GAME REVIEW: Metroid Dread (2021)
It should go without saying that the two humans who live in my house (of whom one is me) are big fans of video gaming. Despite having grown up in Canada and Finland, with different classic gaming systems, we have a decent amount of historical crossover in our individual gaming histories, though there are clear differences in our tastes. For example, as someone who was more of a fantasy-lover than sci-fi fanatic in my youth, I played a lot more Castlevania than Metroid growing up. However, my partner was a big fan of many Metroid games, so when we got the Nintendo Switch, he was interested in playing the newish Metroid Dread from 2021. However, by the time he reached the final boss, I was amazed to find out how well the game was rated after how much my partner hated it.
Now, if we talk about metroidvania games conceptually, some of the big pulls of these games are often world exploration and how upgrades open up new places to explore. Metroid Dread is barely even a Metroid game on this front, as it railroads you forward in a linear manner, while often cutting off your exit by forcing you onto an elevator or train, or simply removing power from doors behind you for absolutely no in-game-logical reason. Then there are the E.M.M.I. rooms, which might be exciting at first, as you have to find a way through the level that avoids them, only to find some gimmick—which still needs to be utilized in a safe space—to use to destroy them, as an otherwise indestructible enemy advances on you. After a while, having to repeat the puzzle over and over just in order to blast the shields, load the beam in a safe space, and fire… this just becomes tedious and none of it is really representative of what metroidvania is best known and beloved for. Rather than polishing what works and enhancing it, they added new things that aren’t intuitive, while removing noteworthy/memorable parts of what makes Metroid games fun.
Beyond that, there are tedious parts of the game caused by the general railroading. The game requires you to fire your special rockets at some walls just to progress, but it’s not very intuitive to use your special weapons on every wall just to see if that’s how you’re meant to continue. This results in a lot of lockdowns that require the player to try to re-explore the world, only to realize that they were exactly where they needed to be and that exploration didn’t net them anything new. Nothing about that feels very logical. This ultimately results in the game being a long series of quicktime events that are not fun, engaging, thought-provoking, or agency-invoking for the player.
Furthermore, the game’s story starts off by completely ripping off Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, by having Alucard Samus encounter an enemy, who immediately strips them of the power that they got in Metroid Fusion (to which Dread seems to be a direct sequel). There’s something to be said for the Castlevania team, who came to a realization that they’d done as much as they could with the series… there’s only so many ways you can justify reviving Dracula after you’ve lain him to eternal rest repeatedly. In the same vein, there are only so many ways you can strip a character of their established powers and still have an engaging story… in Dread, by the end, Samus has become some sort of crazy amalgamation of all of the enemies she’s been fighting over the whole span of the game series. It’s getting a little too far out there, in ways that don’t benefit the story or gameplay, and you may find yourself wondering what exactly is becoming of the series when Samus Aran is basically a mush of everything “evil” that Metroid has in their lore at this point.
From the perspective of artwork, it’s easy to get swept away by the quality of modern graphics, without actually looking more deeply at them. While the game’s visuals are very nice and up-to-date by modern standards… they don’t seem to change up much. Every game biome looks more or less the same, reflecting the molten planet where Samus lands. They are aesthetically attractive levels, but regardless of whether the biome is full of ice, lava, or whatever, the puzzles are always the same: find a way through a series of rooms that lead to another power-up, which opens another door at the end of the next path you’re onto. This means that, despite being nice-looking and modern, the level design isn’t at all varied beneath the surface.
When we talk about the mechanics too, this game seems to fall pretty flat. While the game does indeed boast very sharp, responsive controls, the control map is convoluted and has too many things on not enough buttons (The Messenger also had this issue). It was nightmarish, for example, to watch the player constantly trying to cling to a ledge, only to repeatedly go into a ball-Samus sized hole instead, over and over again, when the game required the player to hang from the ledge to proceed.
Then came the boss battles, which were interestingly one of the better-rated parts of the game in the worse reviews, which was a bit baffling still. The bosses, as a rule, were so easy to defeat by spamming rockets and dodging that they left no impact whatsoever, or they were a battle between the player and the controls (not the player and the boss), having to fire rockets with a poor aiming system, while also trying to hang on to a lift and not having enough time to swap buttons and aim. It didn’t seem to be particularly fun for the player, nor were they interesting to watch as a viewer.
The pacing of the power ups is also overwhelming and unbalanced, as you start with nothing and then in the first 15 minutes of gameplay, you’ve gotten three power-ups, which quickly leads to too many moves, requiring you to press too many buttons at the same time. Then, even when you do get a new skill, you can only use it to go forward; there are no new paths opened to explore in previous areas. There’s no possibility to explore the world; rather, the player is forced to find a path on the map screen to the next place that seems like it could be an option. Then, the player jumps back into the game after playing from the mini-map. There was no chance to experience or enjoy the world, even if it had been more engaging. The game felt like it was designed around ADHD, short-attention span gaming… maybe it should have been a cell phone game and not a triple-A console release.
Finally, when reaching the final boss, the game drops its ultimate crap-bomb by not even making the boss into a real battle—the player has to just dodge until the opportunity to use the special moves comes up… this means that the final boss—I repeat: the FINAL boss—is essentially reduced to nothing more than a quicktime event sequence with added dodging. What an utter disappointment; my partner refused to participate in this battle after drudging through the game. He watched the ending online and washed his hands of it completely.
I had myself considered giving the game a try, as I’m not much of a technical player, but overall, this game really didn’t seem fun for me either, even if I enjoy more casual play. The things that my partner enjoys about Metroid gaming are a lot of the things I enjoy about Castlevania, and I’ve played enough bad Castlevania games to know that this game would not be fun for me to play either. Sorry, Nintendo, but dropped the ball on this one and, what’s worse, is that hardly anyone seemed to notice.
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