3/5 ★ – ceebels's review of Metroid Dread.

You're probably going to like this. I liked it, I just don't know if it's good. I'll tell you what is definitely good about it. Moving Samus around is great. She takes off, she turns, she twists she jumps she slides — I love it. This is the perfect Samus for running from the temporarily unstoppable E.M.M.I. robots that stalk you through clearly delineated sections of each sector, letting you double back on yourself, jump up and around and over and make a gap between the robot and the door for you to dash and squeeze through. So that's great. Buuuuuuuuut. The world's an issue. It looks...nice. It looks very nice and it is definitely shiny, but it feels dead. And y'know, pretty much every Metroid world is dead. They are not very well populated places and we're usually showing up late to them. But this feels more specifically lifeless, and I felt more like I was moving SAMUS THE BALLET TANK across a painting that had very little to do with what I was supposed to be focused on. Maybe that sounds like it could be cool. Here it wasn't cool. Each sector has an "E.M.M.I. Zone", where you have to worry about the robots until you can get rid of them. These are usually quite open spaces, full of rooms with somewhat symmetrical layouts that let you scramble up one side of a block and drop back down to the other to shake off a tail from a pursuing E.M.M.I. For this purpose, they're great. But you'll spend a lot more time in these areas once the E.M.M.I. is gone, and as a space for exploration, as a space to traverse without being chased, they're just not nearly as interesting. And for some reason, all of the E.M.M.I. zones look the same. The sectors otherwise all have basic identities; forest world, fire world, kind-of-underwater area, and they mix things up with some temples and city-type sectors that evoke Metroid Prime. But the E.M.M.I. zones within each sector all have the same clean robot future hospital look, and they make up a significant area of each sector too. This is really my problem with Dread — you're getting the best Samus ever, but maybe the worst map / world in a Metroid game, and that is uh, well that is a big part of a Metroid game. The map is dense. Moving away mostly from Super Metroid's long vertical shafts, rooms are more horizontal, have multiple exits and fold up and down and around over each other. At its best they give you any number of different routes across a sector depending on how you like to travel, but more often it's just a bit of a mess. The map screen works, but it's essential for navigation, and man maybe just a little too essential. It feels difficult to get a handle on landmarks and geography naturally, especially with the near-identical E.M.M.I. zones sitting in the middle of each sector. There are teleports and other shortcuts to bop around the sectors too, but they don't feel like they're placed optimally to help you explore. Rather, they're placed to expedite your backtracking at particular points in the game. Need to go back to the opening section to check a door with a new item? Well, fortuitously, here's a warp back there right beside that item, and one that will be a complete bitch to get to next time you want to warp back from this sector. Which gets to another point — this Metroid feels really linear. There are items to get, missile expansions and energy tanks and what have you but for a lot of the game they really seem to want to keep you on a path moving forward, often (but not always) blocking your ability to backtrack and explore areas you've been through already. It feels weirdly sloppy that I could get a whole bunch of power bomb upgrades before I got the ability to use power bombs without, to my knowledge, doing any wild sequence breaks; but it also wouldn't let me go and have fun with the power bombs until I'd unlocked them "the right way". What is it gonna be?! Samus sometimes shoots things without looking at them, which I've heard said means she has a personality now, and there is the faintest outline of a plot that feels new for a series of games that usually confines itself almost entirely to "environmental storytelling", but I can't say I really cared about it past the novelty of it being (kinda) there. There's a real vital, beating heart at the center of Metroid Dread, and the good stuff, the movement, the E.M.M.I.s, the bosses; they carry you through it. But the world itself, especially when you just think about Super Metroid or Metroid Prime, it just doesn't stack up. Anyway. More like Midtroid lol