Metroid: Samus Returns - Classic 2D Gameplay with a Modern Finish

Metroid is one of Nintendo's most iconic and long-running series, though its releases have been somewhat sporadic over the decades, with frequent gaps between major installments and with development largely being handed over to studios outside of Nintendo, starting in 2002 with Retro Studios taking the reigns for the Prime trilogy, Team Ninja handling Other M in 2012, and now MercurySteam (known for their Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games) developing Metroid: Samus Returns, a 2017 remake of 1991's Metroid 2: Return of Samus. Starring the usual series protagonist Samus Aran, Galactic Federation bounty hunter, Metroid 2 takes place after the events of the first game, and sends you to the metroid homeworld, planet SR388 to wipe out the rest of the metroids. With that simple premise, Samus Returns plays like any typical Metroid game, where you explore a series of complexly-interconnected levels while gaining assorted power-ups that grant access to new upgrades and new areas, in addition to opening up new gameplay possibilities, all in the form of a two-dimensional puzzle-platform-shooter.

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I'm pleased to say that, unlike other recent games in the series, Samus Returns feels like a real Metroid game and actually seems to understand the appeal these games can have and, most importantly, why people play Metroid games in the first place. That should all make sense, however, seeing as it's a remake of one of the earliest games in the series, which actually proves to be the crux of most of its greatest strengths and weaknesses. Despite feeling like a genuine return to form and being one of the better Metroid games to have come out in the last 15 years, it also feels a bit like a formulaic "paint by numbers" entry in the series. I never played the original Metroid 2, but the remake feels so incredibly similar to other 2D entries in the series that I almost feel like I've played this game before since it reincorporates many of the exact same tools, concepts, and gameplay elements that we've already seen before in other games, like the missiles, super missiles, power bomb, grapple hook, ice beam, wave beam, Varia suit, gravity suit, screw attack, and so on.

The new features this time around include a dedicated melee-counter button that allows you to knock-back enemies as they get close to hitting you with certain attacks, thus stunning them and allowing you to vanquish them with a quick burst from your gun, and four Aieon abilities that consume energy from a shared pool to allow you to scan the environment to reveal portions of the map while highlighting destructible blocks of terrain, or erect a shield that will divert physical damage from your health to your Aieon meter, or enable a rapid-fire shooting mode for your cannon, or slow time around you while you still move normally. These are all welcome additions, although most of them don't feel as well-implemented as they could've been. Of the four Aieon abilities, for instance, the only ones I found myself using with any sort of regularity were the environment scanner and the shield, because the other two use so much energy so quickly that they're best used only when absolutely necessary -- basically as "keys" to get past enemies or obstacles that can only be defeated or circumvented with those specific abilities. The shield is functionally pretty useful since it can help save you from death if you're ever low on health, but for me it was mostly just an extra health bar to use against bosses, and as yet another "key" to access areas that would kill me without the shield engaged.

The environment scanner is something I actually enjoy, since it effectively widens your field of view by allowing you to see the layout of the map several squares beyond what you can currently see on-screen, which I find absolutely clutch when deciding where to go while exploring. Often times in these sorts of games you find yourself in a room with multiple doorways leading out in multiple directions, but you can never tell which paths are going to be dead-ends that you should explore before venturing into the other ones, which continue further and deeper into the level, until you go through and explore all options. Which can be kind of annoying when you arbitrarily choose the "wrong" door and find yourself advancing much further into the level and constantly have to second-guess yourself and wonder when or if you should backtrack to check out those other doors you passed. It's also nice that it cuts out on time spent hunting for destructible terrain, since a sound effect when you ping the scanner will tell you if there are hidden blocks to destroy in the room you're in, and they'll even flash if you can get them on screen while the scanner is pinging. I can see some people maybe not liking this, if you're someone who enjoys the challenge of trying to find hidden secrets on your own, but it felt like most of the hidden areas were things I could have or would have found on my own, eventually, and the scanner just cut down on the amount of tedious trial-and-error bombing every square around a suspicious area trying to find the exact spot that connects to a hidden alcove, so I was certainly alright with using it a lot.

Unlike other 2D Metroid games, Samus Returns adds a 360-degree aiming mode to the arm cannon, allowing you to press the left trigger to go into "aiming mode" where you stand (or crouch) in place and have full freedom to aim anywhere you want, as opposed to being restricted to firing straight forward, up, and diagonally. This is another new feature that I absolutely love since it gives you way more precision in aiming so that you can actually hit certain pesky targets, but at the expense of mobility since you can't shoot and move at the same time.

I really liked the melee counter at first, because you're often kind of defenseless in these games if something ever gets in close, so having that ability to knock something back if it's dangerously close to you and, if timed properly, fully counter an attack allows the combat to flow more fluidly instead of falling into that awkward stumbling dance that often happens when something in close range is hitting you and you can't quite get away from it while also shooting it with your weapon. The more I played, however, the more gimmicky and formulaic it got to be. Most enemies are most easily dispatched by waiting for them to flash and then hitting the counter attack button so that you can subsequently one-shot them, which turns the combat into a more passive, reactionary system where you just stand around waiting for the enemy to do something so that you can press two buttons and kill it automatically without having to worry about positioning or aiming your weapon -- all that matters is that you press the button when you see the obvious, universal flash that an enemy is about to attack you. It's also kind of annoying how certain bosses and sub-bosses are virtually impervious to any form of damage, during certain phases, until you counter-attack them, which often leads into a highly cinematic quasi-cutscene where you still have enough control to fire your weapon while watching the scene play out, so that battles and the whole counter-attack system by extension feels like it's just a more subtle quick-time event.

The bosses, unfortunately, all pretty much suck. Basically all of them are "puzzle-pattern" bosses where they give an obvious cue for a highly specific attack they're going to do, with a very specific way to avoid the attack, and so succeeding at these bosses is just a matter of learning the cues and learning the exact, specific thing you need to do to avoid each attack in a rote process of trial-and-error and memorization. What's worse is that they all have multiple phases, where later phases add new attacks and even modify familiar attacks by adding extra effects to them or just changing the pattern slightly, so with each phase you have to learn and memorize new cues and get hammered for a ton of damage until you figure out what each cue is, what it will lead to, and what you have to do when you see that cue. Essentially, you have to die multiple times in each boss fight, usually at least once in each phase, just to learn these things, and once you learn it all, the fight loses any sort of compelling challenge because the solution for how to avoid each attack is incredibly simple and easy, once you connect all the dots. So when you die in phase three of a boss fight, it's then a rote exercise in tedium going through the same formulaic patterns in the first two phases over and over again just to get back to where you were. And on top of that, they almost all have limited time windows in which you can damage them, where you're stuck just going through the motions dodging attacks waiting for the predictable moment when they lower their defenses for a few seconds so that you can get a few attacks in before spending another minute dodging attacks and waiting for the next window. Every one follows this pattern, and it just gets to be a tedious pain in the ass.

The whole game, in fact, is tediously repetitive. The basic plot premise is of course to "wipe out the metroids" and so the whole game is a hunt to kill 40+ metroids, most of which take the form of mini-boss battles that get repeated a dozen or more times, steadily adding new attacks and evolving into more advanced forms. The only real variety is a couple of later forms, and a couple instances where the metroid runs away mid-fight and then you have to hunt it down in an adjacent area and fight it again, before repeating that process yet again, effectively turning one fight against one metroid into three different fights spread out over a wide area, where each fight plays out exactly the same as the last but for whatever reason you have to do it three times. Meanwhile, every area in the game has the same formula for how you progress through it -- arrive in a new area (which are mundanely called "Area 1, Area 2, Area 3, and so on), kill a requisite number of metroids, return to the metroid mate to lower the poisonous fluid, and descend until you eventually find an elevator to a lower area, rinse and repeat seven more times until the final boss. The areas themselves don't feel mechanically or even atmospherically distinct from one another, either. Each area gives a couple upgrades that change how you can move around or access certain areas, yes, but there's rarely a central gimmick or "twist" to each area that changes the way you play and approach the game. Most areas look and feel pretty similar, too, since the music doesn't always do a good job of creating an interesting or immersive atmosphere (most of the time the music is somewhat bland and forgettable, with the best tracks almost always being based on tracks from other games in the series), and the foreground terrain -- the stuff you actually walk on and interact with -- looks pretty similar from area to area, with any sort of unique theme happening way off in the background, and with the same enemies appearing in virtually every area, just re-colored and with tweaked stats.

The Metroid series is known for having a strong backtracking element, where you're rewarded for returning to areas you'd previously explored with new tools and equipment to unlock more upgrades or gain access to new areas, and usually that's something I enjoy in games, but like a lot of other things in Samus Returns, the backtracking gets to feel a little tedious here, too. There are just so many upgrades and things that you're incapable of accessing your first time through an area, so basically each time you get a new upgrade you have to go back to three or four different areas in each level if you want to be a completionist about finding all the things and unlocking all the upgrades. And really, it just makes exploring new areas a bit annoying and unrewarding when about half the time you're encountering things you can't do anything with yet. Most of the time, it's just a missile tank upgrade that'll increase your maximum capacity by three (as opposed to the usual five in other games), so individually they're pretty insignificant, especially since you really don't need that many missiles to beat the game. By the time I was in the last two or three levels of the game I basically just gave up on seeking out the optional upgrades because they just didn't seem worth the time and effort to track them down again. At least the game lets you drop custom markers on the map to help you remember where things are, but just getting back to them can be a bit tedious with how spread apart the warp points are and having to go through more linear, restrictive environments with a lot of meticulous platforming or morph ball sequences or one-way paths.

The overall level progression is pretty linear, too, since you have to go through the eight levels in sequential order, starting at the top with Area 1 and working your way down to Area 8, with each area having a single entrance and exit to the next area. Although you have the constant ability to backtrack to previous areas via handy warp points, there's no real reason to other than to track down those optional upgrades, since the only way forward in the game is down. That isn't so much of a problem, however, because the areas themselves are fairly large and open-ended, giving you complete freedom to explore on your own, discovering upgrades and encountering metroids in any order within those specific areas. Although the game doesn't allow you so much freedom as to be able to sequence-break and speed run the game in clever ways, the feeling of exploring uncharted areas that branch out in all directions and trying to figure out what you need to go where can still be pretty engaging.

The 3DS controls work decently well, except that it's all sometimes a bit of a literal pain since the 3DS isn't the most ergonomic device to hold, even with the larger XL model. The device does suffer, however, from a general lack of buttons, which means a lot of toggling triggers and switching firing modes to enable different subsets of controls, meaning you're frequently holding both triggers down at the same time while using both thumbs on two different sets of controls (the circle pad and d-pad with the left thumb, and face-buttons and touch-pad with the right thumb) all at once. After even a short while it gets to be a strain contorting your hands to operate all the buttons you need, and it's easy to fumble controls while trying to keep track of what "mode" or active toggles you have enabled at any given moment. Getting in and out of the morph ball is particularly annoying, since your only options are to double-tap on the circle-pad (down to go into morph ball, and up to go out), which isn't really designed for rapid double-tapping like that, or take your thumb completely off the circle pad to tap the map screen on the touch-pad -- neither of which is ideal and can be a little frustrating when the controls don't respond the way you wanted them to. The game also crashed on me after I beat the final boss, completely freezing the 3DS and forcing me to do a hard reset on the device. It wasn't a huge deal since I was literally finished playing the game at that point, but would've locked me out of "hard mode" and other features that unlock after beating the game, if I cared about any of that stuff, without having to go back and repeat the prolonged final boss fight again and hope it wouldn't continue to crash in subsequent attempts.

Ultimately, Samus Returns is a decently enjoyable game, and it's certainly nice to have a competent, two-dimensional Metroid game that feels pretty close in style to the older classics. It's easily the best Metroid game we've had since 2004, but unfortunately it feels a little too formulaic and repetitive to be any more than decent. That's still high praise considering what we've had lately in the series, but it feels like just about everything noteworthy in Samus Returns has been done before in its predecessors, but this time with less charm and personality, while other elements like the pattern bosses and generally bland, forgettable atmosphere prove a little disappointing. Some of the game's issues, like the tedious repetition and linear progression of levels, are unfortunately baked into the original game that it's remaking, but that's the sort of thing a remake a quarter of a century later should have the opportunity to address and improve upon. Samus Returns gets the core formula of a Metroid game right, but it doesn't do much to innovate or mix things up. So while it proves satisfying and engaging on a basic level required of a Metroid game, it doesn't do anything transcendent or extraordinary for it to rise above the competition, either within its own series or outside of it. If you like Metroid and want an actually decent Metroid game to play, then you could do a lot worse than Samus Returns, but if you're new the series and want something to start with I'd probably have to recommend Zero Mission, Super Metroid, or Metroid Prime as better starting points.