Mars 2120 undeniably borrows heavily from the progenitor of the genre it aspires to emulate. Metroid hallmarks are here--along with a few interesting twists and setpieces--but are held back by some finicky issues and a rushed power creep.
38 years ago when Metroid released on the Famicom in August 1986, the revelation that Samus Aran is a woman was anything but novel. The assumption that obviously there must be a man behind that mask was based in at least a few decades’ worth of media featuring a dude as the action star.
Fast-forward almost 40 years and it’s a completely different landscape. Heck, many people I know opt to play as a female character when given the option. After all, Kassandra is canon in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, sorry Alexios.
Mars 2120 feels like the product of a group of developers who grew up around the same time I did–I was born a few months before Metroid‘s Japanese release. More so, it strikes me as a game designed as a kind of safe bet. Developer QUByte Interactive makes little effort to hide inspiration. And while imitation can often be the sincerest form of flattery, it is important to carve out a distinct path, ensuring you don’t get lost in the shuffle.
In 2024, action-platformers–and by that distinction, Metroidvanias–are one of the busiest genres. Throw players in a world of branching paths. Tie progression to acquired upgrades. Simple enough. The past few years have seen juggernauts like Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Metroid Dread, Guacamelee, and countless others. Mars 2120 definitely has these aspirations, yet has a tendency to stumble before truly excelling towards something remarkable.
Taking on the role of space soldier Anna Charlotte, players are sent to a human colony on Mars after receiving a distress call. In this world, humans have the technology capable of establishing colonies on other planets as a balm to dwindling resources on Earth. Mars 2120 begins as a kind of blank slate, with almost no establishing narrative being revealed to the player. Anna is a silent protagonist, crashing onto Mars and it is up to the player to glean narrative bits through audio logs and environmental details.
Having a nebulous story isn’t a crime but Mars 2120 could have pushed itself more to establish its universe better. Soon after players escape the avalanche of Martian rock threatening to crush them, they enter a colony where everything has gone to hell. Weird creatures and violent soldiers attack Anna without pause. The first area encountered in the colony is a laboratory, with background details showing alien cocoons and broken containment chambers. Pretty safe to say something went wrong, right?
I appreciate the bevy of audio logs with spoken dialog that play automatically without having to go into a menu. While they don’t feature the best voice acting around, it helps supplement the mood of the colony’s collapse and the carelessness of humanity. But Mars 2120‘s world, lore, and structure are not vastly different from various other similar stories across novels, films, and games. The same skeleton of a story can be seen in DOOM, where mankind dabbled where they shouldn’t have. Mars can be an engaging setting but I feel as if it’s been played out. Perhaps QUByte Interactive has aspirations towards creating other games in this world on the other established colonies but I would have preferred to see those first.
While Mars itself is a relatively drab location–reddish-brown rock and all–the colony itself is the primary location. Players will encounter formerly sterile white labs, icy caverns, overgrown forested areas, and even a hearty batch of lava. Being science fiction, it’s easy enough to establish these classic gaming biomes in a singular location and I’m willing to suspend disbelief here.
Anna, much like Ms. Aran, fights off a terrarium of varying threats with melee moves and a ranged weapon. Strangely, Anna’s gun is often the worst method of dispatching enemies. Relatively quickly, players will find that Anna’s basic gun takes several shots to kill the first few enemies encountered while a couple punches and kicks takes them down in a second or two.
Journeying through the colony, players unlock new abilities based on the elements of electricity, fire, and ice. Along with these powers, the gun is upgraded. With electricity, the gun shoots faster; with fire, it turns into a flamethrower; with ice, it acts like a shotgun. Though the gun has infinite ammo, clips are finite and take a few beats to recharge. But even with this upgraded firepower, only the shotgun really felt like the biggest leap.
This becomes an issue with combat overall. As players seek out power and earn it, enemies do die faster but the game also introduces enemy immunity towards specific elements and the ability to inflict status effects on Anna. Players may find themselves rotating between guns to kill elemental switching enemies or to switch between types. While there are instances where these tactics present a reasonable challenge over the course of Mars 2120, fighting can sometimes feel off. For one thing, flying enemies are the worst. Many small, bug-like creatures will hover around and dash at Anna, knocking her back. Aiming doesn’t feel particularly great and the gun’s basic and electric projectiles are thin and prone to inaccuracy on fast-moving targets.
But there’s a distinct lack of feedback in Mars 2120 that makes combat a bit hollow. Enemies often stand in place while Anna peppers them with gunfire. Animations seem lacking, making registering hits not as satisfying as they should be. And I really hated that knockback. A couple times I got stun-locked not only by enemies but by the environment. Once I watched Anna bounce between two lasers because there were no invincibility frames or recovery animation. Plus it’s weird she can simply be stunned mid-air and not fall to the ground, instead hovering statically for a few seconds.
A number of bosses do offer engaging moments in the game. It’s obvious that a lot of care and focus was put into creating a handful of major setpieces that, for the scope of Mars 2120, are relatively impressive. Towering, screen-filling behemoths don’t always present a challenge but are visually engaging enough that I felt some tension and adrenaline when tackling them. But some of these bosses truly feel like massive damage sponges with a handful of patterns that are easily avoided. It’s almost like QUByte was afraid to make anything too hard for the player, even with a basic amount of upgrades.
Moving through the colony is mostly satisfying. Smartly, a double jump is granted to Anna as part of her basic movement set. This allows Mars 2120 to feel a lot bigger out of the gate. A wall jump is the second movement ability discovered but it is extremely spotty. Specific surfaces can be jumped off of but timing those jumps doesn’t feel right and I often found myself falling because I tilted the direction stick or tapped jump in a way the game deemed wrong.
The sense of progression through the colony is nice, especially when earning new skills. Anna can zip through electric lines, blow up fire barrels, phase through walls, or crush ice barriers with a frozen spear. They are visually cool but nothing astoundingly unique. QUByte chose a dual upgrade path for Mars 2120 that doesn’t feel as natural or cohesive as it does in other games in the genre. Essential powers are earned after key boss fights or along a kind of golden path. But other upgrades like more health, better weapon capabilities, cooldowns, etc. must be found in the world and then unlocked at a save station using experience from killing enemies. While I understand the system, it simply doesn’t feel natural. Metroidvanias often incorporate upgrades organically, having them fuse with the character or be learned intrinsically. In Mars 2120, Anna often taps at a screen on her arm after moving onto a chamber or platform and her suit is upgraded. The bosses themselves don’t drop a power up, they just lead to a static one.
What really hinders Mars 2120 for me is a distinct lack of polish. The game is colorful and I enjoyed how the camera often shifted in the environment. Fights and exploration are brisk and the game can be 100% cleared in around 10 hours. But when browsing the bland menus and seeing tiny words pop up saying “Rage” or “Immune” over an enemy, it loses some magic. One of the first electric abilities players acquire allows them to levitate certain objects–purple boxes to be more precise. But the fact that the game’s tooltips call them “purple boxes” strips away any kind of charm. In the world of Mars 2120, what are these “purple boxes” and why are they that color?
I usually don’t tend to nitpick like that or raise the specter of ludonarrative dissonance but in Mars 2120, I couldn’t help but see some of these issues as oversights. Several small annoyances occurred over the course of the game that didn’t really break immersion for me, they just kept the game at a kind of unremarkable level. Things like the game literally freezing for a few seconds before the save screen comes up or other bugs are definitely going to be addressed in upcoming patches. But for an experience that was in Early Access for so long, a bit more attention to detail should have really made Mars 2120 shine. Hopefully in the coming days and weeks those improvements will make the experience even more satisfactory.
Mars 2120 has the core of an entertaining, satisfying Metroidvania. Players obsessed with the genre will be able to encounter a number of exciting fights and setpieces that test all their upgrades and exploration chops. And while it doesn’t mind borrowing heavily from genre’s progenitor, a bit more polish is needed before it can come close to capturing those highs.
