Despite being a big fan of the metroidvania genre I haven’t actually played many Metroid or Castlevania games. But that didn’t stop me burying my head into what on the surface looked to be a solid and well built game.

As per usual the game starts with you being stripped of all but your basic assets leaving the player with the ability to jump a bit and shoot a bit, leaving the hero Samus Aran marooned on an alien planet. Dread does a fairly good job, if not a bit short, of filling in some backstory for how Samus ended up in this situation, and for the most part I felt like I didn’t need to know much to get me started.

What’s good?

Metroid Dread has some of the mst beautiful set pieces I’ve seen in a while in a 2.5D game. Walking into new environments made for some really fun moments, especially when met with background scenes that were quite awe inspiring.

I never felt like the upgrades came too soon or too late. There were times when it would be very obvious that I would need a specific upgrade to get somewhere new which also limited needless effort in trying to get somewhere I couldn’t.

With no options to change the difficulty after starting the game I was met with the ‘Just get good’ approach and for the most part this was fun, learning enemy attack patterns, how to avoid them and how to lay down the most damage.

What’s bad?

Enemies get quite repetetive after a while and I found myself running past them unless needing a health/ammo top up.

With no health bar and no gradual deterioration bosses are just bullet sponges. The only indication that you’re making progress with a boss is a change in stage or transformation, with the majority of bosses having three stages to get through. Some people might enjoy this approach to bosses but I found it incredibly frustrating not knowing how close I was to defeating a boss and if I should try again. This actually led to me quitting the game on the final boss and looking up the remainder of the story.

I found the exploration to be very linear. While there are moments that a door or block presents itself and I was unable to get through until later, forcing me to backtrack, I never really felt lke I was exploring different avenues, and had a very direct line through the game.

I did not enjoy a single E.M.M.I section. While it did bring great pleasure in finally getting rid of these enemies the areas felt very disjointed compared to the rest of the game. Whereas the majority of the bosses forced me to get better at the game sometimes the locations of the E.M.M.I when entering a room were so frustratingly placed I mostly found myself sprinting to the cores as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

Overall enjoyable experience but I found it dwindling near the end. There was a few times in Metroid Dread where I questioned if I wanted to continue the game and that finally came to a head with the final boss where I had lost complete interest in the bullet sponge approach to bosses. However, there was a lot of enjoyment exploring the different environments.