First Impressions: Metroid Samus Returns

It's been 3000 years

Samus is finally back. It’s been seven years since Metroid: Other M, and a whole thirteen years since the last 2D Metroid title: Zero Mission. Suffice it to say, Metroid: Samus Returns has been a long time coming. At this point, according to my 3DS activity log, I’ve put just about two into the game so far. So, these are preliminary impressions at best. In my time with the game thus far, Samus Returns is well, a 2D Metroid game, for better and worse.

At long last, Samus is as deadly up close as she is far away

The game opens with incredible hand drawn story slides which really pop in 3D. To that effect, the whole game looks quite good in 3D. However, in rare instances the 3D becomes a bit distracting as it stretches the world back to give it artificial depth. Layers of cavernous walls and gushing waterfalls look great in 3D, but the platforms Samus traverses can look oddly stretched at times. Don’t get me wrong, if you can play this game in 3D, play it in 3D: just be prepared for some odd depth of field effects here and there. On the whole, Samus Returns looks great, for a 3DS game. There are jagged edges and muddy textures in places, but that’s more a limitation of the hardware itself. For the most part, I’ve found the game to be visually appealing. Color is used quite effectively here, so nothing blends into the intentionally drab space caverns. Samus herself looks quite good, and has a suite of great animations and moves that make her feel very powerful. The biggest addition, both aesthetically and functionally, comes in the form of the melee counter. Being able to bash aliens in the head with the arm cannon, and then have Samus spin and fire over her shoulder to eviscerate their stunned form is fast and fluid. I’ve never found combat to be that impressive in the past games, but thankfully it is much more satisfying here in Samus Returns.

That light blue area is the scan pulse illuminating
hidden rooms, adding clarity to exploration

Another great improvement is the aeon abilities. The scan pulse is the first one I acquired, and it is fantastic. It cuts so much of the frustration out of exploration. By activating it, the touch screen's map is temporarily illuminated, showing hidden rooms. Also, the pulse will reveal destructible blocks hidden around Samus. The annoyance of running around aimlessly only to look up the solution and find out I needed to morph bomb one specific block in the corner of some arbitrary screen is gone. Now, when I think I need to break a wall to progress, a push of the scan pulse will show me exactly what to blow up. Along with that, the map is vastly improved. It is covered in icons showing exactly what is in each room, again removing trial and error when backtracking to a particular place is required. Markers, a la Breath of the Wild, can now be placed on the map as well. For example, when I find a inaccessible location, I can mark it on the map to return to later. This is great, but I would have liked it to be taken a step farther. MercurySteam should have taken a page out of the Phantom Hourglass playbook and allowed us to write directly onto the map. This would have allowed for even more clarity. Overall, exploration is vastly improved.

Free-aim is a good idea, but it can cause frustration

What hasn’t been improved, much to my dismay, are the controls. Samus has never felt tight; whether in combat or platforming I usually wrestled with the controls as much as I wrestled with the opposition. Here, it’s no different. As I said before the mechanics of combat feel very good, and pulling off the melee counter is very satisfying. However, trying to fire down onto an enemy at Samus’s feet usually results in running straight into it and taking damage. Or, more annoyingly, since free-aiming halts movement, repelling non-counterable enemies in the sky is terrible. For example one enemy in particular flaps back and forth and drops lava onto Samus’s head. Since it never physically makes contact with Samus, so it can’t be hit by the melee counter. The only option is to stand in place and shoot up at it. That's not a problem, until you realize Samus has to be stationary to hit it. So, I’d shoot, run a few feet to the left, hold still, aim up shoot again, and move, repeating until it died. However, the enemy is so fast that it almost always hits me and causes 30 damage per hit. It's aggravating. There could have been a simple solution to this, all MercurySteam would have had to do is add in a lock on feature. Being able to lock onto the nearest enemy would vastly reduce frustration associated with aiming.

Why does it make sense for blocks like these to
reappear after being destroyed?

Platforming is another area where Samus just isn’t as accurate as she needs to be. For the most part, jumping, rolling, and climbing about is just fine. However, when more complex platforming challenges are presented, Samus just isn’t quite up to snuff. There was one particularly egregious example on the way to a metroid encounter. There was a path in the ceiling that I needed to roll through using the morph ball. To get there, I needed to freeze an enemy, land precisely on it, free-aim up to the ceiling and super missile out two blocks to jump through. This all had to happen in a matter of mere seconds. This seems simple enough until you realize that landing precisely on the enemy's head is impossible, free-aiming takes too much time, and the ceiling blocks regenerate after a few seconds. First, it has never made sense that destructible blocks replace themselves after a few seconds. Second, if past Metroid titles have proven anything, it’s that Samus doesn’t do well with precise jumps. It is baffling to me that MercurySteam decided to include challenges such as these regardless of the lessons of the past.

I'd love to see Nintendo release a brand new 2D Metroid
on Switch with an art style such as this

Metroid: Samus Returns is a strong game, and a bold return for the franchise. Unfortunately, the control issues that have plagued past Metroid games simply haven’t been addressed. And, while it isn’t really a complaint I can level against the game, Samus Returns would have greatly benefited from releasing on Switch. The game is already thick with atmosphere, and the 3D really pops, but the extra horsepower could have made Samus Returns a sight to behold. The exploration and combat are greatly improved, but the game needed just a bit more to really feel like a modern 2D Metroid. What we have here is another great Metroid game, with the same strengths and weaknesses of its predecessors. With that said, it’s still a blast to be playing a new Metroid game in 2017, regardless of it feeling somewhat outdated. I’m glad Nintendo isn’t ignoring this franchise, and I hope that the success of Samus Returns opens the door for more 2D Metroid adventures in the future.