Backtracking is crucial and constant, as you’ll regularly return to old haunts to access places that were tantalizingly just out of reach before, or to discover previously unknown chambers and passageways. After cobbling together the game’s various weapons, you can open certain doors that were previously closed off to you, or find new hidden areas, often containing additional power-ups. The levels sprawl out in all directions, with you charging through them from a 2D, side-scrolling perspective. The core power-ups that you expect are in effect-missiles, super missiles, the morph ball, energy tanks, the screw attack, etc. In many other regards this is an extremely traditional Metroid game. If your timing is right, you can sail through most of the game on the backs of that one defensive maneuver. It’s a short-cut, but one you have to earn, as there’s a very small window to effectively parry. This parry even comes into play in the metroid battles that serve as de facto miniboss encounters throughout the game-you can take them down by patiently spamming missiles at them when their weak spots are unguarded, but if you can master the reflexes needed to parry their attacks, you enter a brief little interactive cut-scene where you can just unload missiles into them. The parry mechanic is the most dramatic alteration: if you hit a button at the right time, you can fend back almost every enemy in the game, momentarily stunning them and leaving most open for a single-shot kill. There are enough changes to make this feel like a new game, though, hence the “reimagining” tag regularly applied to it in Nintendo’s marketing (and pretty much every article that’s been written about it). Like that game, you’re not just exploring and backtracking through this alien planet to gather enough weapons to take down a specific final boss you’re hunting exactly 40 metroids strewn throughout the world’s various distinct areas. It began as a remake of the original Game Boy sequel, 1992’s Metroid II: Return of Samus, and that still shines through in its basic structure. It tries to capture what made the old two-dimensional Metroid games so beloved back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while also imprinting its own stamp on that basic Metroid design. Samus Returns navigates some pretty tricky territory. After all, I’ve had a copy for over six weeks, and I’m still finding time to play it. Despite all that, it still merits its own review. I’ve noted how the parry technique noticeably changes way Metroid has handled combat for decades, slotted it in near the top of our ranking of every Metroid game, and added it to our list of the best games of the year so far.
I’ve written a fair bit about Metroid: Samus Returns here already.
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