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« on: October 10, 2021, 11:15:57 PM »
I finish the game earlier today and it was excellent. I really liked Samus Returns but it was held back by trying to be somewhat faithful to the original game. The new content that was added was easily the best part of that game so I'm not surprised that when Mercury Steam was allowed to make an entirely new game that didn't have held back by an early 90's Gameboy game that really made something special.
I've been playing a lot of indie Metroidvania's on Switch the last few years and while some of those have been great, this game reminds me why I still love actual Metroid game the best. The amount of attention that goes into each area, making sure every section is unique and important places that you need to return to are memorable is unmatched. Now it's too early to say if Dread is my favorite since I still need to get 100% items, beat Hard Mode and do speed runs, but it's easily in the top tier for me.
The bosses though are easily the best in the series. This was the part of Samus Returns that made me most excited to see what Mercury Steam could do with a new game since the final set of bosses in that game were already a step above anything seen in previous 2D Metroid games. The only negative was they were all condensed to the end of the game, and the first half was filled with the basic Metroid fights with only one other unique boss during that time. In Dread, the quality of the bosses from the last half of Samus Returns show up at the start of the game and are nicely paced throughout the rest of the game. This will make Dread a lot more fun to replay, unlike Samus Returns that kind of slogged in the middle before it reaches its excellent finale. Dread on the other hand was excellent the whole way through.
Now on the issue of the E.M.M.I. encounters, I liked them but was kind of surprised that they didn't make up as much of the game as I thought they would. I was expecting them to patrol more of the different zones but you actually only deal with them during several smaller sections that you bypass to get to another part of the zone before eventually finding the ability that will let you find what can defeat them. So every time I died, it's not like I lost a ton of progress since they restart you outside the room to their zone and it doesn't take that long to get past each section. So I found them to add some nice variety to the gameplay as you explore each zone but nothing too overwhelming.
Now the biggest hot topic of this game is the difficulty, which I personally loved but can see why it's too much for some. It's kind of funny to think how back in 2004, Zero Mission included an Easy mode because Nintendo was trying to make the series more accessible to the masses. Now Samus Returns from 4 years ago didn't included an Easy mode so Nintendo was already positioning Metroid as a more hardcore franchise again, but even Samus Returns gave players the Scan Pulse very early on in the game so they were less likely to get lost, plus some of the Aeon abilities in that game like the power armor and rapid fire made things much easier then Dread.
I wouldn't be surprised if because so many of the popular Metroid style games this last decade have been these challenging indie takes on the formula, Nintendo told Mercury Steam to really embrace the difficulty because that's where much of the audience for this style of game is. Of course I don't fault anyone for getting upset since Super Metroid and Zero Mission, which are usually the 2 most popular 2D Metroid games are not that difficult, so to jump up the challange by such a degree is going to be a shock that I can see some being unable to complete.
Of course for me personally, as someone who did the low percentage Hard Mode run on Zero Mission back in early 2018 so I could get all the ending images of that game, having a Metroid made for a hardcore fan like me was like a dream come true. If they make the next game more around the difficulty of Super and Zero Mission to make it more appealing to those turned of by Dread, I won't mind because at least I now have something like Dread that can fill my desire for a hardcore Metroid experience.
Well that's my current lovefest for the game. Like I said earlier I need to get 100% items, and then do Hard Mode and do some speed runs so I'll be busy with this game the next week or two so maybe my opinion might change on a few things but at the moment it was an awesome experience from beginning to end. Of course if I had to pick something I didn't like it would be the music. Sadly, none of the new tracks are memorable and the whole thing was very forgettable. Apparently the 2 composers for the game just started at Nintendo so this was their first project. Well everyone has to start somewhere so hopefully they'll learn from this experience and their later projects will have better scores.
Oh and the lasers in this game kind of suck. It takes so many hits just to kill some of the more basic enemies. Of course it didn't bother me as much since missiles kill them much faster and the game hands them out like candy so I never even came close to running out. But it just feels kind of weird to make the blaster so underpowered to the point were it's almost pointless to use. I guess the developers wanted to give players a greater urgency to want to find missile upgrades so I guess it works.
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