Metroid Dread - Review
Channel: MGN TV
Date: 2021-10-10

https://mgn.gg/metroid-dread-review

Story

I’m not going to say much here, as I don’t want to spoil the story that is here. What I will say however is this, with all the hints in the trailers, I really expected more than we got out of Metroid Dread. There really wasn’t too much added to the lore in terms of learning more about the Chozo, in fact what we learn about the Chozo is incredibly generic, painfully so. While the ending puts an end to the 35 years of story leaving Metroid open to new adventures with exciting possibilities, I can’t get over how generic and dull the overall story was. We also do not learn why the hell Kraid was even in the game, except to have a memorable boss… The main enemy is called Raven Beak, because well… He has a Raven beak, that pretty much sums up how uninspired the plot is.

Sound

This is another area the game falls flat, the quality of the sound effects are serviceable at best, and not great quality, given the switch’s limited hardware It is understandable, the mixing is also sub par in my opinion. The soundtrack in Metroid has always been stellar, at least it was… The remixes of old tunes are great, but the new music is poor, by far the worst music in the Metroid franchise, it is painfully generic uninspired and unmemorable. The sombre tones of Metroid is gone, nothing really sets the mood. In addition to that, the boss fights which should be dynamic feel dull and lifeless. The main menu theme is great but nothing else is remotely staying in my mind, there’s no staying power.

Gameplay

For me this is a problematic area, overall, it is more Metroid which is not a bad thing, at the same time the general gameplay is very linear and does nothing new, it is well designed overall, however. There are cool new powers, but they are hardly used. I was highly disappointed at how under-utilized powers were. Quite often you will acquire a new power which you use briefly to access a new area, then you can almost entirely forget about it. Now this is true of most Metroid games but with the sheer number of abilities here and given it’s been 20 years since a mainline 2D Metroid, I really expect more. The game also starts given out power ups so fast that they really start to feel like meaningless candy.  It would have been nice to at least see them be used in boss battles.

#metroidreadreview #metroiddread