Diablo II Resurrected & Metroid Dread

I’ve been playing two new games lately – Diablo II Resurrected and Metroid Dread – and I have thoughts!

Video game companies tend to have a short shelf-life. That’s likely inevitable, given how rapidly the technology changes and the brutal amount of work involved in developing a game. For that matter, it’s extremely expensive, and if you develop a video game, there’s no guarantee at all that you will get your money back, or that the company can even sustain itself. Like, if you look at a lot of the great video game names of the past – Microprose, Maxis, Sierra, and so forth – most of them have gone out of business or been devoured and assimilated by larger corporate entities. Blizzard is still around, but it was eaten by Activision.  I think it’s plain that Blizzard’s glory days are past, and the company is sort of a zombiefied shell of its former self.

Nevertheless, Diablo II Resurrected is a final echo of Blizzard’s good old days. Of course, they did outsource the game’s development to a company called Vicarious Visions, which was clearly a good choice because the core game itself is pretty good. It feels exactly like Diablo II but with modern graphics and some of the rough edges sanded off. I could tell it was just like the original because I stayed up way too late trying to find the Black Marsh waypoint so I could save my game and go to bed.

But! A caveat. I only play Diablo II in single-player mode on Switch. (I rarely play multiplayer games because games are where I go when I’m tired of people and want to recharge for a bit.) There have been widespread reports that the multiplayer and online for Diablo II Resurrected have been horrible, which makes sense, because while Vicarious Visions made the game, Blizzard maintains the server backend, and as we’ve mentioned above, Blizzard’s glory days are long past. (And it seems that the reward of Vicarious Visions for making Diablo II Resurrected is to be eaten by Activision.)

So Diablo II Resurrected is worth playing, but only if you play in single-player mode.

Let us turn to a happier topic – Metroid Dread, which I can recommend without reservation! I really like it, and frankly think it’s a masterpiece.

It’s a 2D sidescroller game in the vein of the old Metroid and Castlevania games. It plays a great deal like Super Metroid for the SNES and Samus Returns for the 3DS, but much more smoothly and with better graphics. Like, wall-jumping in Super Metroid is difficult to time properly. In Dread, it’s quick and fluid. While the old Metroid challenge remains, the in-game map, accompanied by little animated tutorials that appear every time Samus gets a new ability.

A new feature is the EMMI robots, who guard specific areas and start hunting Samus every time she enters that area. They’re fast, quick, smart, and hard to fool, and they can one-hit kill Samus. Admittedly, the EMMI robots look like fancy can openers, maybe high-end ones produced by a Scandinavian kitchenware company with a name like Sigurd & Bjornsson. But once they get moving, they’re really scary, because they’re fancy can openers that want to open up poor Samus.

Anyway, my conclusion is that Metroid Dread is an instant classic, and if you’re enjoyed Metroid/Castlevania type games in the past, you owe it to yourself to give it a play.

-JM