I would very much like to be copying a great big Tears of the Kingdom review from its Word doc into this space right now, but even having finished the game a week ago, I think that one needs time to cook.

Instead, I want to take a look back at one of the last highly anticipated new entries for a flagship Nintendo series, dropped after a seemingly infinite wait, 2021’s Metroid Dread. I tapped out my thoughts on the game as I finished it but never found a place to publish them at the time, so here’s a belated review of the long-awaited revival of the 37-year-old classic sci fi franchise.

Spoilers follow.

Metroid Dread is a great and worthy addition to the Metroid canon and I enjoyed my 13-hour first 100% playthrough thoroughly, but it also stumbles a few more times than I’d want for a sequel 20 years in the making.

Now, when I say “sequel 20 years in the making” I know that they didn’t literally spend the last 20 years (since its chronological predecessor and last 2d series entry, Metroid Fusion) making this game. But it is how long I had to wait for it, and expectations were at a record high for the next step of such a beloved franchise after such a large hiatus, which makes the places where Dread feels slightly rushed all the more frustrating.

I’m going to go through this in three parts. First, I’m going to talk about things I liked in Dread. Second, I’m going to go through my complaints and criticisms. Finally, I’m going to talk a little more about the good so this post isn’t a total downer. The middle section will probably be the longest, but that’s because there’s only so many ways to say “they got it right,” but a lot of ways for things to go wrong as well as fun to be had in suggesting possible fixes. Just keep in mind as we spend a lot of time in the muck that my overall impression is extremely positive.

The good

So what did Dread get right? Top of my list, the movement. Holy shit Samus feels good to control in this one. In my mind, Dread has replaced Zero Mission as the gold standard of what a Metroid game should feel like to control. The slide is a move that should never go away, ditto with vaulting over the terrain and pulling yourself directly into morph ball passages one block off the ground. This is helped by the leading lady being wonderfully animated no matter what she’s doing. Running and jumping from place to place feels good and smooth, and even the early speedruns of the first weekend look incredibly stylish.

Dread feels like it was made with a lot of them criticisms of Fusion and Samus Returns in mind and improves on both in its own ways. The clunkiness of Samus Returns’ movement is nowhere to be found. The melee counter is a lot less necessary for handling normal enemies and is much less likely to kill your momentum when you do use it. Compared to Fusion, the balance between story and world design is leagues better. You still have an ongoing plot developed by briefings after getting key items, but your movements are far less restricted and the game is able to adapt to sequence breaks pulled off by experienced players.

It also surpasses Fusion by a mile in terms of the endgame item hunt. In Fusion, there were way too many upgrades locked behind Screw Attack walls so you have to spend a ridiculous amount of time scouring the map at the very end of the game if you want 100%. There were a few items locked behind Dread’s final upgrade, but I did a reasonable amount of exploring as I went and had around 80% completion in most areas with a couple as low as 60ish% when I reached final boss. My victory lap for the final items was short and sweet. And a decent amount of what was left, I could have actually gotten on a previous visit if I’d had more knowledge or practiced my Shinesparks more.

While I’ll have some more to say about environment design in the next section, Buneria and Ghavoran are both absolutely gorgeous and dripping with atmosphere. Both a joy to explore.

The Flash Shift feels great to use. Definitely needs to be a returning item. The Spin Boost as an early Space Jump is also a cool addition. Putting both it and the actual Space Jump before the Gravity Suit with the caveat that you can move horizontally but you can’t gain height underwater is a clever, organic-feeling way to limit the player then let them feel empowered when they do actually get the Gravity Suit.

And on the topic of changes to items, how about being able to slide, morph and wall jump while carrying a Speed Booster charge. The Shinespark challenges in this one were a blast once I got all its new properties and controls worked out. It was cool being able to Shinespark straight down as well, even if it’s only used once. I also would have loved to see more of using a Ballspark to climb diagonal shafts. I think it’s only used intentionally for one missile tank, but speedrunners are getting some extra mileage out of it.

And still on the Speed Booster, I love how much utility the Shinespark has as an actual weapon now. A bunch of bosses can be dealt significant damage or killed outright if you can smuggle a charge into their arena.

And finally, I love that an early bomb sequence break is acknowledged with a hidden quick kill method for Kraid. Nothing like going out of your way to break shit and be met with a cheeky wink from the devs. They knew exactly how this game was going to be played and (for the most part) really embraced it.

Those are my big positives, and now the areas Dread either fell a little short or didn’t quite achieve what it seemed to be aiming for.

The bad

Some people will have been waiting for the EMMI to show up in the good, but my feelings on them are mixed. A few of the chases were genuinely thrilling and the need to stand your ground to take them out at the end of each area was both tense and empowering, and I want to like the creepy bastards, but their implementation doesn’t quite achieve what the developers wanted them to be. I think the reason for this stems from a Mercury Steam design philosophy that also affects the game’s bosses, and was very much on show in Samus Returns as well.

Mercury Steam likes to ramp up what it demands of the player in terms of precision and reaction times, but at the same time to lower the stakes. This game can be tough. The EMMI rooms require quick, decisive navigation lest you die in one hit. The bosses ask for pixel perfect dodges and high accuracy or they’ll drain three energy tanks with a single blow. It’s brutal. But it’s also not, because there are invisible checkpoints outside every EMMI zone and boss room. So the stakes surrounding that difficulty are nonexistent. You can afford to run in and literally feed yourself to an EMMI or a boss while you work out a route or a battle plan because you’ll lose nothing for doing so.

It’s comparable to the likes of Celeste or Super Meat Boy (two games I love) in that it justifies its difficulty by making retrying as painless as possible.

My problem is, that just doesn’t feel like Metroid to me. And it doesn’t feel like “dread” either. If the assumption is that you’ll die repeatedly just to work an enemy out, you’re not going to fear it. You can’t make your players scared of losing but also ask them to work a section out through trial and error. Either they stop being scared or they stop trying. Something has to give.

Contrast previous pre-Mercury Steam Metroid games and you’ll find that the difficulty is more middling but the stakes are sky high. There are no invisible checkpoints in those games. If you die, it’s back to your last save, no exceptions. Any exploration and map-filling you did since saving will be lost. Upgrades you found? Also lost. Hope you remember where you got them. And that could make running into a boss room genuinely intimidating. You stand to lose actual progress if you can’t work out the pattern quick enough. The idea of taking a mulligan attempt without at least backtracking to a save room is unthinkable.

Of course, these games weren’t sadistic about it. There was usually a save room within comfortable walking distance. But having to make back even walking distance gives you something to lose. It makes me think of a thing I once saw said about Hollow Knight, either in some video essay or in a developer interview. For the life of me I can’t find the exact quote, but was said that the trek from the last save point to the boss is designed as essentially the first phase of the fight, which is why some of those paths were so challenging. That perspective helped me appreciate parts of Hollow Knight more, but the developers of Dread obviously didn’t think the same way.

This isn’t to say one philosophy is better than the other or that there’s any one objectively correct way to balance difficulty and stakes, but if it was Dread’s goal to make me fear its enemies, it failed.

If I were to give notes, I would say to cut the checkpoints. For the bosses, most would just need the damage scaled down so that the player has a fighting chance to learn their patterns before being completely destroyed. The EMMI are more complicated. Something closer to Fusion’s SA-X chases, where it tries to gun you down, dealing high damage as it pursues you but doesn’t just kill you outright, might be a fairer balance for them. Being able to stall them with ice missiles as with SA-X might be good as well. That’s probably not a perfect solution – I’m no game designer – but I think it’s clear the EMMI need a little tweaking to get their fear factor pinned down in a way that wouldn’t also make them frustrating.

Since we just spoke about bosses anyway, what was the deal with the Chozo Warriors and Chozo Robots? Both of these fights are recycled a ridiculous number of times relative to their actual level of engagement. It feels like the devs ran out of time somewhere in the back half of the game and started copying and pasting. The red Warrior showing up after the sudden cutscene death of the final EMMI is particularly egregious. Wouldn’t that have been a great place to say that your new Wave Beam can pass through “the strongest stuff in the universe” that they’re apparently made of and have the player finally stand their ground against an EMMI unassisted? Wouldn’t that have been empowering after all the time spent running? But no, have a fourth freaking Chozo.

Raven Beak’s X form is also an incredible anti-climax, on the level of Dark Beast Ganon from Breath of the Wild. It’s a fight that may as well have just been a cutscene. Once again, did you guys run out of time for more unique fights? I know a lot of content had been made for this game already, but it really does leave a flat final impression on an otherwise great experience.

Moving on, Dread repeats a problem that Fusion had in that Power Bombs don’t have much use aside from getting more Power Bomb ammo. They’re too slow to use in battle (aside from being a hard counter to one of the final boss’s attacks, which is nice) and the Scan Pulse has been filling their role in exploration for hours by the time you get them. I do appreciate how many Power Bomb tanks can be reached without getting the bombs though, even if they don’t allow you to use them.

Worse are what happens with your missiles. You don’t have to be particularly good at mashing for beam spam to overtake them in terms of damage against any enemy vulnerable to it, such as as the Chozo Warriors or even the final boss. Beam spam also has the advantage of being an unlimited resource and requiring less accuracy due to the wide beam. The result of this is that you never really use the resources you spend the whole game looking for. I think the last time I came anywhere close to running out was against Kraid.

To Dread’s credit, you’re at least allowed to use missiles against Ravel Beak if you need to justify your arsenal. Fusion was almost insulting in making the final bosses specifically beam only.

Aside from Buneria and Ghavoran, very few of Dread’s areas left a strong visual impression on me. There are a lot of labs and sciency zones spread across Ateria, Dairon and Ferenia that just kinda blend together, not to mention EMMI zones taking up so much of each map while all having the same design elements. Even just letting the EMMI zones match the local flavours instead of repeating all that featureless chrome could have gone a long way on this front.

The map is also laid out really weird. There is absolutely no way for the vertical lifts and horizontal tramways to all actually line up, no matter what you do. One thing I enjoyed in Super and Fusion was later in the game discovering places to move between major areas on foot, no elevators required. I kinda figured that wasn’t going to happen in Dread the first time I saw the load times between areas, but it’s unfortunate for the areas to not at least line up. Makes things feel a lot less comprehensive and connected.

And finally, some nitpicks.

Most of the game’s map funneling feels fairly organic, but the barrior that appears out of nowhere to stop you from backtracking into Ateria early on is cheap and frustrating.

I wish the Phantom Cloak had more uses outside of the EMMI zones. And even in them it’s kind of a last resort for the most part.

The soundtrack is never bad, but it’s extremely forgettable. I spent close to a week hyperfixated on this game and couldn’t hum a single track that didn’t come from a previous game.

It was great seeing the game work so hard to wrap up the plots of the Chozo, Metroids and X all in one go, but no finale for the Space Pirates? And not even touching on the altered relationship between Samus and the Federation after the end of Fusion? That’s a shame.

And how come the planet explodes at the end anyway? They don’t even try to justify it, it just kinda happens because I guess any world Samus sets foot on develops reasonable odds of spontaneous combustion.

But that’s enough negatives. Let’s go back to the good stuff to round things out.

More good

Kraid’s back!

The game’s sound design is legitimately fantastic. The mechanical sounds are great for the atmosphere and I love the boops and beeps the EMMIs make.

Power Bombs look cooler than they ever have. It’s like a mini nuke!

The Dread Suit looks stunning in all forms.

The backgrounds are gorgeous too, with so many mechanisms and nonaggressive animals moving around just behind the play area. Seeing Corpius and the Chozo Warriors move through the background was super cool. I’ll have to go back and look again for foreshadowing for other bosses. I heard Kraid roaring as I got closer to his prison as well.

Narratively, it was pretty cool having the EMMI get disabled in the middle, allowing you to go through some of their areas unmolested, only to have them be reactivated later, forcing a chase through spaces you’d previously considered safe.

Having the X change the map and upgrade early area enemies at the midpoint was cool too. Felt like Hollow Knight’s Infected Crossroads.

And finally, the level of detail on the map screen is a godsend. It can be overwhelming at first, but once you have your head around it, it feels like one of the absurdly high-res sprite maps you’d find online for the old games. They didn’t have to go as far as making every single breakable block part of the map, but it’s so good they did. Being able to highlight all blocks of a specific type was a godsend when I ever felt lost, and when I was hunting down those last few items.

Overall, like I said earlier, I had a great time with Dread. It made a few stumbles and missed a few opportunities, but Mercury Steam have got their Metroid formula to a pretty good point and I’d be very interested to see what they could do with one more chance to iterate. And maybe with enough dev time to populate the back half with an appropriate number of bosses. And it’s just good to have Metroid back after so damn long.

Dread sold well by all accounts and was a critical darling, and Nintendo has signaled their interest in continuing the series through this year’s fantastic remake of Metroid Prime. If they continue to remake the Prime Trilogy, drop Prime 4 to the series’ quality standard and give Mercury Steam a shot at Metroid 6, we could truly be going into a golden age for this fantastic franchise that lay dormant for so many years.