Let me preface this by saying that I am not a fan of MercurySteam. I have never played a MercurySteam game that I have enjoyed or thought was a worthwhile addition to the series it is a part of. This isn’t saying much of course, because they have made very few games. But I slogged my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow by virtue of Sir Patrick Stewart’s narration between stages alone, and how I managed to endure the sequel and the 3DS spinoff remain a hazy mystery I am better off not trying to recall. But you would think, after the disaster that was those games, they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Metroid series.

Alas, Nintendo never have made much sense.

Samus Returns is a bad game. You know who else returned in a bad game? Lightning. But I’d rather play Lightning Returns than Samus Returns. That is how bad this game is. Prior to this I had only played it once – at release, 4 years ago(!) now – and I finished it in 8 hours over the course of 2 days, because I was so eager to get it out the way I barely stopped. This time it took me 6 hours, 14 minutes, and 13 seconds, and that’s time in my life I am never going to get back. I should have stuck with AM2R and left it at that. But no. Maybe my memory is wrong, I tell myself. Maybe I’ll enjoy it this time.

My memory is rarely ever wrong, and this was not one of those times.

So, where do I even begin with this? I suppose we should start with the level design – it’s bland, repetitive, and shockingly linear for a Metroid game. There are plenty of hidden items you cannot collect until after you’ve acquired a later power-up, sure, but there is never any need or even desire to revisit stages. I’m not going to accept this being a remake as an excuse for this: Zero Mission was a remake, and it had you backtracking constantly through previous areas to uncover new parts of that area. Zero Mission is a much older remake of a much older title. What’s your excuse, MercurySteam? The lack of connection between the areas in this game made the game feel unbearably tedious and banal – backtracking is a core part of the Metroid series, and part of what makes the Metroidvania genre so enjoyable. I want to go back and be rewarded with a new area or power-up, not 3 more missiles I could just as easily do without.

The levels themselves were also very repetitive and downright drab – one was much the same as another. I know the whole thematic level thing has been done to death in video games, but it still adds variety and a change of pace, rather than staring at the same metallic corridors for 6 hours, with only the occasional change to have a toxic purple one, or a hot one, or a strangely jungle-like one. Themed levels encourage exploration and creativity with environmental puzzles, and there was none of that here that really mattered. You’d get a new power-up that you had to use to progress to another room, and that was it unless you felt like going after collectibles, which weren’t much of a reward. They added four abilities to this game – a scanner, a shield, rapid-fire, and a weird time stop thing – so why could these not have been utilised more creatively?

They also added the melee counter. Fuck the melee counter. It trivialises the entire game, and is more or less required to be used unless you want to spend hours hammering away at the same tired bosses over and over…I’m not sure if it’s even possible to beat some of them without using that, in fact. Credit where credit is due: it’s not as bad as parrying is in other video games I’ve played. There are clear tells with generous windows of opportunity for most enemies. But it is so damn boring to do it with every single encounter. When all the Metroid bosses are basically the same, it only adds to the tedium. I don’t see WHY all the Metroids had to be the same, either. If they can give them different elemental attacks, why can they not change their attack patterns and weaknesses a bit as well? This was no doubt a flaw in the original Metroid II, but…well, QoL improvements. Changes. They could have changed this.

Although perhaps I shouldn’t wish for changes, given what was added. This game has some of the worst bosses in Metroid history – that goddamn digger robot fight just drags on and on and ON. Break both arms, break the shield around its head, break three nodes on the head…god almighty, just STOP. Ridley – who should not have been the final boss, even if it did make a certain sort of sense from a story standpoint as it leads into Super Metroid – having to be beaten three times despite barely changing his attack pattern each time was similarly boring. It feels as though the developers decided to add more tedium to an already tedious game.

Lack of music was rather depressing, because honestly Metroid doesn’t have the right kind of atmosphere to pull off the creepy vibe the same way, say, Dark Souls does. It just heightens how empty and repetitive the stages are when the only time really audible or memorable music plays is when you’re fighting a boss or you’re in a high temperature area…at which point, of course, a 3DS rendition of Lower Norfair plays. Because of course it does.

Altogether, this is a very frustrating, boring, badly-designed mess that has me extremely worried for Metroid Dread, because I know MercurySteam somehow got their hands on that and I’ve already seen that awful melee counter in the trailer footage. If this is how Samus is going to return, she was better off staying wherever the hell she was before.