LogFAQs > #961687380

10. Metroid Dread (2021) - Switch

The more time passes, the fonder my opinion of this game gets. The ending sequence is awesome, and I had a lot of fun going around collecting all the items at the end. Shinespark puzzles are great, and moving around once you have all the powers is excellent. It's fun how huge the map is, and how you can traverse it quickly and efficiently despite its size. However, even going around exploring reminded me of how the game has some ups and downs.

Starting with the negatives, there seem to be a lot of one-way doors. This works for funneling game progression so that the player doesn't get lost, but it makes exploring the map to find everything at the end a lot more inconvenient. I wish they would've done something to unlock these areas once you get the final power up or something. Getting some items is frustrating, since the shinesparking can require a good deal of precision, but once I figured out the tricks (like sparking into a slope to keep your charge) it got to be pretty enjoyable. The load times are a bigger negative. Unfortunately, I played the physical version, which apparently has much longer load times than storing the digital version on the Switch's internal storage, and the elevators/teleporters between regions always felt like a pain to use because of how long the loads are. I don't think I've ever played another Metroidvania with such long load times (SotN has some loads, but it's more a lot of short load times then the long ones Dread has). I can imagine playing this on a faster Switch 2 in a few years (or on an emulator now) would be more pleasant in this regard. Finally, it's kind of surprising how few powers you end up using at the end. Some remain useful throughout and are cool, but there's a good chunk of powers that serve only to gate your progress. There are way too many missiles and beams, IMO. Some of them have cool effects, but some basically do nothing. I found the game to be a bit dull at times early on, and getting boring powerups didn't help with that.

But that's about it for the negatives! There are very cool powerups in here too, and it's extremely fun to use the good ones. Classic ones like the Morph Ball feel better than ever here. Getting it and using it to explore might've been the most joyful part of the game. Some of the new ones like the Flash Shift were great too. I kind of wish there had been more new ones, though. I think just about every power from Super Metroid is in this game.

The game looks gorgeous. I was kinda astonished by how good it looks, really. The cutscenes are great, the weapon/item effects are cool, the environments look nice, etc. And the combat is very good. Probably the biggest obstacle in the combat is how complicated the controls are - you end up using just about every button on the controller, and several powers require you to hold buttons to use them. I wish there'd been a way to swap to missiles instead of holding R to use them. Still, I got used to it eventually, and it was never that big a deal. Some bosses can be a little frustrating, but in a good way - I always felt like I was getting better at them as I fought them and died a lot. The last boss was fantastic. I checked out a speedrun recently too, and all the tricks you can do to make them faster are amazing. The biggest surprise was how entertaining the story parts are. There are some legitimate good twists in here, and it enhanced the experience a lot, which I can't really say for the other Metroid games.

Overall, I've played some more fun Metroidvanias here and there, but this is the best one I played it 2021. It's a lot of fun, and it's one of the best Metroids, IMO (would rank Super above it for sure, not certain about Prime 3 and AM2R, but I prefer it to the rest). I had pretty low expectations of this for various reasons, so I'm glad it surpassed them.

Next game hint: almost every game in the top 10 has robots in it. Coincidence?