If you want to know what makes Metroid so special after all these years, consider the opening moments of Super Metroid. After narrowly escaping an exploding space station, Samus Aran descends on Zebes to investigate the ruins of the pirate base she destroyed in the first game. It’s a perfect example of Super Metroid’s minimalist storytelling, wordlessly conveying the tense anxiety of exploring the ruins of Mother Brain’s old Tourian base amid rain and crashing thunder.

Such moments find Metroid at its best, effectively conveying the sense of fear and mystery that drives the series forward. Metroid Dread does its best to capture that feeling with its own opening, which once again finds Samus descending toward an unknown planet to investigate the mystery below.

It’s the opening moments that give me the most hope that Metroid Dread will live up to its famous namesake. While Metroid Dread doesn’t exactly sport AAA production values, its first few scenes manage to be beautiful in their own way, sparking that familiar feeling of tense curiosity endemic to the series. A wordless duel serves to establish the mood as Samus begins delving into the mysteries of Planet ZDR, which is swarming with aliens, robots, and maybe even Metroids (after all, what’s a Metroid game without Metroids).

Journey's End

Billed as the conclusion to the Metroid story arc, Metroid Dread is the first new 2D Metroid adventure since Metroid Fusion in 2002. Other games have been released since then, but they’ve all been remakes like Metroid: Zero Mission, or they’ve been first-person adventures like Metroid Prime. That makes Metroid Dread a special occasion for fans of the series, not the least because series producer Yoshio Sakamoto has been trying to make this game for a good 15 years now.

Metroid Dread follows in the footsteps of Metroid: Samus Returns, the remake of the Game Boy’s Metroid 2 released on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2017. Like Samus Returns, Metroid Dread is being developed in part by MercurySteam, the Spanish studio once responsible for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. As you might expect, it’s a clear step up from the 3DS visually, its color palette allowing it to shine despite its otherwise simple presentation.

It’s buoyed by the Switch OLED’s improved screen, which goes a long way toward bringing Metroid Dread’s otherwise spare environments to life. Due to launch the same day as the Switch OLED, Metroid Dread is being treated as a showcase game for Nintendo’s new console. And honestly? It looks great. The Switch OLED’s more vibrant colors really help it to pop out of the screen.

Its map is once again massive, filled with a multitude of alien-infested nooks and crannies to explore. Adding to its sense of scope is the way that Samus takes up much less screen real estate this time around, making the caverns and hallways feel vast by comparison. I got turned around more than once in my hands-on with Metroid Dread, slightly flustered by the lack of a Morph Ball (Samus, as always, is bereft of her powers to start the game). Notably, the map seems more complex than before, making it much harder to “simply go to the spot you haven’t explored yet.” Traversal definitely requires some thought in this game, which I appreciate.

This sort of exploration is a big part of the Metroid experience, and Metroid Dread has plenty of it. Where it parts ways with the rest of the series is in its emphasis on combat. The quintessential Metroid Dread moment comes in the first few minutes of the game, when a damaged E.M.M.I — one of the robots that relentlessly hunts Samus — shudders to life and gives chase, moving with the slow but inexorable gait of a Terminator. The camera shifts to more of an over-the-shoulder view as Samus aims her Omega Cannon and fires. For better or worse, Metroid Dread is replete with such “cinematic” moments, which are designed to punctuate the action in a manner resembling bigger-budget action games like God of War.

Feeding into this approach are the E.M.M.I. rooms dot the map, serving as bottlenecks where Samus is hunted by droids that desire only to harvest her DNA. These rooms are actually my least favorite part of Metroid Dread, despite forming the core of Sakamoto’s original vision for the game. They seek to expand on the famous encounters from Metroid Fusion, in which Samus is hunted by a frightening doppelganger called the SA-X. But where those encounters are terrifying in the way that they can just appear out of nowhere — the image of the SA-X moving slowly through a tunnel while Samus hunkers in a vent below is burned into my memory — the E.M.M.I encounters feel more stilted, perhaps because they’re artificially limited to certain rooms.

The flipside is that the E.M.M.I encounters make ample use of Metroid Dread’s various traversal mechanics, which are as fast and enjoyable as anything I’ve ever experienced in a Metroid game. Samus is able to bounce, slide, and air dash around foes, and pinballing off balls while an E.M.M.I. slithers in pursuit is a cool spectacle. Notably, Metroid Dread's mechanics are already garnering attention from speedrunners — a series tradition dating back to the days of Super Metroid. In that respect, at least, Metroid Dread is very much in the vein of its predecessors.

Metroid's Special Atmosphere

My hope is that this is only the beginning, and that Metroid Dread will find increasingly inventive ways to make use of its robotic foes while leaning into its excellent movement mechanics. I’m also hopeful that Metroid Dread won’t suffer from quite the same bloat as Samus Returns, which somewhat overstayed its welcome in dramatically expanding its Metroid count and the scope of the map. Most of all, I want to see what Sakamoto and MercurySteam are able to do when they’re not beholden to an established structure like they were in Samus Returns.

As the grand finale of the Metroid arc, it will ultimately be up to Metroid Dread to close out one of the most beloved storylines in gaming history. That’s a tall order, and Metroid’s storytelling track record has been decidedly mixed over the past decade (Metroid fans would definitely prefer to forget Metroid: Other M). But it’s hard not to be enticed by Metroid Dread’s earliest moments, which so effectively establish the mystery at the core of its story. They serve as a wonderful reminder that the atmosphere that has long made Metroid so special is alive and well.

Metroid Dread will be out October 8. Make sure to check out our coverage of the Switch OLED, which releases the same day, as well as 7 things you (probably) didn't know about Metroid.

Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN.

Daniel Craig’s final, long-awaited assignment as 007 in No Time To Die takes him to the El Nido in Cuba; a fictional bar attached to a beautiful hotel and theatre. Like so many of Bond’s previous visits to luxurious resorts in glamorous locations, this trip is destined to end in bloodshed. Luckily, the explosions and gunshots didn’t upset the Cuban government because Craig and his fellow cast and crew shot the sequence in England, where a whole slice of Latin America had been created at Pinewood Studios, London.

IGN was invited to take a look at this lavish set during the final days of No Time To Die’s shooting schedule back in October 2019, long before the coronavirus pandemic threw the film’s schedule to the seven winds. There, we were able to take a closer look at the designs, props, costumes, and cars used in Daniel Craig’s final James Bond mission. Here’s seven of the most interesting things we learned while on the set of No Time To Die.

1 – Revisiting Madeleine’s Past

No Time To Die will reunite Bond with Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, the French psychologist he first met during the events of Spectre. She’ll be a key part of No Time To Die’s story, with one scene revisiting her childhood in Norway.

“She’s at a winter home on an ice lake up in Norway, and she is there with her mother,” explained production designer Mark Tildesley. “And then a horrible event takes place which is going to shape her life. Someone comes to pay a visit to her father, who's a great assassin. Obviously he's not there. And something happens. It’s horrible.”

This is a story we’re already familiar with, as Madeleine herself told the tale to Bond in Spectre. She shot and killed the intruder with her father’s pistol, a situation that birthed her hatred of guns. But this time we’re going to see the events unfold on-camera, and finally see the assailant who was seeking her Spectre-operative father, Mr. White.

The Norway house itself will be later revisited by Madeline and Bond, something that meant that the production team had to build three different versions of the house to demonstrate the passage of time. Two of these were soundstage creations, but the one that will be seen in the opening was literally built atop a frozen lake on the orders of director Cary Joji Fukunaga.

2 – Rami Malek’s Masked Assassin

“Our baddie, who is the person that comes to do damage at Madeline's house in the sequence in Norway, is called Segura and he is played by Rami Malek,” Tildesley told us. Take one look at the film’s trailer and you can spot what must be this scene; the disfigured masked assassin is surely Malek at Madeleine’s Norway house on the lake.

This not only means that Madeleine failed to kill her father’s would-be-murderer that night, but also that he’s back in her life for some reason. Quite why he’s back remains unknown, but the fact that Tildesley referred to him as “Segura'', rather than the character’s official name of Safin, suggests maybe there’s a few more twists to come from Malik’s shadowy terrorist.

We already knew that Safin wouldn’t be associated with a religious ideology, but Tidesley revealed that he has a pharmaceutical company background. Would such a prestigious history make Safin a Doctor? No? It’s a tempting fan theory, for sure (one that Fukunaga insists is way off the mark), but it certainly remains to be seen where his loyalties lie. Considering he was in Norway to kill a Spectre agent, it could be that he’s a third party, but we wouldn’t put it past Bond’s greatest enemy to kill their own people.

3 – Bond’s Final Objective

After the events of Spectre, Bond has retired from MI6. But the world of espionage isn’t quite ready to leave him behind. “Felix Leiter comes and asks something of [Bond], just to pick up a package in Cuba,” said veteran 007 producer Michael G. Wilson. “The package turns out to be a person, and Lyshanna [Lynch] – who is playing the British agent – also wants the package, but for the British not the Americas. And so a gun fight erupts.”

It looks like this initial favour to the CIA unfolds into a much larger plot, and Bond is pulled back into a life of danger and disasters once more. This mysterious person-shaped package, who has since been revealed to be a missing scientist named Valdo Obruchev (played by Chernobyl’s David Dencik), will no doubt be the key to No Time To Die’s central plot. They also ensure that Bond will find his way to Cuba, AKA Pinewood Studios.

4 – The El Nido Shootout

From the outside, the set of the El Nido looked like a classic, if unremarkable, Cuban building. Inside, though, things were getting heated. That gunfight that Wilson mentioned had kicked off, and so that could only mean that Bond and Lynch’s 00-agent Nomi had found the package.

On TV monitors linked to the set’s cameras I was able to see Daniel Craig filming take after take of an action sequence involving men with a metal briefcase being janked upwards to the ceiling. Craig had his gun at the ready – clearly that case was in the wrong hands – and he was joined by a glamorous woman with a pistol of her own.

That was Ana de Armas’ Paloma, a CIA agent sent by Leiter to aid Bond in his assignment. Yup, by a stroke of casting genius Craig has been reunited with his Knives Out co-star. But with Bond’s loyalty presumably split between his current and former employers, it’s yet to be seen if he’ll help Paloma see the mission through, or aid MI6’s new 00 agent, Nomi, get her hands on the target.

5 – Vesper’s Shadow

The Craig era of Bond is most notable for its continuing plotline, gradually revealing the many arms of Spectre. But 007’s soul has been continually tormented by that of Vesper Lynd; his Casino Royale lover who turned out to be another tool in Spectre’s arsenal.

No Time To Die will see Bond’s current romantic partner, Madeleine, encourage him to find some kind of closure. “She persuades him that he should go and visit the grave of Vesper as part of his catharsis of moving on with her,” explained Tidesley.

It’s unclear if that catharsis will ever happen, though, especially in the wake of the opening shots of No Time To Die’s first trailer. “Why would I betray you?” asks Madeleine, having seemingly been accused by Bond of following in Vesper’s footsteps. “We all have our secrets,” replies a furious 007.

This revelation brings the ghosts of Bond’s past back to the forefront, said Tidesley. “He is now in a position of turmoil because he is paranoid that another person he dearly loves has betrayed him.”

6 – An Upgraded Aston

That scene from the trailer takes place amongst a larger car chase featuring Bond’s iconic Aston Martin DB5. We see it thundering through the narrow cobbled streets of Matera, Italy, before arriving in a hilltop square.

“In this square he’s captured, he’s t-boned in the side,” revealed No Time To Die’s SFX supervisor, Chris Corbould. “All the exits are shut in by the villains’ cars, and they start pumping full clips of ammunition. Bond is in the car soaking all this up.”

Naturally, Q Branch has ensured that this Aston Martin is well equipped. In fact, it’s had a significant upgrade since its last outing. Rather than Browning .30 calibre machine guns hidden behind the front indicator lights, the entire headlamp segment retracts to reveal rotary mini-guns. It’s the perfect get-out tool.

“[Bond] presses a button, puts it into a donut, and he strafes 360 degrees around the old square," explained Corbould. "We filled the whole square up with smoke which he emits from the exhaust. And that’s how he makes his escape.”

Alongside these impressive new gizmos is a dispenser under the rear bumper that throws out miniature explosives. The license plate has also had an overhaul, with the antiquated revolving plates now replaced with an LCD screen that can display whatever plate Bond needs to remain undercover.

7 – (Slightly) Classic Q Toys

It’s not just the Aston Martin DB5 that’s got some new toys. The final moments of Skyfall indicated that the Craig era was drifting closer to the hallmarks of classic Bond, and that’s more clear than ever in Q Branch’s offerings in No Time To Die. While a tour of Pinewood’s prop warehouse didn’t reveal any exploding pens or laser watches, prop master Ben Wilkinson agreed that there’s a more classic, almost throw-back vibe to the many props being used on No Time To Die.

One of those is Q’s portable laboratory – a sort of mechanic’s workbench as crafted by stealth bomber designers – which contains a tracking array. “He injects Bond and Nomi with a smart blood tracker so he can see what they’re up to and where they’re going,” says Wilkinson. The injection gun itself is built from blue and white plastic and looks like a leftover from the Connery years.

On top of the lab bench is a device which Wilkinson refers to as “Qdar”, which whirrs and oscillates like an old-school gadget, despite looking like a PlayStation peripheral. “That's scanning the surrounding area and beaming information back up to Q,” said Wilkinson. “He can advise them on where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

“But my favorite part of that is his travelling tea set,” he said with a chuckle. He pulled open a drawer of the lab, which is kitted out with a complete, Ritz-quality brew kit. This film’s sense of humour is certainly in the classic mould, then.

We'll see how all these elements fit into the film when No Time To Die releases September 30, 2021 in the UK, and October 8 in the US. For more, read how Bond perfected the 'gritty' reboot.

Matt Purslow is IGN's UK News and Entertainment Writer.

Vin Diesel has suggested that Furya, the fourth film in The Chronicles of Riddick series, might not be as far off as people think.

Diesel teased the return of Riddick on Instagram this past weekend when he posted an old photo of himself in character as the franchise's titular anti-hero. In the caption, he revealed he had completed an "incredible meeting" with a team that he wouldn't name. He ended the post by suggesting that the fourth film in the sci-fi franchise is "maybe closer than you think."

The first installment of the series, Pitch Black, was released in 2000 and eventually birthed an entire franchise, collectively known as The Chronicles of Riddick, that spanned multiple live-action sequels, video games, and a direct-to-DVD animated film — all centered around gruff convict Riddick, an exceptional fighter with superhuman abilities and perfect night-vision.

Diesel announced back in 2014 that Universal Studios had expressed interest in developing the next installment in the Riddick film series. The following year, Diesel posted a video on Facebook in which he showed himself speaking with director David Twohy about a Riddick origin story, exploring "where it all started, where it all began" with the eponymous character.

News surrounding Furya fell quiet for a while, though that shouldn't come as a surprise as Diesel has been busy working on several other projects. He is confirmed to be appearing in James Cameron's Avatar sequels and has also returned to voice Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, as well as reprising his role as Dominic Toretto in the Fast & Furious franchise.

Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.

Crystal Dynamics, the developer behind Marvel's Avengers, has confirmed that the PlayStation-exclusive Spider-Man DLC will have story content and cutscenes when it makes its long-awaited debut.

As spotted by MP1ST, Crystal Dynamics' Senior Producer Dan Matlack responded to a fan's question on the official Marvel's Avengers Discord server that asked whether or not everyone's favourite webhead would come with his own storyline. "Spider-Man is what we call an 'event' so he will have cutscenes and a story for sure," Matlack replied.

Matlack then went on to give fans a further glimpse at details of the game's first ever Raid, in which players will battle with Klaw, the primary villain of the Marvel's Avengers' last expansion, War for Wakanda. As part of the discussion, Matlack reassured fans that while the Raid may feature some familiar environments it will be a "unique" experience.

Marvel's Avengers first confirmed that Spider-Man would be coming to the game – albeit controversially as a PlayStation exclusive character – in August of last year. At the time, the character was understood to be coming during an early 2021 release window. However, fans' concerns increased when Spider-Man's introduction was delayed and a lengthy silence from the studio fell surrounding the character.

Earlier this month, however, a new roadmap for Marvel's Avengers confirmed that the developer was on track to release Spider-Man sometime before the end of 2021.

For more on Marvel's Avengers, make sure to check out our review of the game where we praised its campaign for being "fun and endearing" but criticized its "loot-based post-game" for being "unrewarding and overly repetitive".

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.

Resident Evil 4 — like Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto 5 — is one of those all-time great games that has been re-released on nearly every platform. But the upcoming Resident Evil 4 VR for the Oculus Quest 2 might be the first time since 2005 that Capcom’s seminal survival horror game feels new again.

Resident Evil 4 VR isn’t some sampler running you through the best parts of the 2005 classic. This is the full game remade in virtual reality and you’ll be able to experience every area, puzzle, and boss fight in a new light. And I’ll be the first to tell you that this might be the first time in a long while that I’ve been excited to play through the entirety of Resident Evil 4 again.

Resident Evil 4 is best known for modernizing the Resident Evil formula and pivoting the series towards a more action-oriented direction. Gone were the slow-pace controls and sluggish gunplay, Resident Evil 4 introduced a new, faster third-person combat system while expanding the arsenal with new weapons and melee attacks.

All of this translates well in virtual reality. If you’ve played a first-person shooter in VR you’ll know that if there’s one genre VR excels at and potentially surpasses on the console experience, it’s a shooter. To this end, much of the original Resident Evil 4 experience has been remade to be interacted with.

Weapons are a good example of this. All the tools a player needs will be somewhere on their person and can be grabbed as necessary. Need to pull out a gun? Grab it from your waist. Need to heal yourself? Your health items can be grabbed from your left shoulder. Pull out a knife? It's holstered on your chest.

Similarly, reloading your weapon is done in real-time as well. Your ammo is in a pouch on your left side and you’ll need to physically pull out ammo cartridges and load them into your weapon.

The whole experience has a learning curve — I can’t tell you how many times I needed a health item only to accidentally grab my knife — but once you develop the muscle memory it’s almost second nature.

Puzzles have also been remade so they can be interacted with. One puzzle in the church requires players to move different colored lights correctly to form the right shape. On the console, players would interact with this using a controller, but in VR you’ll press virtual buttons on a machine to move around the lights the right way.

Likewise, your items are now handled in a full-sized, virtual window where you can pick up items and re-arrange them by physically moving them around. And saving your game is done on a fully interactive virtual typewriter and it might be my favorite thing ever.

Not everything is in VR though. All the cutscenes in the game aren’t viewed in first-person, but rather on a virtual theater screen in front of the player. Not only that, but anytime Leon does an action like climb a ladder or jump through a window RE4 VR switches from a first-person perspective to the same cutscene theater view.

It’s not a very elegant transition, but I understand why it was done. No doubt converting every cutscene in the game will add countless development hours, and I doubt jumping and rolling out a second-story window will be pleasant in VR.

The more serious issue is how some of the combat encounters translate into the new format. Resident Evil 4 as previously stated was a more action-oriented turn for the series and that included adding a lot more intense mob encounters.

On consoles and PC, this wasn’t a problem but in VR the intensity and the difficulty of these encounters are substantially increased. On the one hand, fighting a wave of enemies by pulling your weapons from holsters and reloading them in real-time can be incredibly thrilling.

But if you’re partial to motion-sickness like me, you’ll likely be playing using the teleportation controls, and getting away from a mob with this kind of movement while physically managing your inventory was quite the challenge.

But whereas mob fights are tough and a bit frustrating, boss fights elicit a different reaction altogether. There’s nothing quite like fighting El Gigante in virtual reality, staring up at his towering figure while shooting him with everything you have.

Between boss fights and enemies is Resident Evil 4’s beautiful, gloomy world. While I’ve seen this world many times over the years, there’s nothing quite like seeing it in VR. The constant overcast becomes physically oppressive, and you can almost smell the rot and blood in the village. But there are also moments of serene beauty and you can see it for the first time only in VR.

If you’ve skipped every re-release of Resident Evil 4 because of the incremental changes made for each version, Resident Evil 4 VR is the most substantially different take on the game I’ve seen in a long while and I’m eager to fully revisit this exhilarating nightmare when Resident Evil 4 VR is released this October. At least until the rumored Resident Evil 4 Remake is finally announced.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.