Wrathgaar's Ratings and Reviews
Exploration],
rated by Wrathgaar on Jan 22, 2019 (
Thee were so many times in Eris that I had to simply stop and marvel at what I was seeing. DMan has created a thing of beauty here. I could scarcely believe I was still playing Super Metroid considering how stunning many of the visuals were, from incredible alien setpieces to moving backgrounds to foreground overlays and atmospheric haze effects that all helped to create a powerfully vibrant new world. And the creativity was overwhelming in places too, from the Chozo dining halls to the 'Annihilation'-esque sci-fi horror lairs to the icy, snow-covered areas with reflective pools reminiscent of the Shadow Link fight area from OoT.
The game is challenging, for sure, but there was always so much amazing new stuff to explore that I never came close to wanting to give up, and being limited in terms of your health and armoury when pitted against tough opponents early on I felt only added to the horror vibe that DMan very successfully managed to build throughout the game right from the very start. Hell, I was genuinely scared for a split second when I entered into the bomb torizo fight, surrounded by chozo statues in a large hall with low health and not knowing where the torizo was going to be coming from.
There were many points in the game that felt very reminiscent of Metroid Prime too, with morph ball rail tracks, different coloured metroids, phazon-like floral growths, sky temples, even that one 'logbook' moment... I can't stress how great the game was to look at and explore, and I thought a great achievement to capture some of the essence of a GC title in a SNES game.
My only minor gripe is that apart from the amazingly innovative visuals there wasn't much else that was new. While many enemies and bosses had recolours and revamped health/ damage, they were still the same ones from SM, and though a few items have been tweaked they were all essentially the same as SM too. There was one cool new miniboss that caught me by surprise though, and all the other bosses fit into their environments so well that I didn't even mind that I was seeing them all again. But the tweak to screw attack (turned into a new item called 'evasion') worked really well in the context of the game, and the eventual armour upgrade you get looks so good too (with fancy visor FX to boot) that I'd almost recommend the hack for that alone.
For me, this is about as good if not better than I could ever have hoped an official Super Metroid 2 on the SNES to be. If you can wall jump alright and have at least a middling to mediocre ability to short charge you have every advanced technique you need to finish Eris (the latter may not even be necessary but I found it helped at one point in the final area). There were a few times I got stuck and didn't know how to proceed but there were always clues in the environment that eventually gave the answer.
I cannot recommend this enough.
The game is challenging, for sure, but there was always so much amazing new stuff to explore that I never came close to wanting to give up, and being limited in terms of your health and armoury when pitted against tough opponents early on I felt only added to the horror vibe that DMan very successfully managed to build throughout the game right from the very start. Hell, I was genuinely scared for a split second when I entered into the bomb torizo fight, surrounded by chozo statues in a large hall with low health and not knowing where the torizo was going to be coming from.
There were many points in the game that felt very reminiscent of Metroid Prime too, with morph ball rail tracks, different coloured metroids, phazon-like floral growths, sky temples, even that one 'logbook' moment... I can't stress how great the game was to look at and explore, and I thought a great achievement to capture some of the essence of a GC title in a SNES game.
My only minor gripe is that apart from the amazingly innovative visuals there wasn't much else that was new. While many enemies and bosses had recolours and revamped health/ damage, they were still the same ones from SM, and though a few items have been tweaked they were all essentially the same as SM too. There was one cool new miniboss that caught me by surprise though, and all the other bosses fit into their environments so well that I didn't even mind that I was seeing them all again. But the tweak to screw attack (turned into a new item called 'evasion') worked really well in the context of the game, and the eventual armour upgrade you get looks so good too (with fancy visor FX to boot) that I'd almost recommend the hack for that alone.
For me, this is about as good if not better than I could ever have hoped an official Super Metroid 2 on the SNES to be. If you can wall jump alright and have at least a middling to mediocre ability to short charge you have every advanced technique you need to finish Eris (the latter may not even be necessary but I found it helped at one point in the final area). There were a few times I got stuck and didn't know how to proceed but there were always clues in the environment that eventually gave the answer.
I cannot recommend this enough.
