For me, the atmosphere is wonderful, with just the right mix of tension & release. Samus feels like such a badass once you start collecting upgrades (& after watching a couple of those boss kill cutscenes, which are just ‘chef’s kiss’) but there is that constant sense of being alone in a sprawling alien world full of danger.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the old fashioned design of the bosses, so far. They’ve felt like a decent challenge. Each one took me a couple of attempts to figure out & execute my strategy. A lot of fun, so far.
Never once felt like I was far from a hard save point & the checkpoint system is excellent, auto-saving outside of every boss & EMMI door. No complaints there either from me.
But I’m not arguing or trying to say you are wrong. I just love this game. I honestly think this is the return of the queen Samus has taken her crown back & shown all of the modern pretenders for what they are, lesser imitators. Yeah I said that & I mean it
I will say that I’ve seen a couple of people complaining about bad controls though. In case you didn’t know, you guys can remap your buttons in the Switch’s main settings & save different presets for different games. Just a tip.
I don’t think this game is amazing by any means but its arguably Mercurys best game to date or Probably on par or slightly better than LoS which I felt was one of the most underrated games of the 360 era. But this studio isn’t a AAA one by any means.
I’m probably 70% through. Its a great game but I’d give it an 8/10. nothing more nothing less. I’d put it above Fusion actually but below Super and Zero Mission as far as 2D games go. Prime is still my fav metroid game and one of my fav games period.
The controls are fine but Not having customisable controls is a shame. Game definitely starts on the slow and linear side. But gets much better. One thing that is a HUGE letdown is the OST. It’s terrible by metroid standards. Prime and super have all time great soundtracks. It’s surprising because lords of shadow had a great ost.
People will fight you over the price point but I 100% agree. I’m a huge metroid fan but not in a million years would a MS or Sony put out a game like this at full price. MS put out Ori Will of the Wisps at 30 bucks. A game with probably a higher budget and more tighter content overall. But that’s how things are. When you look at Nintendo as a whole this gen…they’re getting away with absolutely ridiculous price points. Dread at least is a new game. Skyward Sword at 60 bucks is a straight up scalping lol.
Its a Metroid game at the end of the day and Nintendo have given absolute fuck all about this franchise for a while. we need this game to succeed. You can forgive 60 bucks for a metroid game at all.
ngl I wish Ori WotW got the kind of recognition that Dread is getting. It took this game for gamers to realize 2D AAA (although Dread looks more AA than Ori while costing more) games should be celebrated and demanded more, yet completely disregarded the franchise that’d been bastion of the metroidvania genre for the past five to six years. I’ve heard so much of “it’s a sidescroller, it doesn’t count, shouldn’t get GOTY” yet Dread is treated with more prestige for essentially being the same kind of game and is of course gonna sweep the TGAs. I get that Metroid is the source of the subgenre, but games can often evolve and build over their predecessors. Anyway, Ori 2 was snubbed mad hard in art direction, music and just overall recognition, but that doesn’t mean Dread shouldn’t be successful. Hope this game’s success can revitalize the franchise and the genre moving forward.
I get what you’re saying and last year everyone here (including me of course) said the same thing about Ori 2 and rightfully so, there is no doubt that Ori 2 deserved much much more but it’s a mistake to try to belittle a great game like Metroid Dread to make a point (I’ve also done it too more than a few times) about the incompetence of the gaming press and to an extent gaming audience to appreciate a masterpiece like Ori 2. It’s pretty clear that the game being on Xbox played a big role in not getting the recognition that it deserved but that is saying more about the gaming press and the gaming audience than it says about Ori 2, 2D games and the genre as a whole. Hell the same thing and probably worse happened with Tropical Freeze when it released and now the game is being praised left and right as one of the best 2D platformers of all time so it’s not like Nintendo is immune to such harsh and completely unfair criticism/reception.
We all know very well that if Ori 2 was a Sony exclusive (with their hype machine behind it which can overhype even the most insignificant things btw) a lot of people would sing a completely different song but it is what it is and MS has to fight with double the effort to get back the mindshare they lost with Xbox One.
Also something else that I’d like to point out (not related to your post Ruthwik) is that can we enjoy great games and stop trying to find the winner every time a quality game comes out? this thing is getting tiring and it only results in some dumb hot takes. Is Ori 2 the best metroidvania? or Hollow Knight? or maybe it is Metroid Dread? who the fuck cares? anyone who is a fan of the genre should be more than happy to play all the great games that released in the past 6 years or so. With such high quality games it’s up to everyone’s personal preference anyway so let’s just play the games and have fun for a change.
tbh I didn’t mean to belittle Dread at all, only said that it’s unfair that it takes a big brand like Nintendo and the Metroid franchise itself for the zeitgeist to even recognize the genre of 2D sidescrollers as something equally worthy of praise and accolades and saying “there should be more AAA 2D games” while MS already had taken interest in such a venture years ago, but just jettisoned away because it isn’t the kind of game you can use in list wars. Hope everyone who played Dread and wants more AAA sidescrollers actually go and support the already released AAA 2D game franchise, heck they could play it on Switch itself if they wanted. It got higher metacritic on Switch than every other switch game last year lol, imagine MS releasing a higher rated Switch game than any other publisher including Nintendo last year and we still saw the same old narratives in full force.
I was only commenting on that partial blindness from gamers, nothing on the quality of Dread itself, cuz for one I haven’t played the game myself to make judgements on it.
Haha yeah, sucks that that game came during the WiiU era where Nintendo as a whole was struggling in the public eye due the console’s continued failure, the current Nintendo paradigm is completely different, as such, the rhetoric will have shifted, in some ways rightfully and in others, not so much, but that’s a whole another conversation.
100%
On a side note, Ubisoft needs to fucking bring back Child of Light and Rayman, but I’m sure that’s never happening again.
Great Game, almost finished but do have a few niggles that i feel need to be addressed in future entries.
Boss fights are a bit obnoxious especially a few of the late game ones (with out spoiling too much the one with the “two opponents”). Even more so when you can’t dodge correctly or even predict attacks because of the arena.
Structure - Don’t know why but coming off Ori this game felt very scripted in it’s pathing, like in ori WIW i felt you could choose to tackle any of the main “zones”. In any order but in metroid it just felt like i was funneled through, only going back to old areas for story or random energy tanks or rockets.
( I know you can cheese an early boss by breaking the sequence with upgrades but that feels like a one off more than the general game structure).
This one of the most linear metroid games as far as natural progression goes. But I think my biggest issue with Dread in regards to your point is that yeah…exploration is very much gated off most of the time and when you get an upgrade…you sort of want to go back and explore areas that require those upgrades but that’s bogged down with areas you can’t progress with even more upgrades or they’re too far away to even bother so you sort of just get on with where you’re at. The EMMI sections also make exploration pointless until you’ve beaten it in that area and gotten the upgrades as well. And as you know most EMMI sections aren’t beaten the first time you enter it…you have to come come back sometimes much later on to clear that area. Thats pretty much how the progression goes most of the game.
I found that the whole “discoverability” aspect of this game less enjoyable than most of the other metroid games. I can’t remember a part of the game where I’ve gone off the main path and discovered interesting stuff. Its always a blocked path I can’t access or an item I can’t yet get. And even after clearing an EMMI section…a lot of the areas connecting to it can’t be accessed until you’ve found certain upgrades…which are on a completely new area. ITs only when you’ve got a decent amount of upgrades that its worth going back to fully explore and that sort of kills some of the exploration for me. Also navigation in the first half of the game make backtracking a bit of a chore. You have to either find a warp point or make your way through loads of sections to get back to certain areas of the planet.
It feels like a lot of negativity but in all honesty…its a very very good game. The actual gameplay is tight and really fun. But for me personally I rate the Metroid Series very highly, so when a game comes out its going to be put under a microscope. This is one series that IMO holds 2 legitimate “Greatest of all Time” Calibur games in Super Metroid and Prime. So the standards are extremely high. But Mercury have done well with this. Its much better than Samus Returns which I wasn’t a huge fan of. And Castlevania MoF was just terrible. So they’re evolving and learning.
What loses in open ended design it gains in pacing which is top notch all around with almost always having something new to play with or something new to see. It’s a different design decision and it helps the pacing a lot that I don’t have a problem with it. Do I want Mercury Steam to go back to the more open ended design in the next game? hell yeah but at the same time Dread is a blast so far (and actually much better than I was expecting) so I am OK with the linearity.
Pacing is fine but metroid is about atmosphere and exploration as well. Dread has some exploration but atmosphere is one of its weak points and part of that is the soundtrack as well as some of the level designs.
Finished Dread today. Great game overall but flawed. I’d probably rank it as the 3rd best 2D metroid. It has its weak points and strengths. I think a 2D metroid game can get away with being a bit more linear. But never did the game surprise me with some of its level design. It all felt kind of expected and familiar.
Now onto Prime 4. I hope that game is for Nintendo’s next console. I can’t see how the current switch hardware would be able to do that game justice. We’ll see.
I went from being underwhelmed when I started, to absolutely loving the majority of the game, and back to underwhelmed by the ending.
Final boss was just another chozo soldier? I get that he was the main antagonist, but come on. I was ready for a Mother Brain, Metroid Queen, Metroid Prime type monster boss thing. A shame to end the game on such a low point, really. And this isn’t the fault of the game or the developer, but the comments I’d read about the final boss being some huge endeavour to defeat had me imagining something much tougher, so that was a little disappointing too.
A bit shitty since a few dozen extra names on a credit scene doesn’t effect anything.
The Pandemic had a huge effect on development and of course they were gonna hire Contractors or freelance designers/coders to help finish their game. Doesn’t matter if they worked on it for half a year. They still helped.
As MVG mentioned, imagine working for a whole ass year on a 4 year project and not getting credited because it was less than 25% of the project duration. That’s appalling.
I hear this argument a lot but imo it falls apart cuz Nintendo’s market position & history allows them to charge full price for games that if indies actually charged would be suicide. Very easy to say “Hollow Knight should be 60” until its time for the market to actually pay that 60 for it.
For example, literally only Nintendo can sell you an upresd port of a two decade old game and charge full price for it and actually still dominate sales charts. Indies don’t have this privilege at all, not even close. Forget indies, most other AAA publishers don’t and can’t get away with it either.
Literally only Nintendo can operate in their own business model that’s not standard anywhere else in the industry.
I’m 100% confident majority of these people who say these indie games should cost 60 too would absolutely not pay that money for it and then instead lament why they should have gotten more success.
That’s already happening in the UK. All major first party Nintendo titles are £49.99 (~$68) but BOTW and Smash Bros saw a price hike to £59.99 (~$82). Did they do this in the US?
Samus has taken her crown back & shown all of the modern pretenders for what they are, lesser imitators. Yeah I said that & I mean it 
