4/5 ★ – neko_and_co's review of Metroid Dread.

After Dread’s announcement, I realized I had never played a 2D Metroid before. Hearing Dread was the conclusion to the Metroid arc, I decided to go back and play through all the previous Metroid games in preparation for Dread. I can safely say that was completely unnecessary, as the storytelling in Metroid is, let’s be honest, bad at worst and nonexistent at best. Still, it gave an interesting perspective on the series going into Dread. This is easily the best 2D Metroid. The movement is fluid, unlike the very stilted movement from prior entries (I was not able to get my hands on Samus Returns. Instead I opted for AM2R which proved to be my favorite going into Dread). In previous Metroid games, you start out slow and sluggish, but here Samus is nimble and acrobatic. She’s vaulting and jumping and flipping and sliding around. Everything feels more responsive and faster from the very start, immediately helping make Dread feel much more modern. Unfortunately, Dread continues the long-running tradition of clunky controls. This is not the easiest game to pick up and play. There is a lot of holding shoulder buttons while also moving sticks, while also mashing face buttons. It felt like I had to sort of rewire my brain as I was being forced to use the gamepad (I used a Pro controller, I cannot imagine trying to play Dread with Joy-Cons) in ways I am not used to. I eventually got decent with Dread’s controls, but I never fully stopped having issues with them. It would’ve been nice to have button re-mapping (something Super Metroid included on the SNES). Also, the shine spark ability is back in Dread, and it’s just as finicky as ever. I was going to 100% Dread until I saw what I had to do to get some of the upgrades, and then I quickly threw that plan out the window. Still, Dread’s new movement system (which isn’t even technically Dread’s invention, having been brought over from Mercury Steam’s previous Metroid game) is still a big improvement, despite some missteps. Beyond the new movement, there isn’t a whole lot Dread does that is new, though. Depending on your preferences this is perhaps a very good thing, or perhaps a disappointment. Either way, if you’ve played a 2D Metroid before, you’ve pretty much already played Dread, albeit a more clunky version. Mercury Steam did not try to reinvent the wheel here, instead opting to make another Metroid entry that closely follows the formula that was originally established in Metroid way back in the mid 80’s, for better or worse. But, while Metroid may have been largely on hiatus since the early 2000’s, the metroidvania sub genre wasn’t. We’ve seen incredible metroidvanias pop up in the indie space- my favorite being Hollow Knight. There’s been so much growth and innovation in this space that’s been occurring since Metroid fell out of Nintendo’s love, so Dread’s strict reliance on the established formula is painfully glaring. Dread’s map is still heavily grid-based and in general feels very video game-y. It doesn’t at all feel like a living space. Going back to Hollow Knight- over the course of that game I grew a real understanding of the kingdom of Hollownest and how each zone in that world fit into the greater whole. Further, Hollownest’s zones and individual rooms were so memorable that I can still remember much of its world by memory. Its map function was comparatively simple to Dread’s, which is rife with icons and markings denoting all the little quirks of Dread’s world (which makes for the best map function in the Metroid series); yet Hollow Knight’s spaces were memorable enough that it didn’t need such detailings in its map function. In Dread, the rooms all feel very similar and throughout my time playing Dread I was constantly referring to the map. I never developed an understanding in my head of how it’s spaces connected because it all blended together. In Hollow Knight, I enjoyed moving through its world for the sake of exploration; to learn more about its world. In Dread, I moved through its spaces going from icon to icon in the pursuit of gaining greater power without paying any real attention to the context of the spaces I was moving in. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but I certainly prefer Hollow Knight’s added meaning to the exploration that is central to a metroidvania. To Dread’s credit, its bosses are dramatically improved over previous 2D Metroids. In prior entries, I don’t think it is a wild assertion that the bosses were pretty bad. They often boiled down to shooting the boss with a barrage of rockets, with the difficulty of the boss determining how small the hitbox is. Here, Dread’s bosses are the best in the series. Gone are the strategies of spray-and-pray tactics. Instead, you have to pay close attention to learning the boss’ patterns and then anticipating their moves. Yes, boss fights here do essentially boil down to pattern recognition, but it’s still fun enough and certainly rewarding. I’ve absolutely found much better boss fights in other games, but these fights are certainly not bad, and a huge step forward for the series. A quick word on Dread’s difficulty- I’ve seen a lot of discussion around Dread being a very difficult game. I’ve seen some people mention this as being one of the most difficult games they’ve ever played. The last boss seems to be cited as an especially difficult spot. Of course, difficulty is very subjective, but I would not at all describe this as a difficult game. I do not think of myself as an especially skilled gamer, maybe of above average skill at best, but Dread is not really all that difficult. Challenging? Sure. Difficult? Meh. Granted, I’m a huge soulsborne fan, so take that as you will, but I never really struggled in Dread- either with boss fights or finding where to go. Perhaps having played through all the previous 2D Metroids before Dread prepared me better than others going into Dread blind. All in all, Dread is a very solid 2D Metroid; the best 2D Metroid, even. I find it a bit disappointing it didn’t seem to learn from the other fantastic metroidvania entries that have popped up in the years during Metroid’s absence. In 2021, Metroid Dread feels rather stale and very old-school. For some, that’ll be exactly what they are looking for. For others, they’ll be left wishing Dread tried to push the series further. Either way, Dread caps the Metroid arc off with a bang- I just hope if Nintendo decides to make another one of these, it looks outside of its own games library for inspiration.