This game piqued my interest from the get-go, the melding of Wizardry style exploration and Punch-Out combat combined with the raw energy of Black Knight 2000 seemed promising if not interesting. Unfortunately, this elevator pitch barely holds together past the game’s first floor, unraveling into a series of incredibly tedious puzzles interrupted by constant ""random"" encounters. In reality, each floor has 3-5 distinct sets of enemy encounters that it will eventually stitch into the fabric of your soul as the monotony of the puzzle solving is interchanged with the monotony of repeating the same encounters over and over and over. Some fights do take you by surprise the first time, but ultimately most battles will boil down to:

*1. Hold Auto Attack
2. Parry
3. Repeat*

I suppose it lived up to its Dungeon Crawling influences more than I had anticipated, but at least those had a modicum of player progression and agency that FIGHT KNIGHT desperately lacks. Your options here are limited to supers and armors that add varying levels of risk/reward to your base kit, but ultimately the clunkyness of having to completely put the brakes on whatever you were doing in the dungeon to painstakingly walk back to the hub world just to change your equips defeats any situational benefit they may have had; and frankly, what you start with by default is better than the vast majority of what you unlock.

There is no carrot dangling on a stick here to keep you going, it’s so unbelievably bland in almost all aspects, and what is there in the way of dialogue is better left unmentioned; the amount of words spent saying absolutely nothing would make a Dark Souls NPC blush. Beneath the garish color palettes and repetitive music terribly unfit for how often (and how briefly) it rears its head is an experience that is nothing short of nauseating.
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Edit 12/05: It would be remiss of myself not to acknowledge the allegations of abuse levied at Team Sorcerobe and lead developer “Boen” by a former writer on the project. Boen has chosen to respond by flooding all available avenues of information including the game’s Steam discussion forums with vitriol and rage; engaging one-on-one with parasitic individuals lusting after the latest gamer drama and indulging them in kind with unprofessional and crude attempts at generating Kiwifarms-style interest in the matter for his own sake. The Steam reviews for this game are a reflection of that behavior, where you will find no shortage of hateful jabs at sufferers of mental illness and other depraved takes on the events. This is the Fight Knight Boen wants you to see, and I will not accept any spineless calls to simply "ignore the controversy" in light of this.

in contrast to other indie shooters which push the envelope in terms of technicality and systems, super xyx falls back on tried and true simplicity: dodge incoming attacks, hold fire to shoot, grab power-ups, and drop screen-clearing bombs. score bonuses come from killing everything without dying, chaining combos, and grabbing big honkin' gold medals, keeping you on the move constantly. the biggest score bonuses come from chaining the NO MISS multiplier stage after stage. to reach the true last boss, you have to 1cc the game and clear the bonus stage, which is basically a remixed blend of every other stage up to that point. beyond that, there's a whole bunch of unlockable ships and modes. tons of meat on this bone. if you're someone like me, who typically plays more for survival than for score, you might also appreciate the vibrant graphics, the toaplan-esque designs, some compile vibes, and the killer music by carina evoking thunder force. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utyi4NxD9vA

ok. metroid dread's primary failing is being very much a metroid game and all the obvious stuff that implies, such that ai companion adam knows samus will be able to find the gravity suit she needs to navigate a certain area, and that type of thing. on this alien (robot) planet she's never visited before. because, of course, there are chozo ruins there (oh, right—this one might be their original homeworld), and with that comes all the tech samus needs for every mission...? i guess? it's just a bit convenient, is all. maybe they could've gone for some new ideas with regard to power-ups we've seen many times before, for the sake of a believable and verisimilitudinous world. at least they, uh, shook things up slightly by delaying the morph ball.

that said... one kind of interesting detail which i find somewhat (if not entirely) mitigates the above quibble is the nature of samus and her suit's uncanny ability to 'absorb' functions. some have scoffed at the concept of missile-firing capabilities being downloaded in fusion: in dread, she literally absorbs the energy from fallen enemies, sometimes as actual glowing energy and others in the form of some mechanical cube found within its body—or in the palm of a huge chozo statue. perhaps, along with the power suit's tendency to have its appearance altered, unlocking new functions through the interpretation of computer data speaks to the suit being some sort of crazy chozo biotech. as if the suit is no mere armor or robotic apparatus: it is energy. a legendary chozo weapon in symbiosis with samus aran's body. and we've seen samus simply absorb energy in every metroid, whether as far back as the final battle of super metroid or the very first time she picked up a lingering mote of energy from a dead creature on zebes. it all goes some way toward making some sense of the ebb and flow of samus' 'powers' (and therefore her freedom and autonomy) game to game. and if you ask me, the answer to the old question about how the morph ball works would be that samus' own physical matter is temporarily rearranged on a subatomic level, or something—as if being teleported, though remaining inside the spherical form of the suit. (i'm no physicist and it's probably better not to overthink the suit's capability to modify its own mass-energy, let alone samus'—it clearly has its limitations. it's fun to develop some kind of loose headcanon about it, though.)

beyond that... whether this understanding of the power suit began with super or with fusion, i feel it comes to a climax with dread. and i would say that this is its primary triumph. samus feels amazing: faster than ever before; also somehow more... real. iconic as ever. white-knuckle, treasure-tight boss fights really let you feel the power of unreal agility and furious blasting. the game also looks and sounds fantastic! animations in particular are a real highlight. there's worldbuilding stuff and foreshadowing all over the place. the backgrounds (beyond the 2d plane upon which you travel) alone are wild. i used to be skeptical of the whole 2.5d thing as a fit for metroid, but even if this is the last one, it's one of the prettiest.

having played a bunch of metroid recently, i'm still inclined to point to super as my personal favorite—above all, i like its mysterious openness more than the task-driven style of the rest. really, though, between return of samus, super, fusion, and now dread, you've got a handful of excellent space horror adventures with an awesome protagonist. right now i'm just glad for the opportunity to spend some time in samus' power suit once more, and i feel this was a very satisfying metroid 5.

it took me ENTIRELY TOO LONG to understand that this is a quintessential video game. my past attempts at plumbing its depths have failed—it felt cramped and clunky compared to super metroid or even the nes original. every so often i would make another failed attempt and come away with the impression that it was one of those "you had to be there" experiences and i had simply missed the boat forever... (i scarcely even knew of it until after i had played SUPER metroid, despite my age (i turned 11 in june of 1991, setting na release dates aside)) which sort of reinforced my uncertainty about its whole appeal, because, i mean, i HAD a game boy and i love and cherish the handheld mario and zelda games of the same era. what was i missing?

maybe first and foremost—and i am certainly not saying anything new or revelatory, here—that cramped screen space is a boon to the claustrophobic atmosphere of this thing, definitively setting it apart from other games in the series. you especially begin to feel this when you've made some progress and begin to hurt for a map, or some indication of where precisely the metroids you've yet to find and defeat may be lurking. the sheer empty darkness of these chasms is both smothering and informative of the barely fathomable scope of the world around you. this rules! metroid 2 is a HORROR game. its music often being sparse gothic dirges, all discordant 4-bit harpsichord, pulse wave doom and skittering alien noises, the vibe is relentlessly eerie. an even spookier precursor to the dank jams of castlevania: harmony of dissonance. it takes you back to a time when nintendo weren't afraid to experiment and make strange, almost avant garde art with their games. this is just about a masterpiece of exemplifying the beauty of technological limitations.

i won't get deep into the storytelling aspects, but one of the more impressive things to me, here, is the fine balance of streamlined, almost arcade game like flow to things (read: yes, it can feel a bit repetitive (though i DO feel this has been overstated, as the quake and lava-lowering that marks its gated progression is actually pretty satisfying when you've been hunting for a while...)) and environmental, cinematic (dialogue-free) storytelling. the events of super metroid resound in my mind now that i have my own experience with the oddly bleak return of samus in there, too.

(note: i played this in retroarch with one of those game boy color shaders that represents the handheld's screen as a frame around the game itself and i 100% recommend this.)

(extra side note: if metroid was inspired by alien, metroid 2 would seem to be obviously inspired by aliens in that it is primarily a mission of extermination... but it also presages the ideas of prometheus—specifically with regard to the fate of the chozo and the engineers and their role in the existence of each's lethal cosmic progeny—in some pretty interesting ways. makes u think.)

i haven't yet completed this or tried the variety of its unique modes (classic zebes, a revamped version of the original game set on a new planet, a randomizer, multiplayer, and map creation...!) but i have played enough that i really think this deserves more attention. it's such a polished update to a somewhat dusty classic that if there were any justice in the world, its developer might be paid by nintendo and a port released for the switch. it's not any kind of dramatic overhaul like zero mission by any means... it feels more like the nes game had been ported to pc engine and now it's got some more modern additions. really, really cool.

https://forum.metroidconstruction.com/index.php/topic,4952.0.html