October 8 will be one of the most important days of this year for Nintendo Switch. Friday of next week is the date chosen by the big N to put on sale the Nintendo Switch OLED, whose launch will be accompanied by the Metroid Dread, the new adventure of Samus Aran.
It will undoubtedly be an excellent way to release the new model of Nintendo’s hybrid console in which its new screen stands out so that the games can be seen even better. That is something that we have had the opportunity to verify recently after having been able to play the new Metroid on this new Nintendo Switch.
A) Yes we have been able to enjoy the first hour of the game, on which we can assure you that it passed us in a sigh of how much the game caught us from the first second, hence we are going to tell you what we thought and why you should follow the track very closely to this new installment of the saga.
Getting new powers on a strange and most hostile planet
If there is something in which all the video games of the series agree Metroid it is in the fact that, as good metroidvanias, little by little we will have to obtain various skills and improvements in order to become even more powerful, which in turn will allow us to access more places in the different areas of the map.
For reasons that we are not going to reveal to you so as not to spoil you, as soon as you start Samus will lose all his abilities and types of shots. What we can tell you is that our heroine receives a call for help that warns her that a sample of the X parasite has been discovered on the planet ZDR, an organism that is capable of copying any living being, is still alive, despite apparently being eradicated in Metroid Fusion.
To end him, the Galactic Federation sends a group of Interplanetary Multiform Mobile Explorers robots, also known as EMMI.However, shortly after landing on this alien planet, all contact with them is lost, hence Samus is tasked with traveling to this place to find out what happened and exterminate the X parasite once and for all if it continues to pose a threat.
With this argument will begin a stunning 2D action platformer adventure in which we will only start with the normal firing of Samus and the possibility of launching missiles, nothing more. By exploring the rooms and regions of ZDR we will recover the main skills that characterize our bounty hunter, among which there will be some completely new.
There will be no shortage of rooms in which we will find doors or places that we cannot access in any way until we get the corresponding improvements. In this sense, something that we liked a lot is that We will not acquire them in the usual order, because anyone who is a fan of Metroid You will know that the Morphosphere is usually always one of the first capacities that we acquire, but in our first hour we have not encountered it.
What we have found is the Arachnoiman and the Spectral Camouflage. Thanks to the first we managed to hook ourselves to some walls and special platforms in order to access more places that we could not reach in any other way, while the second gives Samus the ability to become invisible in exchange for using Aeion energy, on the It must be recognized that it is spent at high speed, so it is advisable to use it at the right times.
Even so, until you reach these new skills we will be able to develop perfectly against the enemies Against which we will be facing, since Samus will be able to slide on the floor, bounce off the walls, point in all directions at the place we want to shoot and there will also be the counterattack. The latter is what we liked the most because it allows us to leave enemies immobile as long as we use it at the exact moment, either while standing still, jumping or running.
We are not sure how many different regions there will be in the game, but in our first hour we covered a large part of the first and a small portion of the second and we had countless rooms to visit and surely there would also be dozens of hidden improvements. So it looks like those who want get 100% they will waste their good amount of hours until I find everything.
All this is precisely one of the things that has fascinated us the most about Metroid Dread, the fact of being able to enjoy a new Metroid in 2D completely new and we didn’t know anything about it from the beginning. Okay, it hasn’t been long since the launch of Metroid: Samus Returns, but after all, it was a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus. On the other hand, here we start from scratch and that is the best because it is not clear what you are going to find and think carefully about where to return to take advantage of the improvements and skills that appear as you go.
The fight against EMMI, a clear tribute to Metroid Fusion
For many fans of the franchise, Metroid Fusion is the best delivery of all. Each one will remember it with great affection for various reasons, but if there is something that no one will ever forget, it is the tension that made us live every time we were chased by the evil version of Samus generated by the X parasite, capable of killing us in a jiffy if it caught us, so we had no choice but to put our feet in dust if we ran into it.
That is one of the main aspects in which it is noted that Metroid Dread It is a direct sequel, because here we will suffer the same type of situation again, although in this case they will be the EMMI those in charge of giving us war. Although these robots were supposed to be our allies and those in charge of ending the X parasite, for some reason they have gone to the opposite side and their main objective will be to end Samus’s life if they manage to hunt her down.
Luckily we will know well when we will have to deal with them, because the rooms they are in have a very specific design and they cannot get out of them, which partly takes away a bit of tension knowing when we will meet them, but that does not mean that they make us nervous while they chase us at full speed. More than anything because if they catch Samus it is a practically guaranteed death.
The only way to get rid of their attack is with a counterattack in time, but the times we have tried it has been impossible, hence we have only resorted to escaping directly from them. And do not think that it will be easy to avoid them, because the EMMI they move quite fast and will know how to read our movements perfectly to surround and chase us incessantly thanks to their radars, which is why Spectral Camouflage is so important.
On the other hand, the special emphasis on them is due to the fact that one of the main objectives of the game is to kill them all. In principle, they will seem invincible and any shot from Samus will not scratch them, something that is solved with a more devastating type of shot that only has a single charge, enough to blow them into a thousand pieces, so it is essential to locate this type. attack before facing any of them.
Of course, not all will be the same. Just like Samus will get stronger little by little, with EMMI the same will happen and also they will gain new capacities that will force us to hit the coconut to get rid of them if we want to carry on with our mission. In general terms, all the encounters that we have fought against them have seemed to us the most challenging and every time one caught us it also helped us to understand where we have failed in order to think of a new strategy.
But this does not mean that they are the only final bosses that we will fight. On the planet ZDR there are also other infernal creatures with its own mechanics with which we will also have to use all the skills that we have been getting up to that moment, something that has also made us happy so that Samus’s abilities are not limited to certain rooms without more and we have to use them all to get hold of the victory.
Personally, the first hour of Metroid Dread It couldn’t have been more satisfactory and the sensations it has produced in me have been fantastic. I am looking forward to finding out what more challenges await me and especially to discover if the X parasite is really behind all this or is there someone else pulling the strings, but what I have clear is that a Metroid completely new in 2D and at the moment it seems that MercurySteam has done its homework very well.