A few hours in, Metroid Dread really irritates me. There’s so much that’s Technically Fine about it: the controls feel super smooth, the boss fights are way more involving than I expected, the progression is pleasantly surprising, has a good rhythm and mostly strikes a right balance between making you feel lost and gently nudging you in the right direction. Basically, a lot of it feels like a cool fangame, made by someone who really wants to please a certain subset of hardcore fans. But I’m not a hardcore Metroid fan, just someone who really liked Super and Fusion and would want another game that feels inspired or singular in one way or another, and Dread…
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Really don’t care for the setup or presentation of the story. First, you get hit with a two minutes long PowerPoint presentation explaining plotlines of Metroid 2 and Fusion, then, 90 seconds of similarly static exposition introducing the new storyline (there’s a planet called ZDR, Parasite X was discovered there, seven robots were sent to investigate and disappeared mysteriously, Samus needs to check it out, that’s literally all, you don’t even learn what the planet is). Then, over 60 second of a cinematic where Samus Aran’s ship slowly approaches an alien planet while her monotone AI navigator keeps repeating that the mission is too risky. Then, it cuts into a confusing shot of Samus lying in some cave in a different armor where she gets flashbacks about landing her ship and getting her ass kicked by some big bird guy in a goofy metal armor, two and a half minutes. It’s meant to be a mysterious introduction, but it only comes off as insanely overlong and sloppy, like they really don’t have a handle on the possibilities offered by increased visual fidelity so they keep falling on the most boring cliches from the past games. It’s insane how efficient it was at killing my excitement while booting the game for the first time.
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The UI/UX work is a major letdown. In the first 15 minutes, you’re constantly assaulted with overbearing tutorial prompts that actively work against the mood of feeling lost on an alien planet the game just spent 150 seconds trying to establish. There’s one time where the game suddenly fires up the map on its own and starts zooming in like your controller was malfunctioning (and it’s Switch, so it’s more than probable). The map itself is so visually cluttered and hard to process, it somehow gave me Doom 2016 flashbacks in 2D, pause menus in general seem like they were designed for a low rent 3DS game and blown up into high res, these huge inelegant chunky windows and fonts. It’s just vaguely unpleasant to do or look at anything that is not directly connected to navigating Samus through this world…
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…and the world itself does not read as a believable world, just an amalgam of what worked in previous games without comparable visual flair. Some underground caves and passages, some abstract anonymous facilities, monsters whose looks I cannot remember beyond vague archetypes. The worst part is how EMMIs are supposed to be stars, these menacing Terminator-like enemies the game is built around, but scan as generic sleek mining machines with some admittedly decent animation work, and thanks to generous checkpointing moving through their zones is like bruteforcing your way to the nearest exit, Rain World but with 10% of possibilities for interesting things about to happen. Not to mention how uninteresting their lairs are to visually process or plan escape routes around – once again, increased fidelity isn’t matched by a new approach, this time to a sense of place.
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Action-heavy cutscenes often feel like they’ve had Japanese-style storyboards that rely on heavily emphasized poses/keyframes but were animated by people who kept deciding to connect these in one unremarkable smooth motion, constantly leaving me with “this should have been cooler than that” feeling. The decision to make cinematics run in 30 FPS probably contributes to that.
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ADAM’s voice is simply unpleasant to listen to and unlike Fusion, he keeps droning on and on about obvious stuff. The controls are shockingly complex, pretty much every button is used and you’re often expected to hold like three of them while using the control stick. Just like in Samus Returns, the focus on parrying makes your interactions with alien lifeforms too uniform. The music is neither atmospheric or emotional. Even some minor stuff like door transitions often feels weirdly sloppy in a way that feels like a deliberate sabotage of Nintendo polish/gamefeel. And so on, and so on.
It’s possible I wouldn’t mind most of this in a game that actually has some design ambitions and struggles to express them holistically, but Dread is all about polishing a proven formula. I assume a fan who is all about DEEP CHOZO LORE and finetuned familiar Metroid rhythms will be overjoyed, but all the game has done for me so far was killing some time and reminding me that the older I am, the less patience I have for these unimaginative franchise continuations that thoughtlessly fetishize the familiar abstractions to please the fans. Reach for the same core inspirations to express something new or repackage the same thing while using the craft of experts in cutting edge digital art, whatever. Just don’t sell me a game that comes off like a sloppy Unity remake of a thing I used to love, ESPECIALLY right after I’ve just been burned by that new Monkey Ball.