GRADIUS ORIGINS

I'll be straight with you: I came into this expecting a nostalgia cash-in and left with genuine respect for what M2 pulled off. Gradius Origins collects six arcade titles spanning the late 80s to the mid 90s, includes 18 regional ROM variants across all of them, and then drops a fully original game, Salamander III, into the package like it's nothing. That last part is the headline. The core six titles split across two gameplay philosophies. The Gradius trilogy, covering Gradius I, II, and III, runs on a Power Meter system where defeated enemies drop capsules that cycle through a loadout bar. You bank them, wait for the upgrade you want, then spend. Speed, missiles, lasers, the iconic multi-directional Options orbs, a shield. Gradius III even lets you build a custom weapon palette and introduces a shrink power-up that tightens your hitbox. The system rewards deliberate play and punishes panic spending, and that pressure loop still holds up. The three Salamander games, including the originals and the new entry, ditch the meter entirely. Capsules hand you a direct upgrade on contact, which makes everything faster, louder, and more chaotic. Two-player simultaneous co-op across the Salamander games amplifies that chaos in the best way. Salamander III is the reason to take this package seriously. M2 designed it as a "what if" title, built to feel like a 1998 arcade release that just never happened. It runs six stages with both horizontal and vertical scrolling sections, uses pure pixel art rather than the CG look of Salamander 2, and introduces a Burst attack that triggers an eight-way spread shot before temporarily stripping you down to basic weapons. The new Change Formation power-up shifts your Options into a snake pattern borrowed from Gradius III. The final boss, Zelos Force, gets a proper multi-phase fight this time around. Not everyone loves it: a vocal minority of critics point to a limited weapon set (missiles, ripple laser, standard laser) and feel the stage design plays it too safe with familiar references. Those are fair shots. But the execution is clean, the pixel work is sharp, and the fact that it exists at all in 2025 is the kind of thing that makes genre fans stop being cynical for a few hours. On the QoL side, M2 did the work. Save states and quickload are in. There is a rewind function across all the classic titles. Invincible Mode and a Training Mode that lets you set restart points and configure power-up loadouts mean you can actually study stages without losing an hour to checkpoint punishment. Competitive online leaderboards with replay uploads are present for score chasers. CRT filter customization goes deep, including scanline intensity and motion blur tuning. The one gap: Salamander III skips quicksave and rewind entirely, so you are running it the old way with infinite continues as your only safety net. That said, the instant respawn system in the Salamander games has always been more forgiving than the Gradius checkpoint loop. What is missing matters some. Gradius IV, Gradius Gaiden, and the Rebirth titles are absent, and the community has been vocal about it. The extras package, covering original instruction cards, sprite galleries, and soundtrack players, is solid but not exhaustive. These are real gaps for the completionist crowd. For anyone else, though, this is still a dense and well-preserved package. Steam user reception sits at 91 percent positive at launch, and the Metacritic aggregate skews favorable even accounting for the detractors on Salamander III.

Fred · Scout Team

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