Metroid Dread

Release: October 8, 2021

Developer: Nintendo/Mercury Steam

Publisher: Nintendo

Gameplay Stats: Check out this nifty picture!

Oh man did Mercury Steam crush it when they made this game. I didn't consider myself particularly a Metroid fan before this despite beating several games in the series, but I think I do now. I'll have to play some of the older entries in the future when I have a little more time. Let's hop in!

Aesthetics: This game looks pretty! Loading a room at a time doesn't seem to demand so much from the Switch and the devs really took advantage of this when they made the game. Everything here looks beautiful. The enemy designs are all good and they kind of capture how the enemies will behave before you even see them move. Samus looks great in all of her armor sets here too. The power ups look visually like a step up which was something I hadn't really considered previously, but it felt nice. The bosses all looked cool, I can't really call one out in particular. The music was fine, nothing particularly stand out I didn't think. The sound effects were very good, I felt like I was experiencing the game with surround sound even though that wasn't the case. The shooting and some of the enemy cries did get a little repetitive, but the game was short enough that it didn't bug me.

Plot: I actually kind of enjoyed this! I played Metroid fusion a few years ago and vaguely remembered the story here and that served me well I think. I can't speak to how well this game fit into the larger Metroid universe/story though. Overall it was a good time. I did think the plot twist revealed at the end of the game was very obvious though.

Gameplay: Most excellent. I thought that the game played a little floaty for some parts but when I was doing some of the final item collection before finishing the game I realized that the game was controlling well and I was being floaty with my controls. When I had to learn a bit more about how the mechanics worked for some of the final collectibles I really began to appreciate how well the game controlled. I did have to look up how to access a couple of the capacity upgrades at the end because of a mechanic the game didn't tell you about. But making the mechanic work for me was pretty satisfying. It didn't take long to learn to do properly either.

This game was really strong in pretty much every avenue and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in the trailer. Nothing but praise here!