I finished Metroid Dread a couple days back, my final verdict is that the game is pretty good, but Not My Metroid.
I really like the movement and fluidity of this game, it feels super nice to play.. especially once you’re familiar with the controls, you can really glide through the world in a satisfying way. The graphics are not amazing but, crucially, they are 60fps which makes a huge difference and the visual design is pretty nice. The background detail is really impressive in a lot of places (although I have to make an effort to notice it - I am pretty much just attuned to take in relevant foreground visual information). I mostly enjoyed the bosses as well, I managed to “solve” most of them in a couple attempts. I think I would have preferred if the most of boss fights were a little faster, having a little bit less health and perhaps doing more damage to compensate. Also the repeated bosses got a bit irksome toward the end.
The EMMI were a big disappointment for me. They are cool conceptually, they look pretty weird, move in a really creepy way and their sound design is awesome. I just think they are let down by the game mechanics. If you get caught by an EMMI, you die instantly and respawn outside. This is so incredibly low stakes that there is absolutely no fear of getting caught. I think they gave the EMMI insta-kill to make them super scary and deadly, but they can kill you so easily that it will definitely happen quite often, so they added the respawn points in to stop people getting frustrated. The problem is this completely undermines the initial premise of them being really scary and dangerous. I actually got to a point where I would just try to sprint through the area and not worry about running or hiding at all. If I got caught I would attempt a parry and then respawn and try again. Waiting around being invisible takes longer than just respawning, and at least once you respawn you’re actually doing something. The sense of “dread” is something I really love about my favourite Metroid games,. Descending into a new area, not knowing whether I will be able to handle whatever enemies I come up against, trying to remember when I last saved, deciding whether to gamble and push on or make a trip to the nearest save point. Dread has none of this at all, death has barely any consequence most of the time and happens extremely often. I think if the EMMI were just unkillable and hit you really hard (or maybe like a three strikes and you’re dead system), but if you died you had to go back to a save point, it would have been a much more engaging experience for me. The only dread I felt entering into an EMMI zone was akin to seeing the little “Ad in 5…” box pop up on a YT video. “Great, gotta sit through another one of these…”. The later EMMI’s new abilities just make them even more annoying, and the fact that the way you kill them is basically identical for all seven is totally lame.
I still don’t like the parry mechanic. It’s a step up from Samus Returns in that at least this time you can use it from pretty much any position, but they still lean on it way too heavily. A lot of the enemies are just so annoying to fight unless you parry them, and in some of the boss battles you are just going through the motions, waiting for a QTE like prompt to play out the same exact animation you already watched 3 times. These set pieces get really old for me and just don’t feel like a Metroid game. It’s one of my favourite things about SM that you are in control for pretty much the whole game. Dread is constantly broken up by these set pieces, not to mention the 30fps cutscenes.
Watching the FPS suddenly cut in half is a really unpleasant experience for me. I never don’t notice it, so I am never really immersed in them at all. I really don’t think the cutscenes add much at all. The story is pretty much trash as far as I’m concerned, or at least the way it is delivered. Again, my favourite Metroid games tell their story through their world. Little tidbits dotted around, instead of exposition dumps dotted throughout the game. One in particular is so clumsy it feels like a child wrote it.
While I like the general feeling of the Metroid Dread world, the different areas and the general stage design. I can’t stand the way you are constantly funneled down a linear path. On several occasions in the game I spotted an obvious hidden powerup or a path I wanted to check out, but decided on a different one first which then immediately closed in behind me. That is incredibly frustrating for me, and the game quickly trained me to abandon hunting secrets altogether (I ended my playthrough on about 50%, then went and mopped up all the secrets at the end). Honestly I’m not sure this game really even qualifies as a Metroidvania, there is one very obvious path through the game, each ability unlocks a very obvious next step that you are funneled toward. I know there are a lot of sequence breaks people have discovered, but the default experience offers essentially nothing in the way of exploration, problem solving, learning your way around, etc. The world itself also doesn’t feel particularly cohesive, every area is connected to all the others by elevators and teleporters (and loading screens), so they are all totally isolated from each other and have no real geographic relation. I know lots of the games have occasional elevators, but it feels like Dread really doubled down on it. I suspect it was a technical limitation.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. Despite my complaints.. I did enjoy playing this game a fair bit. It just wasn’t quite what I had hoped it would be!