A Relatively Timely Review of Metroid Dread

“It’s been 87 years…”

If you’re a regular reader of this blog and/or a family member or friend, I want to say: hello, and welcome to the shit show that is video game criticism, I hope you’ll stick around until the end. If you’re someone who’s played the game or is thinking about buying the game and, incredibly, stumbled upon my blog through the magic of search engine optimization and good timing, I want to say: hello, and welcome to the shit show that is my video game criticism. It’s nice to have you here, riding along on this fruitless quest to critique and improve a medium that is, ultimately, still an entertainment form most people won’t take seriously, and a business world that is, ultimately, still mired in the need to make money and appeal to increasingly larger audiences at the cost of the goodwill of both fans and game developers! Let’s get started.

*MINOR SPOILERS FOR METROID DREAD. Nothing huge or anything but, hey, I warned you.*

First, some backstory. A lot of these words are going to make zero sense to anyone who doesn’t regularly play (or watch) video games, so let me get you up to speed. And if you’re already up to speed, feel free to skip around a bit. You probably know the drill already. The Metroid franchise is a science-fiction video game series about a spacefaring bounty hunter, Samus Aran, who hunts space ships, space pirates, and space monsters all across the galaxy. Think Star Wars, but if Star Wars focused entirely on Han Solo trying to break into a Jedi Temple to blast some nasty beasty. Actually, that’s a terrible analogy. Just think Alien, but Ripley has a laser cannon attached to her arm. And instead of the classic phallic-shaped Xenomorph, the main monster is something called a Metroid, a little floaty blog-thing that sucks out the energy of anything it touches. Yes, this is still by the people who make Mario. The main series is split into two primary avenues of game; first is 2D, which has your classic running-left-and-jumping kind of gameplay with the addition of the ability of move right (incredible, I know) and, again, a laser cannon. Later came the 3D Metroid series, but that’s not really important at all right now so we’re gonna ignore it for the sake of simplicity.

So, even if you’re not plugged into the video gaming world, or are only peripherally attached to it (such as, in the case of my family members, you’ve talked to me for more than a couple of hours), you may have still heard the name Metroid Dread popping up. And it’s for a good reason; Metroid Dread is kind of a big deal. Just watch this live reaction of the game’s reveal for proof. It’s a big deal mainly because there hasn’t been a proper “new” 2D Metroid game in 19 years. 19 years! I work daily with people who have been on this earth for significantly less time than the time between the last new Metroid game and Metroid Dread. That’s not to say there haven’t been new games, though; the 3D games all came into being in that gap, and there’s been a handful of remakes of older 2D games in there, too, but there hasn’t been a really new 2D metroid game in that whole time. I, along with most everyone else who follows this stuff, had figured Nintendo had given up on that part of the franchise. But, thank Zebes, they had not. And it’s a good thing they hadn’t, too; Metroid Dread is a superb game that I recommend everyone* play. Ok, end of review, roll credits.

That’s not really the end, of course. Because while in that 19 years, Nintendo hasn’t put out a proper 2D Metroid, tons and tons of other game developers have been filling that Metroid-shaped hole. This takes the form of an entire genre of games, dubbed “Metroidvanias,” with the “vania” coming from Castlevania. Don’t worry about that, it doesn’t actually matter. A Metroidvania is, for my purposes, a game that is built upon exploration of unique areas, the slow accumulation of powerups and abilities that unlock news challenges, and giant, grid-based maps. Especially in the last decade, there have been a ton of amazing games in that genre that are trying to live up to something that some people in the community are really missing. And many of those Metroidvanias are very, very good; as good as, if not better than, a solid chunk of the actual Metroid games. And in the meantime, while these incredible games have been building up over the years, Nintendo has sat back and watched. Until now.

I think this context is important because, if you want my honest opinion of the game, you’ve got to take in the whole picture. As amazing as it is, Metroid Dread does not exist in a vacuum. And, weirdly enough, neither do I. I have only ever played two other actual Metroid games in my entire life, but I have played countless other Metroidvanias, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s a good game and what’s not. And I do have some actual Metroid experience for comparison, too; I’ve played through most of Super Metroid, the 1994 SNES game considered to be the absolute gold standard, and I’ve beaten Metroid Samus Returns, which is a 2017 remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, a 1991 game for the Game Boy. Like, the old-school pea green Game Boy, not even the one in color. Looking back now, it seems a bit funny that I was as excited for Metroid Dread as I was, considering how little of the series I’ve actually played, but mostly that excitement came from one simple fact; Super Metroid fucking rules. That game is amazing. I haven’t even beaten the damn thing and I love it. So, this the mindset that I went into Metroid Dread with. All these other great games, both Metroid and not, and it’s 19 years later. This has got to be good.

But enough of the appetizer; let’s get to the main dish. Because Metroid Dread IS good! Great, even! The movement is the best it’s ever been in the series (except maybe Metroid Prime, I wouldn’t know since I haven’t played it), and Samus is more fluid than ever. Gone of the days are jumping and shooting in only 8 directions; like Samus Returns from 2017, Dread has full 360-degree shooting, more realistic physical jumps, crouch-slides, parkour, wall jumps, ceiling-hangs, bomb jumps, and more. Your options for traversal feel endless and feel good. Everything about moving Samus feels right. Except for crouching into a ball, but that’s only a small trifle. And that’s a huge thing, because movement and exploration are the main gameplay loop here; you’re exploring and filling in a huge map, constantly moving between rooms, fighting enemies on the fly, finding treasure, and willfully backtracking to places you’ve already been. The basic framework of the game is rock-solid.

And even though I’ve done it a hundred times before, that simple loop doesn’t really go bad. Exploration, at least for me, is the single most compelling part of any game. If it doesn’t feel good to explore, then I don’t care about it. Not only is this exploration held up by the movement, but the whole game world hinges on this; everywhere is a new path for you to discover, a new room to check, a new powerup to find. Or, at least it feels that way in the beginning; more on that later. And it’s gorgeous; Dread is probably one of the best-looking, if not the best-looking, game I’ve played on the Nintendo Switch. Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild were great, but Dread graphically and technically blows them out of the water. Too bad, then that everything feels kind of same-y after a while.

Ok. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll stick to the good stuff for now, but I’ll wrap it up real soon because everyone’s already said everything good about it. The boss battles are great; the really big, cinematic ones (of which there are five, by my count) are a ton of fun to play and, in some ways, another highlight for me. I came for the exploration, and stayed for the boss fights. Dashing around some horrible monstrosity while blasting missiles at it feels so good, and even after I’d died to a boss five, ten, a dozen times, going back to fight it still felt so good, probably in part of the fact that there is so little room for error in these boss battles that the game forces you to master them. The final two major bosses I particularly enjoyed. Mastery over a game feels good. Therefore, these bosses feel good. It’s great fun.

And that’s another thing; the difficulty of the game. It’s hard. Not too hard, not unfair hard, but hard enough to be a real challenge, even as someone who plays a lot of video games. The game is uncompromising of this, though, and it is why I threw an asterisk way up there when I said everyone should play this game. I think everyone who has the time to learn the game should play it. It’s not long, but if you’re new or bad at games, there is a sharp learning curve to climb. Difficulty is absolutely going to be a barrier to entry here for many, so while I loved the difficulty on display, I always think more accessibility options are the right move, and an easy mode or a suite of features to adjust difficulty to the player could go a long way. But that’s an entire other discussion, much bigger than I have time for.

I think the EMMI enemies, the big, smooth, unsettling robots that have been plastered all over the internet as the game’s primary new addition, are emblematic of this difficulty, too; indestructible, hyper-aware machines that, in certain parts of the game called EMMI zones, will relentlessly pursue you and put you on the defensive. They can be killed, if you can get to their hidden brains, but you’ve got a trek ahead of you to get there. And in the meantime, there’s some genuine tension or, dare I say it, dread in entering these EMMI zones. I found myself equally laughing out loud when I’d get caught because I’d back Samus into a corner and thought I could hide, and distressedly yelling at Samus to run faster whenever one of the things would spot me. I wouldn’t say I was ever afraid during any part of the game, but there’s something to really be said for those damn robots.

Which makes it frustrating that, for one, you don’t actually spend that much time with them, and two, the final bot gets completely sidelined by a replacement boss right at the very end! Alright, here’s the part where I talk about the negative things I have with the game, the “everyone should play this, but…” part. I still love this game. I still recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the series and has the time for it. But it is not, as much as this is disappointing to admit, the best Metroidvania in the last decade. All that time, all those years waiting, and we get a game that is, by my estimations, only 80% of what a perfect 2D Metroid game could be. Let’s run down the list.

First, the EMMIs. They are not as big a part of the game as the marketing would make it seem. There’s one robot for every game zone, but you criss-cross in and out of their areas so much that, at any given time, you’re only really in their line of sight for a few minutes. The moments when I was in an EMMI zone for longer than a few rooms, or just after I killed their hidden brain and then had to tearfully stand still and charge up power as they kept getting closer and closer so I could eventually shoot a big fucking laser at their heads, were by far the best parts of that entire setup. Everyone likes to talk about the games of cat-and-mouse between Samus and the EMMI, but for the most part, every interaction with them felt a little choreographed; I’d enter a door and, oh no, an EMMI suddenly appears from around a corner! Who could have suspected? It didn’t feel like the EMMI were individually-intelligent enemies like, say, the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation. It felt more like they were a roadblock that happens to appear from time to time. Even though overcoming that roadblock is fun (especially those tense moments when you’re powering up your laser and you can do nothing but hope to Zebes you’re far enough way), it never felt as organic as I had hoped it would. There is drastically missed potential in the implementation of the EMMI. I love them, I think they’re a great part of the game, but they could have been, no, should have been much better.

And that kind of dovetails nicely into another complaint I have about the game; besides the EMMI, it all kind of feels like well-trodden ground. Yes, it’s an incredible return-to-form for a long-absent franchise, but you’d think they could have innovated just a little bit more. In a world where quality Metroidvanias are now a dime a dozen, in my frank opinion, Dread does little to stand out besides the fact that it’s a Nintendo game, so it’s polished to a sleek, near-perfect spit-shine. The environments kind of all look the same after a while. The rooms, while carefully constructed to make each area its own self-contained challenge, blend together. The powerups, with maybe one minor exception, are all things I’ve seen before. There are no optional bosses, no optional areas, maybe some “technically” optional powerups, but nothing surprising about the game. If you’ve played Samus Returns, as I had, Dread feels like a direct sequel to that and, honestly, not much beyond that. It doesn’t help that the game is short, only around 8-12 hours for a first playthrough and only with five major bosses and six major areas. But I think the worst sin the game commits, besides the lack of anything novel or surprising, is the fact that I never felt like I had to slow down.

During my entire 10-hour run of the game (maybe 11 or 12 if you count the times I died), I blazed through it at hyper-speed. Never once did I feel the need to stop and admire my surroundings, as gorgeous as they were, because there isn’t much interesting to them in a lot of places. Some stand out, like the caves around Elun or the rain-soaked surface of the planet, but otherwise the backgrounds can be mostly ignored. Never once did I feel like I met a challenge or a puzzle that was actually impeding my progress. In some ways this one’s a mixed curse, since maybe that’s a good thing that, even though I died many times to the bosses, they always felt winnable. But nothing made me stop and ponder, either. But more importantly, never once did I feel lost. In a game series that lives and dies on atmosphere and this imposing sense of helplessness and isolation, stranding on a strange, alien planet without any guidance, I never actually felt lost. The game allowed me to move so fast, and with so little reason to slow down, that I always felt like I was just being shuttled to the next thing. There was never a point where I stopped and thought, “Well, I could go there, but maybe I should go here instead.” Backtracking is optional, and although I don’t know if this is true or not, it always seemed like there was one clear path. This could be, on one hand, expert game design; I was never told on a map where to go, there is no Fi or Navi or (thank Zebes) Adam Malkovich breathing over my shoulder. I did just kind of find my way around naturally through play. But it didn’t feel rewarding the same way exploration in something like Dark Souls feels rewarding. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved exploring in this game. It just felt… controlled? I wasn’t a lone bounty hunter, trapped without my powers. I was Samus, going from point A to B to collect one gate-key powerup after the other. And then I won, and it was over.

Again, maybe I was just in the wrong headspace for this, trying to play the game like I’m Sonic the Hedgehog instead of a power suit-laden superhero. But I don’t feel like the game does anything to really combat this sense of constant forward momentum. To me, Metroidvanias are about exploring new places, taking intrepid steps in unknown worlds, backtracking to areas you’ve been to before, radically recontextualizing those spaces with new powers, and really getting into a place. I never felt like I needed to learn the layout of anything. I had my map for that. To the game’s credit, it does a pretty cool trick about three-quarters of the way through where you do return to an old area in a new way, and I appreciated that, but it didn’t stick. I could choose to backtrack at any time, sure, but why? The things I could find weren’t super exciting, just more missile upgrades, mostly. I didn’t need them anyway. There are a few puzzles with the speed boosters and shine spark powerups that really stood out, though, and those ones seemed like something that should have been something really special. But then you solve the puzzle and it’s just more missiles, and I moved on. The world felt… empty? Gamey? Constructed? I don’t know what’s the best term for it. But, and I really don’t want to pull this card, it’s just missing something that Super Metroid had in spades. I can’t explain it, really, besides maybe that there’s no atmosphere in Dread. Except for a few special moments, mainly with the brief EMMI encounters, the bosses, and a handful of puzzles, the game does not feel as memorable as it should be.

I could go on for ages with this, trying to pinpoint exactly what about the game made me want to play it as fast as possible with no regard for what I’m actually doing or why, and how that impacted my play experience overall. But I’ve already spent enough time on that, and I want to look at some differences that maybe could have improved things. Of course, and you might have seen this coming, I think the EMMI should have played a much larger role. They were too isolated, too easily avoided and removed, to be much of anything besides a few star moments. I think loads of the issues I had with this game could have been vastly improved with just that one major tweak, and I think I’ve got a pretty solid idea of how it could be done. I think there should have been one EMMI, or maybe two or three, and they should have been free-roaming the entire time. Think about the possibilities of this for a second; same invulnerability, same tension, same dread of facing them, but across the entire game. You could have unscripted moments where you’re nervously exploring a new area and bam, suddenly an EMMI appears out of nowhere, instead of being in a well sign-posted area. You could have players accidentally stumble on the EMMI’s brain, instead of telling them where it is from the start. Throw in a few more EMMI-specific power-ups, maybe a bomb that stuns them or a decoy setup or an extra super-rare missile ammo to damage them over time, and you’ve suddenly got way more variety of items to find. Plus, this would have made me slow way the hell down, worrying about whether or not that tube was safe to go into, or if there’d be an EMMI over there, instead of just worrying if “huh, wonder if I can counter that enemy or not.” It would have elevated the EMMI to the real stars of the show, instead of a side gig. Oh, and give them a proper boss fight, too. Their whole point is that they’re impossible to kill with regular weapons, but damn I wanted to fight one with an upgraded moveset or something. They could keep the insta-kill attack, too, just throw in some others. I mean, the EMMI kind of have extra moves later in the game, but it’s not the same.

When thinking about Metroidvanias that I think better capture the mood of the Metroid series (that is, dark, brooding, atmospheric, and yet with those heroic bad-ass action bursts from Samus), Dread is not one of them. It is a fantastic game, I want to reiterate, but I don’t think it’s what I was hoping for in a Metroidvania. I think a better example of what I’m talking about is something like Hollow Knight. And I really hate to say that, because that game just grates my bones. Ugh, I just cannot bring myself to finish it no matter how hard I try, and I don’t know why. It is hard, not usually because it’s fair, but because sometimes the controls are finnicky or the game throws something stupid at you. It’s long, like, needlessly long in some places. And it is so, so obtuse and intimidating that even the idea of trying to figure out where I’m supposed to go, after not playing it for a year and a half, makes me never want to touch it again. And yet, it has all the things I wanted Dread to be. It’s slow, it’s thoughtful, it’s got tons of unique and unexpected powers, it has meaningful backtracking, it has optional areas and bosses, it’s got more atmosphere in a single area than Dread had in its entire run. I hate that I’m saying this, but I think Hollow Knight is a better follow-up to Super Metroid than Metroid Dread is. Not that they had to take the series in that darker, slower direction anyway, and not that I think that everything Hollow Knight does would work well in a Metroid game, but I’ll be damned if I don’t think that Dread would have benefited from at least some of it. I think the gist of what I’m saying is that I wanted Dread to be more surprising and more pensive than it was. And I was disappointed by that.

But at the same time, I can’t help feeling like Dread toes this weird line because there are those moments of brilliance. There is still Samus, unfazed by everything around her, with an aura of power all her own, despite her lack of actual powers. There is that ending, which, woah, they did actually go there. And there’s this lingering sense at the back of my head that maybe I’m the problem, and I’m just not playing the game right. But I don’t know. For all my belabored sighs and whiny rambling and overuse of italics, I still feel that my time with Dread was worthwhile, and that at almost every level, I really enjoyed my time with it. Especially if you’re new to the series, it is a great place to start. But for longtime fans of the series (see, I can’t even call myself that; what the hell do I know?), I can’t help but feel that it is almost a paint-by-numbers sequel. It is some of the best parts from Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Samus Returns, and even exceeds those games on some levels, but I can’t help but feel it’s still less than the sum of its parts in some areas. If games like Hollow Knight or Guacamelee or Axiom Verge or Steamworld Dig or even, hell, Alien: Isolation didn’t exist, maybe I would feel differently, and this would be the pinnacle of the genre. But we don’t live in that world. Those games do plenty of new, or experimental, or surprising things that Dread usually does not, and those are made by teams of, like five people (except for Alien: Isolation, that one’s an outlier). If they can do it, why can’t one of the planet’s biggest gaming companies and the creators of the genre do it? I don’t know. This mostly boils down to, “Huh, this game is great but it didn’t meet my particular expectations,” but still. I think there’s something there, and I don’t need an EMMI to find it.

In other news, in my most controversial move yet, next week I’ll be explaining why Metroid Dread is also just like the 2012 movie Prometheus starring Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba, and what this maybe means for the series as a whole! And also what the fuck was up with that ending! HWAAAAA????? Stay tuned for more wacky shenanigans in the surprise PART TWO OF MY METROID DREAD REVIEW!!!!!