Fantastic game and the first truly great Metroid Sequel since Super IMO. The Prime games are ok, but I think the series loses a lot going to first person and this game shows why. First, Samus has a ton of personality just watching her run around the areas. The way Mercury Steam added so many touches like the way she will put her hand on walls or bomb openings as you approach, and can shoot like that, even in the 360 setup just adds so much "life" to the character. Second, the platforming (and controls) in this game is outrageously good. I was worried this game would feel like every other "cheap" 2.5D game we have seen so many times over the years, but nothing could be further from the truth. Samus is fast, precise, nimble ... basically every positive adjective in the book. Again, this is lost in the translation to First Person. So you take away the amazing shooting and platforming present in 2D Metroids, and you're left with a game about exploration where you don't get to even see your iconic character while playing. I hope after Prime 4 they drop the format and only do 3rd person games.
This game also flips the usual script on its head a bit. Instead of starting at the top of the map and descending into the depths to find your adversary, this game starts you at the bottom and requires you to find your way back to the surface. Areas started out feeling a bit samey, which initially worried me. Again, the accusations of "cheap, indie" feel lingered. But this thankfully proved to not be true at all. Chozo ruins, underwater vistas, forest regions, and of course the requisite sci-fi base settings provide for plenty of variety. One of my favorite moments was spending the initial game in that mentioned standard sci-fi setting, and then approaching and entering Burenia for the first time. It's like all of a sudden you go from a tech setting to being in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And it felt awesome, and reminded me that yes this IS Metroid. It was at this moment my worry about it everything looking similar completely disappeared.
The graphics are overall great. I love great visuals of course (Ratchet and Clank on PS5 was incredible this year), but at the same time I do not care as long as they are serviceable enough to the game where it doesn't detract from the experience. This game has style to spare and features plenty of cutscenes for bosses and some story segments. More so than any Metroid I can remember. And Samus is the complete opposite of the character presented in Other M. Cool, confident, and capable. She even has some voice over sections where, again, her character comes across exactly as a Metroid fan would hope. Still one of the best characters in gaming IMO.
As mentioned, the controls are incredible, to a degree where I was surprised. This is the fastest Metroid game I think I've played. The 360 degree aiming works far better than Samus Returns (based on my memory of hating it in Samus Returns and thinking I hope this is always in future games), the control scheme works great for managing so many capabilities, and I think this is a new high water benchmark in control for this kind of game. I had been hoping for a true 2D Metroid for years now, complete with world class sprite work and huge sprawling worlds. I don't think we need that anymore, and indeed, that would be limiting because you simply wouldn't get that massive range of motion and action Samus is capable of in this game, because it would simply require far too many sprites. This is the best control in any Metroid game IMO.
Bosses are incredibly well done, and they all follow a similar pattern. They tend to do a lot of damage so you won't survive many hits, and attacks come fast and furious. This can lead to feeling overwhelmed the first time you face them with a feeling of impossibility. But give it a few tries and the patterns reveal themselves. Focusing on dodging then allows you to stay in these battles while you try and pile on the hurt in between dodging attacks that recently felt totally insurmountable. It's completely possible to go from feeling like you'll never beat a boss to being able to beat them without getting hit over the course of 10-15 minutes, and every boss (for me) more or less followed this pattern, including the last one. But it felt brilliant and perfectly balanced in that respect. I don't want to mow over a boss on a first try, and I also don't want to grind for hours to beat something. This game has the perfect balance of learning and executing on the boss encounters. On top of that, the design for all of them are great. Most of the actual major bosses tend to be huge and imposing. There is also foreshadowing for many of them, whether it's seeing one of them being, essentially, operated on by machines, or the level sprawling tentacles/roots of another before you actually get there. Overall, perfectly executed bosses IMO.
The music and sound ... this is the one area that the game fails in IMO, and it's a bummer for me. Super Metroid is one of the all time classic game scores. There is so much atmosphere in that game and strong themes, that this game feels like a complete let down in comparison. Think about the intro to Super Metroid, where there isn't even music. But the sound of the Research Station is eerie, isolating, but also engrossing as you travel through it, looking for what caused the distress signal. Think about lowering onto Zebes after the intro with the thunder and lightning and ominous string section playing as you descend to the site of your previous battle with Mother Brain. Or entering the Ghost Ship before it's brought back to life. Then on top of that you have iconic music of Norfair, Brinstar etc. There was just so much mood. And I don't know if that game has truly been "topped" in that sense. This game feels like they didn't even try. I think Burenia stood out as having a bit of atmospheric music that was nice, but most of it is not only forgettable, the music volume is mixed down pretty low compared to the sound effects. On top of that the sound effects also feel weak. In Super Metroid I can perfectly recall the sounds of firing missiles, picking up Energy tanks, engaging the speed running option. I just played Dread for ten hours and don't really remember any of the sound effects. They just didn't have the "impact"
The design of this game is "dense" for lack of a better word. Everything is tightly packed in and there are tons of enemies to take on at pretty much all times. While there are scenes that are massive in scope, you don't really "explore" those scenes. The scale of the map consistently threw me off because you actually SEE the layout of the screen in the map, as opposed to each screen being a square in a grid. I would look at a map and feel overwhelmed with the thought of needing to get to the other side of an area only to realize that it just took a few minutes at most. Again, this is because of how fast you can traverse in the game, along with the map scale being entirely different from Super Metroid, which is the last 2D Metroid game I've played (I did finish Fusion but that was so long ago). However seeing that detail in the map screen is completely necessary. I often had to plan my path to get to a wanted destination, because there are so many different kinds of doors, barriers, roadblocks, etc. in this game that I don't think you can just go willy nilly in the direction you want. So towards the end of the game I was definitely more used to the how the levels and map were executed. However the side effect of this design is that the game feels both massive and small at the same time. I'm not sure how else to describe it. Comparing it to Super Metroid again, SM had areas that felt huge. Like you were truly exploring alien vistas. I'm not sure I got that feeling of "scope" in this game outside of a few notable screens (taking trams between areas, approaching the Chozo ruins towards the end). It's extremely hard for me to describe because a lot of it is just a "feeling", but I think this game could have been a bit better in the sense of feeling like I was exploring a huge alien planet. But at the same time, the game also felt huge. A strange dichotomy.
The E.M.M.I.s were fine. I think the sound there again let us down. The sound of the robots was not intimidating or scary. They just sounded a bit goofy to me actually, and this points back to the importance of sound design in games. Looking at something like the Empire Strikes Back when the Imperial Probe droid makes an appearance, the sound of the transmission as well as the sound it makes as it hovers over Hoth is decidedly meant to be creepy. The radio signals are oddly human sounding while being completely unintelligible. Something in that vein would have helped the feel of the E.M.M.I.s IMO. I am also glad they are in clearly marked zones. I thought you were going to be chased for the ENTIRE game, but keeping them to specific areas allows the classic Metroid feel to be the predominant setting of the game. And you get enough tools to avoid and dodge the E.M.M.I.s that those sections are still fun to me, without feeling like "oh no, here we go again."
Overall, this game is a 9/10 for me. It would have been a 10/10 for me with better sound and music. To me music is so important, it can make or break movies, games etc. Bringing a Star Wars comparison back again, the original Star Wars would not have been nearly the hit it was IMO, without the incredible orchestral score. Lucas originally wanted trendy disco/laser sounds from what I have read. The movie would have been a joke, all because of the sound. For Dread, If we had gotten new iconic music for each area, with amazing atmosphere and sound effects, I think this would have been an easy 10. It's overall that good. But sound matters in a big way and I think this game lets us down there. But it still does things that I didn't expect. It moves Metroid forward. The new abilities, the more in-depth controls, while being perfectly responsive makes for an incredible game. This game perfectly encapsulates what I was they would do with their other franchises like Star Fox. Use the classic formula, but bring new elements to it without making it gimmicky. We got a new planet, new characters. New lore, along with new gameplay. But at the same time it always felt like classic Metroid. I don't think that's easy to do, and I didn't think this was the kind of game that Nintendo cared to even make anymore. So in the end I am floored. This game is right up there with Super Metroid for me. I think it does some things better while Super does other things better, and no other Metroid game has ever done that IMO. I'm glad the game was not made 15 years ago. It would have been a lesser experience.
P.S. Kraid was totally unnecessary. Wasn't he basically a space gangster along with Ridley in Metroid 1? Wreaking havoc with the Mother Brain? Yeah he was a dragon looking thing even then, but how he evolved into this giant, mindless, Space Beast with belly button issues, is a mystery to me. And you know ... he was dead (but I guess Ridley keeps coming back too). Unless of course there are just a series of Kraid like monsters throughout the galaxy, but in that case, that takes away from his uniqueness in the previous games. This choice makes even less sense to me since there is basically no other element of the previous games here, so it just feels randomly thrown in. Not even classic Metroids make an appearance (which is a GOOD thing IMO).
