So I 100%'d this game this morning. It's a pretty good Metroid game!
My complaints are largely the same as above. The EMMI sections suck, especially the purple EMMI. That one involves a creature that moves faster than you, can see through walls, can shoot a purple ball at you through walls, and mostly involves trying to get through water without the gravity suit. The EMMI sections in general are bad, but this particular one is especially awful. Fortunately, the EMMI stuff is loaded in the front of the game, with a smaller resurgence in the back half. If they were as prevalent as the marketing would have you believe, I wouldn't have finished this game. As it is, they're a relatively minor part of the game.
The music is also very lacking. Here, listen to this, it's the Brinstar theme from Super Metroid. Dread completely and utterly lacks anything of the sort and what music this game does have is buried beneath everything else happening. I listened to some of the soundtrack on Youtube and it's just really bland and boring, so it's not entirely the fault of the audio mixing. I played some of this on a decent home theater system and some of it with a pair of headphones at my computer and at both places it's the same story.
One complaint I didn't mention above deals with 100%ing the game. ALL of the tough-to-get expansions in the game are hidden behind shinespark puzzles. ALL of them. Not "most of them", all of them, as if the only challenge Mercury Steam could come up with was fucking shinespark puzzles. Now, I do enjoy a clever shinespark puzzle and I don't think any franchise outside of Metroid has ever done them, but I want something else. Anything. A difficult environment to navigate, a bonus boss, something cleverly hidden that requires analyzing the map for oddities, something other than another shinespark puzzle. Everything else is pretty easy to find, but there's no wall jumping puzzles, no tight platforming, nothing as far as difficult hidden items. Just shinespark puzzles as far as the eye can see, and by the final one I was so fucking done with shinespark puzzles.
Finally, I feel like the controls are too loose for some of the things they want you to do in the late game, especially when dealing with the aforementioned shinespark puzzles. I personally would rather use L to aim diagonally like in Fusion/Zero Mission than hold L to anchor your feet to the ground and aim with the analog stick. I also think that Samus shouldn't aim her gun any direction other than straight ahead or straight up unless you're holding down that bumper. Far too often, I would fumble a shot or something because I had the analog stick tilted a little too far up or down so that Samus wasn't aiming straight ahead. I also think that you magnetize to ledges a little too easily (I want to drop down, damn it) and I think the game misses spin jump inputs a lot. Like, a whole hell of a lot, to the point where I occasionally took tons of damage because Samus didn't jump in mid air even though she was somersaulting and I was pushing B. Speaking of controls, I can't imagine playing this with the Joycons. Play this on a TV with the Pro controller. If you have a Switch Lite... ouch.
I have a few other nitpicks - I think the first few areas are visually uninteresting, for instance - but I think the above are the things that keep this from being in the same class as Super, Zero Mission, and AM2R.
On the bright side...
I did say this was a pretty good Metroid game and I meant it. The bosses here are great, mostly. I especially liked the final boss, which felt ripped straight out of Mega Man Zero and I mean that in the best way possible. I think the levels and areas are designed really well and navigating them is a lot of fun. The game's first half feels pretty linear, but we've already seen a lot of sequence breaks and crazy shit people have been doing. I got the Scan Pulse way earlier than I was meant to via some good ol' fashioned bomb jumping. I complained a bit about aiming, but the actual movement - navigating around the environment and stuff - feels great. I think it's interesting that the game is way more about an ascent than a descent - you start at the bottom of the world and not the top, which mixes things up in some interesting ways. I think the map is extremely useful (this is how you fucking do it, Hollow Knight, you and your goddamn "find the cartographer" bullshit). I think the game strikes a really good balance between hiding things well but also ensuring that you never need a guide to figure out what to do. In the same vein, I think it leads players along its main path without having to explicitly tell people where to go. I think it's really good about letting you get to places you're not supposed to be able to get to and also subtly ensuring that you can get back out. I don't know for certain if there's anywhere you can soft lock, but it seems like you'd have to try really hard to find such. I really like that if you die, you pretty much always start right outside of the last safe door you went through (right at the boss door, right at the EMMI gate, etc.).
I genuinely think this is a great game. It's not the best 2D Metroid, it's not as good as Timespinner, it's certainly not as good as Bloodstained, but it's still really good and I'd call it a must-play for the Switch. With a Pro controller, on a TV. Don't use the Joycons.
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