Product Reviews / Gaming
A ‘Metroid Dread’ Review From an Average Guy
Fluid, fun, and dreadful — in both good and bad ways
This is my first-ever written product review, and the first time I’ve ever decided to give a rating to a video game. I recently purchased an OLED-model Nintendo Switch and decided that I’d kick things off with the game that launched alongside it: Metrioid Dread.
Nineteen years after the previous 2D entry (Metroid Fusion), a successor has arrived in the form of Dread. This game was originally supposed to be created for the Nintendo DS, but was shelved because the DS wasn’t able to bring Dread’s vision to life. Now that we have the Switch, that vision has come to life and I must say, it was done so pretty well.
After tasking Spanish developer MercurySteam to handle 2017’s Metroid: Samus Returns — a remake of the original Metroid II: Return of Samus — Nintendo gave them the reigns to handle a new entry: the first [and hopefully not only] Metroid game for the Nintendo Switch.
My First Metroid
I’ll start this review off by being extremely clear up-front: I’ve never really played a Metroid game other than Metroid Fusion, and I played that game when I was like 8 or 9 years old. Suffice to say, I don’t remember much of it aside from being able to recognize the protagonist of Dread, Samus Aran. I tell you about my inexperience with the Metroid franchise because I’m essentially catering this review to those who haven’t experienced the game before.
People who have played Metroid in the past may be familiar with some of its mechanics, gameplay loops, and design. I, on the other hand, have just looked at this as a cool-looking, brand new game for the Nintendo Switch, a console I still feel barely has any unique games worth playing. I had a launch day (March 2017) Switch console that I sold just over a year ago for that exact reason — I felt it had barely any games. The Nintendo games that were being released were often full-priced ports of Wii U games or bare-minimum efforts such as Super Mario Party, 1–2 Switch, and even Nintendo’s online system.
OLED + Dread = Beauty
Metroid Dread compliments my new Switch OLED incredibly well. The intended fearful undertone of the game comes to life with the OLED display’s ability to display ‘perfect’ black, vibrant reds, and the fact that the screen itself is much bigger than other Switch models. I feel like Dread is a game that wouldn’t be as enjoyable on other handheld Switches just because you lose out on that vibrancy — it alone can make the game so much more immersive.
Don’t get me wrong, the game will still look and play great even on a Switch Lite, but playing it on an OLED screen is a special experience. It doesn’t surprise me, then, to see that Dread launched alongside the Switch OLED. I often found myself playing in handheld mode in situations where I’d usually play on a TV with my old Switch. The game is just that pretty with OLED.
Gameplay
Regarding the gameplay itself, I’ll say that for the most part, I loved it. Samus’s controls are extremely fluid, and that fluidity goes a long way when you’re juggling lots of abilities at the same time. When everything ‘clicks,’ it feels magical. What I mean by that is that your inputs are registered properly, Samus does what you want her to do, and you feel in the zone. When it doesn’t click, the game can feel somewhat frustrating.
[SPOILER ALERT — Skip to Next Section For No Spoilers]
I mention the following part specifically because I feel it helps explain my point above. If you don’t wish to be spoiled, please skip to the next section. In the game, you unlock an ability that somewhat takes the place of a traditional double jump. As long as you time it correctly, you can turn your ‘one’ jump into two, which allows you to reach previously blocked-off areas. Now, this is awesome when it works the way you want it to. However, you seem to have to time the second jump at a specific ‘point,’ or activate it at a specific time during jump #1. You can’t just double-tap instantly and have the second jump start right away.
What that leads to is clunky-feeling gameplay during a boss fight where you have to pay attention to jump-timing to ensure that the game actually registers a double-jump. Having to pay attention to something like this can be attributed to the game being ‘difficult,’ but I personally don’t think that this limitation needs to exist. If anything, the restricted second jump just detracts from the rest of the [usually fluid] gameplay. This can be frustrating in a boss fight not because you made an understandable mistake, but because you’re at the mercy of shoddy controls.
Boss Fights
Speaking of boss fights, they’re pretty fun themselves. However, sometimes I felt like they could be… too much. I’d find myself dreading the boss fight because it just never seemed to end. Now, that in itself isn’t a bad thing. A long fight can really kill your morale and make you start to panic. That’s fine in a game that has ‘dread’ in its name. What’s not fine is how that fight is fought. Once I understood a boss’s patterns, I found that I’d beat bosses not due to my own skill, but because I simply took advantage of scripted patterns long enough to eventually kill the boss. Fearsome bosses often became rhythmic dances that just dragged on for too long.
As such, I wish that there was more variety to the bosses whether it be their movesets, the way you can go about killing them, or simply the bosses themselves. The game often re-hashed old encounters with a new, added twist. That’d be awesome if you actually had fun with the first encounter. However, considering the first one was a rhythmic dance, you just started to dread the new variations. To put it simply, it eventually stopped being fun.
Shooting Random Objects
The other thing that wasn’t so fun is the gameplay loop of ‘shoot random things to find an opening.’ I guess this is a typical gameplay loop for a Metroid game, where an inconspicuous wall might actually be something you need to shoot down in order to progress in the game. In Metroid Dread, this wasn’t always noticeable to me. Eagle-eyed folks might be quick to point out that if you look very closely, the color of two side-by-side blocks may differ slightly. That difference, they say, should have indicated where to go. Well, as someone new to the franchise, and as someone who isn’t familiar with this type of gameplay, I personally think this is simply bad game design.
Just because it’s a Metroid game and because it has “always been this way” doesn’t mean it has to continue being that way. This ‘hidden object’-esque gameplay isn’t revealed to you in a particularly clear way, either. You have to be paying attention during a loading screen — at the right time, mind you, considering each screen has up to 5 different tips — to see some small text that says you might be able to shoot at walls to figure out where to go.
Even once you’ve figured that out, you’ll be shooting everywhere yet nowhere — it’ll feel as if you’re shooting at every wall yet not getting very far. I tried my best to play this game without looking anything up but found myself looking up one such encounter where I had to shoot at the ground in a very specific spot to be able to access a room. I can definitely see something like the ‘hidden blocks’ being annoying enough to make someone put the game down for good. If something like shooting random walls for hints is necessary, then communicating that to the player should be necessary as well.
What I mean is that I feel the game doesn’t do a good-enough job of communicating — or rather, stressing — that shooting at random things is pivotal for your progression. If the game ensured that you knew to do this early on by somehow verifying you understand the concept, then the gameplay would be much smoother for a lot of people and we wouldn’t have thousands of YouTube comments about people talking about how many hours they spent feeling ‘stuck’ or ‘softlocked’ out of the game.
Thankfully, once I figured out that I need to ‘shoot at anything and everything’ in order to find where to go next, it became bearable yet still often annoying. Despite this kind of stuff being frustrating, I still carried on because I found the game to be fun and rewarding. Despite some of the clunky controls, rhythmic dances, and ‘poor’ gameplay loops, the game was still really fun. I felt immersed in the world and loved learning more about the story and goings-on.
If I was ever truly frustrated due to a feeling a boss was unbeatable or an area being seemingly-impassable, I just took a break from the game altogether. The next time I picked it up, I often figured out the solution pretty quickly. I consider myself to be a very patient person, but I can’t say that many others who are new to the series will be able to tolerate some of the game’s shortcomings in similar ways. That aside, I’d like to reiterate that I found the game very fun nonetheless.
Breadth of the Wild
The enemies in the game were at a good-enough difficulty that they didn’t feel too easy or too hard as a whole. Naturally, there are some simple enemies, and ones you hate encountering. There was a good variety to the enemies, and — aside from some of the bosses — I never really felt like the game was ‘the same thing over and over again.’
The areas themselves felt unique enough initially, but eventually I stopped being able to really tell the difference between them aside from which color they were on the game’s map. Don’t get me wrong, the areas themselves are beautifully rendered and looked super pretty on the OLED screen, but they all ended up feeling similar nonetheless or blended together in a way.
It doesn’t help that the game has — or at least I feel it has — a particularly weak soundtrack. I often played with the sound turned up and there weren’t really any memorable music tracks or sounds aside from a few (like when you acquired a new item). This lack of musical depth contributed to the areas feeling mostly ‘same-y’ rather than distinctive.
Nonetheless, I felt there were enough areas to explore within the game, and enough to do in each of those areas. I feel a similar type of way about the enemies, as I mentioned. There were enough of them to fight without getting bored, and there was enough depth with a decent number of monsters that I didn’t really feel like more were needed.
Gameplay Time
Before receiving my copy of Metroid Dread, I read that it took some others about 7 hours to finish the game on their first playthrough. Seeing that worried me because I didn’t think it was enough to justify dropping $60 on the game. It worried me enough that I subscribed to GameFly for a month just to rent the game instead of buying it. Don’t get me wrong — I prefer quality over quantity any day, but I didn’t really think there’d be much to do with the game after those seven hours. I didn’t see myself having a ‘second’ playthrough or ever touching it again. I didn’t particularly care to find every single little item in the game or play the unlockable Hard Mode. With that in mind, $60 for 7 hours felt like an excessive for this game.
I’m happy to say that fifteen gameplay hours later, I can justify this game being $60. Yeah, it took me much longer to finish the game than it may have taken familiar Metroid fans. I finished the game with an item completion of 62%, meaning I collected that percentage of available items. I do not feel that the game was too short whatsoever, as I took my time in each of the areas to both explore and marvel at the world — and, honestly, sometimes it just took me longer than intended because I didn’t know where to go or what to do.
Thankfully, that wasn’t always the case as the game was mostly linear. However, sometimes I genuinely felt stuck because it’d feel like every area I went to was impassable and there was nothing guiding me toward the solution. Also, despite spending a lot of time simply being lost, I don’t really feel like the game was too long, either.
E.M.M.I. encounters
There were specific parts of the game that felt too ‘long,’ like the ‘E.M.M.I.’ mini-boss encounters. The E.M.M.I. robots were absolutely terrfying at the start of the game, but dragged on and were simply annoying later on. They weren’t annoying because they were difficult to deal with, but because you’ve already seen that formula before and at later points, they mostly felt like a hindrance.
As I unlocked more and more abilities, I became less and less scared of encountering an E.M.M.I. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t annoyed that they continued to be a presence in the game later on.
I liken the E.M.M.I. to a sort-of phobia. Initially, you’re absolutely terrified (of heights, spiders, humans, et cetera). Eventually, you might overcome that fear and can deal with being around those things. Despite that, you still wish you didn’t have to deal with them — not because you were still scared, but because they just seemed to be ‘in the way.’
[SPOILER ALERT — Skip to Next Section For No Spoilers]
The Bright Side
In the above video, I darted away from an E.M.M.I. because I messed up the control scheme, not because I was afraid of the E.M.M.I. To effectively dispose of the enemy robot, I had to use a particular weapon that I unlocked. To use it, I had to click a button to ‘aim’ at the E.M.M.I., move the joystick in the direction I want to aim, and then hold the ‘shoot’ button. With all of these commands happening at the same time, it can be easy to forget — in the moment — which button you need to let go of in order to just shoot. In this case, I let go of the wrong button, which stopped my weapon from firing. Thus, I needed to run away and try again. Despite the controller hiccup, it still led to a tense moment that was more rewarding than it would have been otherwise.
I found that trait to be a redeeming quality for Dread. There would be times when something goes completely wrong. You forget which button does what. You forget which abilities you even have, leading you to not use an ability that you probably should in a fight. There are so many things that can go wrong and end up almost costing you your life, but you somehow eek out a victory nonetheless whether by luck or skill. Regardless, that feeling that you get when you overcome seemingly-insurmountable odds is amazing, and Dread gives you the opportunities to experience a lot of those, for what it’s worth.
Takeaways and Review Score
All-in-all, I definitely recommend Metroid Dread to anyone looking for a new kind of experience on the Nintendo Switch. It’s fluid, fast-paced, and extremely fun most of the time. However, the times it’s not fluid and fun can be draining and dreadful — in a bad way — in its own right.
As a result, I feel like my overall rating can go two ways. For the ‘average’ gamer like me, I give Metroid Dread an 8/10. It’s a solid experience that’ll give you your money’s worth (which may be a legitimate concern for some, like me). It has its faults and is definitely not a masterpiece. Despite that, I feel like this can definitely be seen as a 9/10 by those who are familiar with its gameplay loops and as such may be more forgiving. I personally can’t excuse some of it, hence the 8/10.
This is definitely a solid entry in the series and despite not playing 2002’s Metroid Fusion, I feel like it should be seen as a worthy successor simply because of how fun it is. I’m glad that Dread was my first in the series and as such, I can confidently recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played a Metroid game before. Again, it’s not without its faults, but when it clicks — it clicks.
