I finished METROID DREAD!
I am pleased to report that I finished METROID DREAD!
It only took me five months. Considering that it took me ten years to finish the Main Quest in SKYRIM, that’s like lightning speed.
METROID DREAD won the Best Action/Adventure game award in 2021, and in my opinion the game deserves it completely. It’s the best side-scrolling Metroid to date – it has all the strong points of the previous side-scrolling Metroid games, with the addition of many refinements and a lot of polish.
The plot is a bit of a twist on the usual Metroid formula. Samus is sent to the mysterious planet ZDR to investigate a sighting of the deadly X Parasite, an alien lifeform that could wipe out all life on the galaxy. When she lands on the planet, she’s attacked by a mysterious figure in a more advanced version of her Power Armor and knocked unconscious. When she awakens, Samus finds herself in the lowest level of the planet’s caverns with most of her armor’s abilities missing. So instead of starting on the planet’s surface and fighting her way down to the boss’s lair, Samus has to start in the lowest level of the caves and fight her way back to the surface and her ship to escape.
The controls are fluid and slick. There are several new additions to the game mechanics that are great fun. For instance, Samus can now slide under obstacles, which is useful all through the game up to and including the final boss battle. My favorite new weapon is the Storm Missile, which is kind of like The Mandalorian’s Whistling Birds weapon, but with more explosions.
The EMMI robots are another excellent addition. Seven areas of ZDR are patrolled by EMMI robots, and if they detect Samus entering their zones, they will hunt her, and they have the capability to kill Samus with a single hit. Outwitting, outrunning, and finally defeating the EMMI robots is a major part of the game, and defeat them is immensely satisfying.
The chief villain of the game (no spoilers) has substantially more personality and malevolent motivations than most of the villains in a Metroid game. Samus only has a single spoken line throughout the entire game, but a combination of her gestures, body language, and the occasional eye take beneath her armor’s visor seems to give her more personality than in any game before. For instance, she doesn’t say a word when she runs into an old enemy, but his body language all but screams Not Impressed, further reinforced when she puts a Charge Beam blast into the boss’s face to start the battle.
Way back in the NES era, one of my favorite games was CASTLEVANIA II: SIMON’S CURSE, which was one of the early progenitors of what is has become the “Metroidvania” genre. So between METROID DREAD and BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT (which I finished back in 2020), it’s exciting to see the full concepts of the early Metroidvania games realized on modern hardware with the finesse and smoothness of modern software.
I hope this isn’t the last 2D Metroid game, but if it is, they saved the best for last. So I hugely, hugely recommend this game, and if you have a Switch you should try it out. Though when you finish the game, it announces that Hard Mode has been unlocked.
Hard Mode?!? You mean the main game WASN’T Hard Mode? 🙂
-JM