'Metroid: Samus Returns' Impressions

Metroid: Samus Returns is getting high praise by many professional reviewers, but it has some serious problems.

The controls, as they relates to movement in the game, are not very good. You can only use the Circle Pad, and so it is not very precise. I will be near the edge of a ledge and desire to go to the edge so that I can make a difficult jump. It is nigh impossible to inch carefully to the ledge with the Circle Pad. There is so much dead-zone on the Circle Pad that by the time you register a movement, you move far too much and have fallen off. In a 2D platformer, the d-pad should still be an option.

I am not a framerate-snob, but it is way too low and choppy in this game. If using 3D graphics was too taxing, they should have gone to 2D. I understand that 2D is probably not MercurySteam's forte, but the framerate affects a lot of things, including the melee-counter.

The melee-counter comes out too slowly, as if I'm playing a laggy online game. In Splatoon, many times I couldn't activate a Special weapon on reaction because it was so laggy; I had to premeditate when I was going to use it, which defeated the purpose of many Special weapons, including the Bubbler and Kraken. Not being able to melee-counter by reaction takes away from the feeling of having to use skill. The best action-games make you feel like your skill is improving as you keep playing, and that your skill makes a difference in your success. In this game, I need to memorize when an annoying enemy is going to charge at me, or the timing of a melee-counter during a boss-fight, rather than intuitively using skill to melee-counter.

Ledge-grabbing takes away from the fun of platforming. In Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission, ledge-grabbing wasn't used too much, but in Metroid: Samus Returns, it is far too prevalent. It takes away from the fun of platforming - of timing and landing jumps. It's not like ledge-grabbing is a thing you need to do for only certain, hard-to-reach areas; it is necessary in many normal areas as well. The prevalence of ledge-grabbing makes the game seem less like a platformer, and more like a ledge-grabber, if that is a genre.

In the other 2D Metroids, one of the screens in the menu is a straight shot of Samus's suit, detailing all the power-ups you have attained. In this game, her suit is unappealingly at an angle. It reminds me of Metroid Prime and Star Fox Assault. In Star Fox Assault, the talking heads in the dialogue-boxes were also at an angle. It was aesthetically unappealing. It was different for the sake of being different, and not different for the sake of being better.

The game is ugly. It would have looked better in 2D or on Nintendo Switch. The 3D graphics in this game allow for smooth animation, but the overall look is unappealing.

The game is boring. The original game was also boring (so it's not really the developers' fault), in that the premise was just to kill a bunch of Metroids. The whole quest feels like a slog, job, or fetch-quest. There's nothing exciting to motivate the player to keep looking for and killing Metroids.

There was a lot of hype and excitement surrounding this game, but it is just another disappointment in the most disappointing year in Nintendo's history: 2017.

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