Metroid Dread is a broken game

I have played enough. This game is inherently broken.

What’s tragic is that there is a good degree of fun within the title. When all the Sakamoto story elements and gimmicks aren’t being done, when Mercury Steam isn’t trying to show off, the game is actually fun and very addictive. It is like dopamine when you get a new ability. You want to keep playing.

The sound and movement are all very well done. Bravo.

The game is doing enough good things that overlook the bad things.

-Lack of D-Pad for movement, a no-no in 2d games.

-Melee counters to the endless stupid bats (and the bats keep reappearing and reappearing).

-The pointless Emmis who are as scary as a wet fart… i.e. a nuisance to go around.

-The stupid research-station-with-biomes theme that has been redone and redone since Other M and Fusion. Why is Sakamoto so scared of an organic or natural planet?

-Conversations with ADAM where he tells you what to do.

-X parasites ad nauseum.

-There is no music in this game. No music!? Insane.

-WAY too much gatekeeping. You don’t really have ‘upgrades’ so much as ‘keys’. The game will upgrade the enemies everywhere in the game so you never feel powerful. Whoever was the gameplay director simply doesn’t understand Metroid.

All of these could be overlooked based on the juicy yum yum of Metroid exploration and adventuring. But what cannot be overlooked, what screeches the pacing to a dead stop, are the boss fights.

And there are LOTS of boss fights.

These boss fights are not like anything I’ve seen in a Metroid game… including the Prime games. The boss fights are where the player has to use a complicated control scheme (believe me, your hand will cramp) to do constant patterns and timing reflexes. You respawn right outside the boss fight so you get to die again and again and again. And you will do this for hours. Just for a boss.

A definition of a game is that people can play the game in different ways and get different results. For example, two people will play PONG differently depending on how the paddles connect with the ball. Or they will play Tetris differently. Or Pac-Man. And so on. And should a game not allow that player difference to exist, it is debatable if it is even a game. Metroid Dread is guilty of this.

Most of Metroid Dread has everyone playing the same way especially during the bosses. There is no room for player creativity or different tactics during the boss fights. The boss fights are designed for the player to do the pattern perfectly with the correct timing. That is it.

It is so bad that the boss fight will change into a cutscene where the player must ‘counter’ at the correct times. By ‘counter’, I mean hit a button at the precise second. This same cutscene plays the same for everyone. If you hit the button at the right time, then the boss dies. If you are off, you get hurt and have to do more damage so the counter cutscene comes up again.

The boss fights, alone, will ensure people won’t be replaying Metroid Dread.

I’m very close to being done with the game. Yet, with ANOTHER boss fight that drags on and on and on, I eventually just put down the controller and said, “Enough. These people don’t know how to make a game. This is NOT fun.”

If you think the turbo tunnel in Battletoads is fun, then you will think the boss fights in Metroid Dread are fun. They are exactly the same in principle.

It’s not that I can’t do it. I just don’t want to do it. I’m simply too old for this shit. My time is far too valuable to be going through boss attempts again and again and again. And for what? For an upgrade that does nothing but serve as a key? To get locked into another area where I won’t be able to move around freely again? To watch them upgrade all the enemies so I never become powerful? (This happens to places you’ve already been.)

Honestly, this game feels very amateurish. It’s like Mercury Steam couldn’t deal with the open ended nature of the Metroid upgrades so they turned all of it into a key to a gate within linear loops.

Can you believe it took four years to make this game? It took four years to make the Manhattan Project for crying out loud! (for the hardcore gamers, I am referring to the development of nuclear weapons).

Right now, people are still inside the hype, there is still marketing going on, but over time, the major flaws of this game are going to be felt more prominently. The most egregious are the boss fights. Beating these bosses the first time might be ‘exciting’. But doing it again and again on playthroughs? I can’t imagine Metroid Dread ever becoming a ‘comfort food’ type game anyone would play. The boss fights make the game unfun and literally destroy the pacing.

It’s a damn shame. Metroid Dread has some very fun core elements going for it. It feels like Mercury Steam is trying to do some grandstanding or something. “Look at us! Look how amazing we are!” But it is all amateurish. It isn’t fun at all.

I recommend Metroid Dread as a game to pick up when it is on sale or in the bargain bin. The gameplay is too sloppy to be a A tier game. And the boss fights will ensure you won’t be replaying the game anytime soon… if ever.

Now that I’ve decided to stop playing Metroid Dread, I feel so much better. You know you’re playing something not fun when stopping it makes you happy.