Mercury Stem Magnum Opus brings back the Metroid franchise for an incredible successor to Samus Returns.

I personally think this is the best Metroid ever made. It takes everything Fusion did years ago and expands upon it creating a title worthy to be called a sequel in every possible way.

Samus feels amazing to control in any instance of the game, and every powerup and discovery makes you feel like an unstoppable machine.... untile the EMMI shows up, and that's wehre the horror aspect of the title resurfaces. Some of the most tense pursuits in the series, able to be compared to the best horror games.

I love the story presented, able to tie to FUsion and evolving the story of the Metroid universe with an incredible set of events and plot twists. Even past fan favorites are able to return in an amazing redesign.

I personally prefer the more grim atmosphere of fusion's ambience, but I can't deny how good Dread is. An absolute masterpiece.

The second metroid game I've ever played and the only one I've ever beaten. I understand the appeal of the series. I love the exploration and steady pacing of upgrades. The combat, movement and graphics are all unbelievably good. The bosses are truly hit-or-miss, and only about 5 of them are actually unique and as a result quite challenging. The backtracking was overall minimal, mostly left to re-exploring areas in new rooms you haven't been to, or a new environment. The game teaches you a lot through trial and error, which can be frustrating if your general catalogue has been much more forgiving like I feel mine has.

I think the amount of upgrades was baffling. Late in the game you have about a dozen abilities you have to remember at any given moment. They pile on quickly because the game is fairly short. The weapon and damage upgrades are odd because the minute you get something new, there is now an enemy that's somehow immune to it. This game and I'm sure the franchise as a whole don't really coddle you or hold your hand in many ways - not a critique or a complaint. As someone basically new to this specific franchise it took some time to adapt to and by the time I was done adapting the game was already over.

The EMMI sections are thrilling at the beginning of the game, but there are so many of them that by the end it was just exhausting. In two specific instances this was very annoying because you are trapped under water moving at a snail's pace.

Story - 7.5/10 With writing that expanding on cool lore.
Gameplay - 9.5/10 The moment to moment movement and combat are great. The unique bosses are incredible. The number of times you repeat some bosses takes off that last .5
Presentation - 10/10 The game looks stunning, the suits Samus has in this are incredible. Every area has great unique vibes and an attention to background detail that kept making me genuinely say wow.

In the same vein as Metroid Fusion, Metroid Dread chooses to create a game where instead of giving you free reign of the entire game world, like Super Metroid, the game will gently guide you in a relatively consistent path. However, unlike Metroid Fusion, this game has no interest in cultivating fear. Samus is a fucking god in this game. Unstoppable. You are the limiting factor in Samus-- and getting good at this game means removing that limiter. All the little nicks and fluff have been cut out here. This game is short and fucking incredible.

Rookie Mode
Clear Time - 16:31
Play Time - 28:18
Items - 89%

Yes - I was that bad that I effectively spent 12 hours dying and retrying boss fights.

The rugged crevasses of alien skin and brilliant sheen of lush backgrounds and foregrounds are an incredible feat, especially on the Switch. There were only a few moments of slowdown, and it was even pretty in handheld mode. There were too few bosses, and only a few of them had varied attack patterns. The renowned music of Metroid is sadly reduced to pitifully lackluster boss themes and uninteresting area backing tracks. Since this was my first Metroid game, I can't be sure if Dread's cramped design is a staple of the series or a choice for the modern game journalist.

I think that this is now my favorite 2D Metroid. I love the way Samus moves. On the heels of playing Super and Fusion before this one, I can handedly say that the controls have never felt tighter which makes the gameplay both fun, accessible, but also challenging.

Exploration might be a bit more guided than in other areas, but the search for powerups has never felt more fluid and engaging for me.

My only major critique is the overuse of the Chozo warriors and robots... I could have done with more creative boss encounters, especially in the second half of the game when these particular fights become ubiquitous. But otherwise this is a sublime Metroid experience and probably one that I will go back to more often than any other.

Samus se manie à la perfection, le framerate est impec et le jeu est tellement beau, mention spéciale à la carte très bien détaillée et clean

Mais il y a un seul truc qui m'empêche de lui donner 5 étoiles : les E.M.M.I

Ces saloperies qui te foutent le stress et qui te one shot si tu loupes le contre (le laps de temps pour appuyer sur le bouton, faut avoir des réflexes de ninja xD), encore heureux qu'on recommence à l'entrée de la salle et pas au dernier point de sauvegarde

Ceci étant dit, c'est un sacré jeu à faire et à refaire

This is gonna be a tough one. To be honest, this game forced me to re-organize my backloggd notation and create "4stars : very good in its genre"

Because I believe it's exactly what Dread is: really good in its genre. I cannot honestly state it is bad or things aren't well done, with the notable exception of music, which isn't not as as good as I think it might have been considering the production level, the production owner (Nintendo), the licence the game belongs to (Metroid) and the genre the game belongs to (Metroid-vania). Yet, can I say I consider it a good Metroid-vania? That's a good question.

To be fair, that's the first Metroid game I ever payed if we consider wandering arround completely lost in a 1st person metroid on the Wii at the age of 6 isn't something we can call a game experience. Nontheless, I know what metroid-vania are: I'm used to Castlevnias (Dawn of Sorrow, Order of Ecclesia, Bloodstained, Super IV) and I certainly know or/have played other games in the genre. About Castlevania: i consider the games I've played masterpieces. I frequently listen to their killer soundtrack.

Considering all things said above, my expectations were to discover a pinacle of the genre featuring a great soundtrack. As stated, soundtrack isn't great, but what's about gameplay?

Well, the 1st hour is... Beyond all expectations. It is carefuly crafted, it's in my opinion a near perfect 1st time user experience. You learn how to move, then how to fight. You're then introduced to simple rules establishing the world, its concepts, enemis and levels. Then you encounter the deadliest enemies and your introduced to the counter-attack system. You fight this enemi in a simplified boss fight. Then you're forced into a scary survival horror phase leading to a pursuit in which you have to run for your life.
This is as brilliant as stressful and exhausting. It voluntarly doesn't give you enough time to get confident with controls and mecanics. This is all for pace, and as I state in many of my reviews: pace is 90% of games pleasure.

If this boiling hot pace was maintained throughout all the adventure this game would have been one of the best ever made. Unfortunately, strange design choices lower the interest of the cat-and-mouse game between you and EMMIs (I think of the invisibility feature, which in my opinion is available too soon). That being said, the game's globaly well paced thanks to two major things: bosses and upgrades.

Bosses are very good in their vast majority. I have no complain about them. I'll even remember the magma core boss for a while considering how clear and joyous its patterns were. I also want to point out the submarine boss, which was more of a puzzle, which constituted a nice (nintendo) switch of pace. Unfortunately there are two things I found not-so-good about bosses. The first one is the final boss, which is interesting, but waaaaaaaay too long and difficult. The second one is something I honestly struggle to understand considering nintendo funded this game. The game's flooded with really poor designed sub-bosses you'll fight counteless times. Neither chozo soldiers nor Mawkin warriors are fun to fight. Even if I was convinced it was something of the past, the game spams two of them in a small area to create "novelty, challenge" -> this only create a urge to pull-out the cartridge and sell it to the nearest videogame shop.

Upgrades are, I think, the issue I have with this game. There are two types of uprgades: the ones that actually are upgrades that unlock gameplay, and the ones that aren't upgrades. The first one are cool: walking on the wall, running very fast, charging your shots... All this unlocks new possibilities and empowers both the character and the player. The second one are smokescreen that actually change nothing to the game except allowing you to open a door : piercing shots are just shots, stronger missiles are just missiles, ice missiles are just missiles.

All of this is very disturbing considering upgrades are at the core of metroid-vania designs. I mean, when you unlock something in castlevania, you either use it till the very end (i.e : double jump), either you CAN you use it if you want: most of the time, it's a new weapon with a new pattern, which mean you can use it outside of its straight mandatory use of opening a door. Metroid doesn't feature that, which mean skillset strangely appear... Weak, in comparison of a Castlevania. From the begining to the end of Dread, all you do is shooting and walking, which isn't the same in Castlevania. This bother me, because i'm scared i'm in a "I knew Castlevania when I was a kid so I love it and cannot consider it inferior to other things" mood. But I honnestly think castlevania is much more interesting on this point than Metroid is.

This is a much bigger issue than it first seem because here's the catch: why would you lock a door with a key you've unlocked on level 2 (let's say, invisibility) during level 8? There's no point in it: the devs know it, that's why they didn't do so. But this creates the following issue: upgrade are perishable. If the level designer doesn't specifically design a puzzle arround the running ability, then there's no point to run. That's exaclty what happens. As a consequence, the running ability becomes useless since the 4th level is done. This is a pity.

I must also point out what I'll call "lame" upgrades, like "infinite jump, but only on a horizontal line under water when the moon is half and it's 4am". This seems like... Useless. This seems like exactly what it is after i talked to a friend who knows the serie: legacy. Dread is drowned under the serie's legacy: it is too scared of disappointing to try something new. As a matter of fact, it is even too scared of its legacy to try NOT to put somehting in the game. What's the point of infinite jump in an horizontal line under water? None. But if we don't implement it, Jean-Michel-fan-of-Metroid will complain. So we do. This leads to difficult to use mecanics, like infinite jumps you have to time on who knows what (even the game says "you have to execute it on a precise timing" but doesn't tells you what timing it is lol).

So yeah. A very, very good action game. Very difficult too: in fact I think it's too hard as I think nearly all metroid-vanias are too hard and I don't know why we keep setting their difficulty like this. In my opinion, a game that use less smartly and with less diversity it's "action" side compared to Castlevanias. It trades it for horror sequences that are wonderful at the beginning of the game, better plateform sequences and very cool high-speed chase phases.

Not an absolute must have on Switch, but definitly a good pick.

But yeah, musics are disappointing.

This could've been my favorite Metroid gameplay wise BUT they screwed up the music so badly. The tracks I remember are just so agressively mid and whatever. An exciting soundtrack can save a game for me, but Dread made me realize a souless soundtrack also can kill a game to me. I've heard many people say they could bypass it due to the excelent sound balancing helped to immerse them... I'm just not one of those. With a mid soundtrack even performing the coolest of tricks and fighting the best bosses feels like nothing.

my first ever Metroid game aaaaand this was really good!
really liked the moveset, map layout and honestly the sense of polish enhanced the whole experience : the game looks great with amazing cutscenes to boot and the endgame is honestly extremely fucking cool. also always fun to be able to sequence break the game with the hand you're dealt.
I'd maybe just say that the EMMIs kinda get old after a while, their sequences can sometimes just feel unfair, and that there was a tiny itsy bit too much backtracking. (also wasn't huge on some of the bosses)
really makes me wanna try the rest of the franchise! (2D and 3D)

First time I played Metroid Dread I got it on launch day and finished it on that same day. On the next day I got all the collectables and played through it again. Now I guess I'm playing through it every year around this time. There's a lot of problems in Dread: The recycled bosses, samey feeling areas, kinda eh music and most importantly the classic Metroid atmosphere that the series is known for just isn't there. That being said, it's an absolute blast. Samus controls so smooth and fluid, the interconnected yet linear level design is some of the coolest I've seen in any game and the boss fights are the best in the series. Super, Fusion, Zero Mission and especially Prime might scratch that ambient Metroid itch more but Dread is just an unbelievably fun and well designed action game.

I haven't played any Metroid or even Metroidvanias before so this was a fresh experience for me. It's a good game.

The robots that follow you around freaked me out way more that I thought they would. The way they corner you and give you one perfect shot to parry them creates some seriously intense situations which is completely unexpected from a 2D platformer. The game can be pretty challenging at times which I appreciate, the final boss being one of them. I struggled quite a bit with that bird guy but damn did it feel good once I beat him.

I wasn't aware of how satisfying Metroidvanias can be, the formula of optionally returning with new gear to once sealed off areas to find even better gear is just so pleasing. The story is interesting with a cool twist and is more than passable for what type of game this is.

The only major thing that turned this game down for me was it's price tag. I really don't mind short games and at times prefer them but to pay $80 Canadian for this 9 hour game is a no. This is also from Nintendo who almost never puts their products on sale, even if they did, the lowest it'll go is $55 which I still think is too high. Price aside, this game is good and makes me want to explore Metroid and its genre much more in the future.

This game is super good, it’s just awesome. Right. The music, while good, replaying the game, I think oh yeah this track is a banger! But I am not remembering the tracks like, weeks and months after playing the game. The boss fights are fantastic. The art design? Tops a notch. The game suffers a bit being on the switch, the game was being, possibly, developed around a switch + or whatever, a system with boosted specs, but that got shelved. So it can look a bit pixelated, but still. Fantastic. The cutscenes are great, they do a great job characterizing Samus a lot more for this game, she’s very expressive for being stuck in a suit of armor. It’s a true to itself, Metroid game. And it’s fantastic. I think a remaster of sorts on the Switch Successor would do WONDERS. I need more Samus Aran though Nintendo, please show Metroid Prime 4 this June, it’s, nearly, your last chance.