Metroid Dread review – Nintendo’s horror-tinged sci-fi feels oddly hollow

Nintendo Switch; Mercury Steam/Nintendo
Samus Aran's return after 20 years is welcome - but other games have taken up her mantle in the meantime

The recipe for a Metroid game is clear and concise: there's a labyrinthine system of rooms and corridors, an oppressive science-fiction environment, an escalating series of power-ups. A good-feeling gun. A great-feeling jump. A limited map you unlock gradually and rewardingly. Metroid Dread is proficient at all of this: it feels good to play, for a while. But I found that it got tiresome. There is little to hold the player in the world beyond the feeling of a perfectly executed attack or dodge. In the 20 years since we last saw bounty hunter Samus Aran run around in one of these 2D space stations, there have been several indie games modelled on the Metroid format - such as Iconoclasts, and Hollow Knight - that offer far more atmosphere, depth and life than Dread's slickly predictable tunnels.

Metroid Dread is a game about trying not to die alone in a cave system full of hostile fauna and predatory machines that are invested in hunting you down. This is pretty much all the storytelling you're handed, outside of some panels of text and short and awkwardly placed cut-scenes at the start of the game that establish us in Samus Aran's timeline. She will encounter old enemies, and some new ones; this planet has no allies for the player. She begins her quest all but totally disempowered, her suit deconstructed, and we lead her towards the surface, regaining her abilities along the way. This game does not offer much of a guiding hand, and the challenge is tough.

Metroid Dread is out now; 49.99