When you wait more than a decade to step out again as intergalactic bounty hunter, Samus Aran, you don't tread lightly. You goddamned run. At full tilt. Thankfully the way Nintendo treated the design of Samus' triumphant 2D side-scrolling return in Metroid Dread is more than accommodating of this style of play. In fact, The Big N insists upon it.

This review should have been up 12 hours ago, but the universe hates me and so it's fashionably late, as the kids say, but worth it I think.

Here's a snippet:

Metroid Dread makes you feel cool. Like, everything Samus does; how she stands, how she aims, how she spider magnets, how she slides, how she now melee attacks, how she combines slide and the new melee attack -- all of it. Every little thing, including dying, look f***ing cool in Metroid Dread. It’s fast and furiously fumbly to control at first. There’s no hand-holding in this outing, and its pacing is a fundamentally different affair to the Primes of the gaming world. You can’t scan in Dread, which is a significant disadvantage as often things are simply marked on your map as “???” leaving you no real understanding of what they are, and often how to get by them. But this is glorious design, because you don’t have all the answers, and side-scrolling right be damned; look up, down, left, right and then beyond every one of those angles. Movement and navigation of this world, particularly when you’re stuck is the absolute key to both progression and survival.

Click here for our full Metroid Dread review.

If you haven't bought it yet, you should.

This one needs to be Game of the Year.

It's really nice to have a new 2D Metroid game after ~19yrs. It seems to be tracking to become the highest selling Metroid game to date so hopefully that incentives Nintendo to do more with the franchise aside from Prime4. Definitely worthy of game of the year.

For mainline Metroid games, I'd still rank Metroid Fusion and Super Metroid higher but it is a fantastic entry in the series.

I reached the end boss yesterday but currently back tracking through the game collecting items I've missed.