designs. And while the game looks amazing in handheld mode, the graphics might suffer a bit in the scaling processing while docking and playing on an HD monitor. However, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the game on the big screen, as it lets you fully appreciate just how beautiful some of these levels are.
This is 2D Metroid at its peak and makes us wonder what could have happened if Dread had been released back in 2005 when it was first rumored. Could we now have a lot more 2D Metroid games? Or could the formula have dried out? What would have been its impact on the Metroidvania landscape? There is no way to know. The only thing we can know for certain is that Metroid Dread is a game you should definitively play. In further delight, Metroid Dread has been selected as the winner for the GamesCreed’s Best Action/Adventure Games of 2021.
