Lords of Shadow is truly one of the most overhated games ever and for no good reasons either from the Castlevania purists.

Castlevania is one of my fave series and this game right here is one of the top 5 best of the series for me as far as I am concerned.

Everything about it is incredible to me. The voice acting is all fantastic, Patrick Stewart, Jason Isaacs and especially Robert Carlyle as Gabriel? Doesn't get much better than that. Such a star studded cast.

The graphics and concept art are absolutely beautiful and still holds up incredibly well, everything from the luscious forests to the dark castle and snowy mountaintops, it all looks fantastic.

The film score OST is very professionally done and fits the epic cinematic nature of the game.

The story is very profound and philosophical as you'd expect from something Kojima worked on after all, it takes major cues from Dante's Divine Comedy and Gabriel's entire character arc is very well done and tragic as hell.

Oh and I don't give a shit if the combat is just 'a God of War clone' because it does it just as good, if not better than GoW.

The only reason this game gets shit is because it did something from the norm of Castlevania, if this would've been a new IP and didn't have the Castlevania title attached to it, I think it would've been a massive success.

baby's first immersive sim¹

wonderful game. loved it way more than i thinked i would -- not a big fan of open world games. best princess zelda, love the history and THAT ENDING was really emotional.

made me think how good zelda actually is, not only as a franchise, but as a mythos.

¹i am baby

As hard as Breath of the Wild hit on release, there actually were a few aspects that disappointed me about it, and it’s not the stuff people usually discuss. My initial expectation was that this would be a full post-apocalypse in the style of the original Zelda, where the pacing is completely hands-off and dungeons are just random caves you stumble into. As well-done as Breath’s towns and set pieces and characters were, it all ran pretty directly against what I wanted out of it.

Still, the game’s magic would draw me back in for another replay time and again over the years, and it wasn’t until I sincerely held it up against its rigid and limited predecessors that I started to appreciate just what a quantum leap it was over not just the rest of the Zelda series, but many modern games in general. I still consider myself a fan of those older Zeldas, but whatever tonal preferences I may have with some of them, they’re so effortlessly eclipsed by Breath’s smooth free-form mechanics that give me a feeling of innate, childlike fun that is strangely uncommon in this type of atmospheric open world. It’s wild to think this game may still be topped by its upcoming sequel, because it’s already making the whole rest of the industry look dated by comparison and combines virtually everything I look for in games in a package that’s entirely unique.

I jumped off a charging horse, killed two Moblins, landed back in the saddle. I climbed a cliff for a solid five minutes only to be headbutted off the top by an unexpected goat. I conjured ice to ascend a waterfall. I flipped a puzzle upside down. I jumped from great heights and played chicken with the ground. I went snowboarding. I unleashed bees on my enemies. I regularly took a big dog for a walk. I bought a house. I built a town. I met a load of wonderful people. I smiled for hundreds of hours.

Breath of the Wild. I don’t think I’ve ever been this conflicted on what angle to approach a game from. There’s so many aspects I could start with, each of them encompassing an important part of the game that’s worth critique. And that makes sense - Breath of the Wild is easily, definitively the largest game I’ve ever finished in terms of scope.

I understand that I sound like a bit of a casual gamer video game player, a normie, a Nintendrone, and… well, in some ways I definitely am, and if I had a bit more experience with open world games (my only other time with the genre was having tried Assassin’s Creed 2 shortly after I started and fell in love with Breath of the Wild. I got frustrated that the game would present such a beautiful, expansive map with such gatekeeping, hand-holding and comparatively superficial parkour and exploration; I have yet to return to the game), I probably would have a better understanding of what triumphs and missteps Breath of the Wild makes for a game of its genre.

But… I think I won’t worry about that. I’ve experienced this game on its own merits, as who I am. I think by writing about this game on a site where people occasionally check in on my writing (hi, everyone who dropped by to wish me well. i can’t thank you enough; i’m doing better for now, though the road ahead is still rocky), I’m proclaiming that I have something worth saying, so I suppose I might as well make it a little personal.


Breath of the Wild had me absolutely hooked when I first experienced it blind in 2020, near the onset of the pandemic. Somehow I’d remained completely oblivious to the Nintendo Switch’s two signature games for years, and just like with Super Mario Odyssey, my reclusiveness found itself rewarded. Up until very recently, I’d thought that there hasn’t been a single Nintendo console for which the flagship Zelda was better than the flagship Mario - in fact, Zelda in general is a franchise I’m pretty mixed on, with most of the games in the series seemingly completely misunderstanding what I like about Zelda and becoming bloated, tedious experiences that in my opinion didn’t respect my time.
In that regard, Breath of the Wild was a breath of fresh air.

So when my cousin who lives with me told me that she’d borrowed a copy of Breath of the Wild from her friend, didn’t gel with it at all and offered me to try it, I approached it with a cautious optimism at best. What followed was me becoming absolutely glued to my Switch for hours on end. I still remember little moments here and there, like the first time I’d gotten Link up to the Plateau tower and couldn’t tell the various other towers and shrines apart; or when after finally marking the four shrines, I accidentally had Link walk off the tower like an idiot and frantically paused the game to warp him back to safety (I think Mirror’s Edge had left me pretty acrophobic in video games; though I want to think I’m over it now); or how I completely failed to pick up the hint when the Old Man would try to teach you about how to cut down trees to use their trunks as makeshift bridges, instead stocking up on some stamina foods and having Link climb around the abyss that separates the Old Man’s house and the Stasis shrine.

But I loved that that was a possible solution at all! The impression I’ve always gotten from Zelda puzzle design post-1992 was that there was only one solution ever intended by the developers for any one puzzle, and that players would (or, at least, I would) get punished for not thinking and approaching the puzzle from exactly the same angles as the designers intended. It’s a suffocating kind of design that’s always turned me of from the Zelda series as its temples transitioned from dungeon crawling to puzzle solving; it’s not that Breath of the Wild is completely exempt from it, but so much more of the game lets you solve it any way you can find within its own rules than any other Zelda game, and video games in general in my experience, that Breath of the Wild was genuinely wonderful to play.

I don’t think a Breath of the Wild review would be complete without a mention of the Great Plateau - it does so much right to set the game up in a bite-sized piece that’s exactly big enough to feel big, especially coming off of Mario games. Not only are individual objectives within the Plateau just as open-ended as the rest of the game is (just look at speedrunner stasis launching Link and bomb shield jumping him all across the place), but the sheer sense of minimalism it provided was amazing, with the Old Man giving the bare minimum of handholding and exposition.

It’s kind of like a great reset manifested as a soft exhale: aside from the Bokoblins (who look so different so as to be unrecognizable), the only familiar Zelda elements I noticed from the Plateau was Hyrule Castle, way off in the distance, and the Temple of Time, left in ruins, its melody fragmented, to prove a bold point.
Not a rupee, not a town or even a single human soul besides Link and the Old Man; I didn’t even encounter Koroks until Link had left the Plateau. In terms of sheer utopian post-apocalyptic atmosphere, the Plateau is simply unparalleled by the rest of the game, and like Pikmin, it’s a sort of beauty that’s unfortunately a little too good to last.
Still, even then, I’d say Breath of the Wild is a sort of rarity for modern Nintendo in how little it relies on rote nostalgia, how it takes an iconoclastic approach to a lot of Zelda tradition, and makes use of what it keeps mostly for deliberate impact and effect.

All these experiences, not to mention the two hundred hours that ensued once I actually got Link off of the plateau, were probably perfect to experience for the first time during the pandemic, being offered a sense of freedom and outdoors exploration that I craved more than ever in a particularly suffocating period of my life, for more reasons than just the novel virus itself.
I know a handful of my reviews across the past year have said “I liked it because I played it during the pandemic”, but Breath of the Wild might be my most sincere, most unreserved nomination for that title.


Which is not to say that I don’t have any reservations about Breath of the Wild. Bear with me, you’ll hate me after I say this: in some ways, I think the 2017 Zelda game is all breath… but no depth.

I feel a little bad saying that about Breath of the Wild on account of what it does accomplish, honestly. But there are a lot of small issues I have with each individual nuance of the game that add up and creep in as a sort of mild dissatisfaction that detriments from my overall experience.

A lot of them will sound like familiar nitpicks - what’s with rain and climbing being so at odds in such a clumsy way, and why does Revali’s Gale remove half of the complexity provided by both mechanics? Is the way they handled weapon durability really the best way they could have gone about it? Don’t the infinite material limit and expandable equipment slots incentivise hoarding? Are extra temporary health/stamina foods not straight-up better than restorative foods? Does the Master Sword (and Urbosa’s Fury) make weapon durability pointless once unlocked?

But I think you can agree with me that in 2021, these seem like pretty uninteresting thoughts to explore. So maybe let’s not do that, and look at the bigger picture once again.

On paper, I really love the idea of how Breath of the Wild decides to paint its story and central conflict, where most of the story has already taken place, and you’re mostly going through the post-mortem of everything and slowly building up Link’s power until he’s ready to go and set things right. With the conflict against Ganon being looming but never present until Link actually goes to confront him, Breath of the Wild presents itself as the most peaceful and beautiful apocalypse ever.


But, as much as I resonated with Zelda’s struggle to keep her composure under overwhelming impostor syndrome, being forbidden from exploring her true passions, how much responsibility was put on her to the brink of straight up breaking, and how her father clearly struggled himself throughout the entire ordeal, how much grief there is to be found if you look around in aspects of Breath of the Wild’s story, especially family-related grief…
I couldn’t tell you I actually cried through any of it - and I’m a person who’s moved to tears by the slightest instance of family-related loss in fiction.

On one hand, I think it’d make sense to be able to approach all these events from some distance - a hundred years’ worth, in fact - but the thing is that with the memories, Nintendo wanted players to be able to experience these key moments themselves. And maybe this was better than going through the entire story and having to bear watching Zelda under so much anxiety through every moment of uninterrupted storytelling? I’m not sure.
And I don’t think Nintendo was entirely sure about how much show and how much tell they wanted, exactly how detached or attached they wanted players to be from the events of Hyrule’s past. It’s the Super Mario Galaxy issue again: Nintendo not being sure how minimalist or maximalist they wanted to be.

A lot of these issues communicate an underlying unconfidence to me as to how Nintendo felt about moving past a lot of Zelda conventions. I feel like the swordplay and weapon-based combat is a big sign - neither Flurry Rush nor Sneakstrike feel like actually interesting mechanics, and while it’s clear that Nintendo wanted to revolutionize swordplay in Zelda, the impression I get is just that… it’s shallow breathing. I would honestly have liked to see them go even further. Ditch the idea that Link has to be a swordsman. It’s called Breath of the Wild. Maybe let Link be the breath of the wild - the wind. Maybe his rune powers could revolve around controlling air flow and wind, and become a mainstay of his kit. Maybe combat could involve deflecting enemy projectiles and blowing them back into them - kind of like an equivalent of perfect shielding for physical projectiles, and less inconsistent.

Maybe they could even (gasp) let Link be anything other than a white blond boy. I’ve literally never understood Nintendo’s thinking regarding Link as a player avatar, and a lot of related points affect how I enjoy games in general (not even just Zelda) more than I honestly care to admit.
Am I ready to completely tank my credibility as a video game critic? I am. Let’s do this.


“You’ve acquired the legendary Master Sword, that which seals the darkness. You feel that the sword itself delights to be in your possession…”

...what?

”You scurry back to the Pokémon Center, protecting your exhausted Pokémon from any further harm…”

huh?

”YOU GOT A MOON!
Bench Friends”

I think you get where I’m getting at with this. Who is you? Who is this you that video games talk to? Is it the player character? Is it the player? Do video games know how to tell the difference? Do video games even recognize that there is a distinction to be made?

There are basically two examples I can think of that are consciously exempt from this, both by the one same person dog: Undertale and Deltarune. A lot of other games seem to conflate the concepts of the player character and the player in how they address them, even in cases where multiple player characters are involved. And honestly? It frustrates me quite a bit.
I have a bit of an irrational obsession against the original Dragon Quest, for example - and that’s because the NES script constantly refers to the Hero as “you”, in a position that I have no connection to whatsoever. I’m a bit more comfortable with Pokémon games by contrast partly because the older games at least have the courtesy to refer to the player character only by the name players choose for them, letting them detach from the player character if they wish; and the newer games at least make the process of relating to the player character more natural by letting players customize their characters to better represent how they wish to present within the game world.

But by far the worst case I have about it is with Zelda, because of how the series insists that Link is a one-for-one representation of the player: making him silent so that players can supposedly imagine what he says, and what his personality is like; coming from humble backgrounds so that players can imagine themselves being the underdog just like Link, triumphing despite not having any inherent advantages; his name (customizable in most entries, even those with Link in the name) is at least partly based on his role in connecting the player to the game; Eiji Aonuma even making the extremely audacious claim that they intended him to be gender neutral in various incarnations.

To which I will always quote the single reason why Romani insists Link should train with her to fight off the aliens in Majora’s Mask:

“You’re a boy, won’t you try?”

Breath of the Wild does break a lot of conventions regarding Link. Link’s chronological earliest appearance is after already having been knighted, with the Master Sword in his possession; his name is fixed, though that probably has more to do with the fact that cutscenes are fully voiced now; and his dialogue options display more character than ever, and even provides monologue at times (the Japanese and Korean scripts present the Adventure Log entirely from Link’s own point of view, in fact). In a lot of senses, Link is more of an autonomous character than ever before, and a lot of the snags in player/character incongruence that remain can be bypassed with how much choice Breath of the Wild provides.

So it feels all the more incongruent when an essential part of the Divine Beasts quest has Link thrown out from Gerudo Town for being male, only being allowed entry under the specific understanding that he engages in crossdressing, doing something he shouldn’t be doing. Comparing it to Super Mario Odyssey, where Mario literally only tries on (a version of) Peach’s wedding dress because he feels like it, and the only two responses he gets are a “You’re getting married and you didn’t tell me?!” from Luigi and a “You look amazing! Love the outfit!” from Bowser, it feels particularly out of touch by contrast.

You might have noticed I’ve referred to Link specifically as himself throughout this review without conflating him with me or you. Call it a nitpick, call it worse things, but this matters to me, you know?

I think Breath of the Wild is definitely going in a direction where I want to see the Zelda franchise going, and even as a snapshot of a work in progress, I’m hooked. It’s just that I think Zelda is capable of a lot more, and I think it’s capable of being even more meaningful to video games than it already has been in the past four years. I’m not worried about that. The sequel already looks like it’s checking a lot of boxes that I’m really excited about, so let’s wait and see.

I’m holding my breath, Nintendo. Your move.

Despite being one of the more recognizable and prestigious flagship titles from Nintendo, Metroid has always struck me as being more of a niche franchise than what its historical legacy would suggest. In a similar fashion to what Link to the Past did for the Zelda series, Super Metroid polished and perfected the open ended design and progression concepts of its predecessors, eliminating much of their more frustrating aspects, and established a success formula that the franchise has religiously followed from then on. In doing so, Metroid has been the same game for more than two decades, and putting aside its 3D detours with the Prime series, it has been trapped in an ever increasingly enclosed bubble of self reference and iteration.

Metroid Dread wastes no time with introductions, and the moment you grab hold of Samus Aran, it feels like coming home again. Take away the new coat of paint, and you are back to the same old Metroid song and dance, rushing past grid like corridors of underground caves and industrial lab rooms filled with alien critters to waste away and locked doors that you will inevitably open once you get the next power up on the checklist. Ever the stimulating power trip that characterizes the series, Dread's biggest achievement is how it seamlessly paces itself and constantly rewards the player in quick succession as it twists and turns the map, demostrating a seasoned understanding of the Super Metroid formula that makes putting down the controller a very hard thing to do. After what felt like a deliberate eternity, getting the Morph Ball power up was a non spoken mutual understanding between game and players in the know.

Unfortunately, that's only what Dread ever is. While the E.M.M.I. cat and mouse chase segments are the most inspired Dread ever gets, they are restricted by a need to appease the fandom's rejection of inconvenience, and so are sectioned off into clearly identifiable areas where a death only amounts to setting the player back to the start of said area. A brief pesky light detour into survival horror before going back to business as usual. For a series so deified for its somber atmosphere and exploration of the unknown, Dread contents itself with regurgitating the same landscapes and biomes we have grown tired of seeing since Super that rarely give an excuse to trade the foreground for the background, and the story, apparently a passion project in the works for many years, hardly justifies its purpose other than continuining on the concepts and themes that previous entries have already expanded upon in a much more meaningful way. Metroid Dread does not earn its title. So I ask this question: how many more times must I expect to get the space jump near the end of the game? How many more instances of blowing up a glass tunnel with a power bomb will I be subjected to? How much longer must the Chozo be the center of the universe?

Thanks to the flourishing of indie development of the last decade, the metroidvania genre has since seen a vast increase in experimentation that has given every kind of Metroid fan something to look forward to. I have made my peace a long time ago with the notion that the Metroid series now occupy a very specific set of qualities and standards meant to appeal to an audience that values the power fantasy of the franchise above everything else, and I can gladly say that Dread fits that bill perfectly with the most fun to control Samus and a plethora of movement and combat options that I'm sure will be exploited for years to come. If I want that old feeling of treading an alien and hostile environment by the skin of my teeth, I'll play Rain World. If I want to revel in indecipherable mystery and obtuse puzzle solving, I'll play La-Mulana. If I want to experience Metroid's atmosphere, I'll play Environmental Station Alpha. I just hoped that Metroid Dread could have once again been all those things for me.

Metroid Dread is good. It's great for most of it, even. But it's never exceptional. And as long as the franchise decides to live under Super Metroid's shadow, it will never be again.

I'm probably stating the obvious opening my review this way, but whether or not Metroid is truly BACK with Dread depends entirely on what you look for in the series. It's Samus, it's caverns, it's bombing random blocks, but is it intricate world-design and schmovy survival action? Ehhhh.

Mechanically, Dread picks up where Samus Returns left off, which itself picked up where Fusion and Zero Mission left off more than 15 years ago. Samus snaps onto ledges, automatically curls up into a ball when you approach tunnels, accelerates and decelerates immediately and falls like a rock. For the average person, the adjectives that will come to mind when comparing these controls to the "old" and "clunky" Super Metroid are likely "tight" and "slick" and "modern."

I find it interesting to think about Dread in this context, because it illuminates how we often cling to obvious answers for why certain games are the way they are, instead of simply looking at the experience for what it is. And the experience Super Metroid provided was to let the level design essentially act as a blank canvas for your consistent, non-arbitrary moveset. The tiniest bit of wall can still be kicked off of, and the morphball lets you squeeze through whatever gap you feel you should be able to, because so little of Zebes's geometry was put in place specifically to require the use of individual movement mechanics. One of Super's most famous skips involves barely rolling under the metal gate in Brinstar just before it shuts, which works not because it's a set piece specifically crafted for the morphball, but because the collision boxes are so generalized and speed is retained so naturally.

Look at Zero Mission meanwhile and if you try to wall-jump off of a small platform at a low angle, you won't be able to, because for as saucy as its movement tech may look, the game still expects you to contend with its rigid ledge grabs and pull yourself into arbitrarily positioned morph ball tunnels. All the way back in 2004, we were already playing a Metroid game where speedruns end up hinging more on deliberately hidden shortcuts in the level design, rather than deep exploitable movement tech à la Super.

And don't misunderstand; it is cool that these newer Metroids try to specifically cater to that kind of player mentality. But it's also at least a little mistrustful toward those same players, to expect them to learn all these incredibly specific ways the level design can be broken, rather than hand them a deep set of movement mechanics and let them look at any given part of the game world and say "hmm yeah I can probably do that." If anything, these games have to rely on deliberate speedrun shortcuts because the mechanics on their own give you so little to work with.

Dread's exact place in this debate is confusing, as it's already proving to have far more speedrunning tricks up its sleeve than I personally expected. Originally I was going to go off on how dumb it is that the game bars you from using your power bombs if you find them early, how that proves that the game doesn't really work in a systemic fashion (like Super Metroid, where pick-ups function completely independently of each other within the game's logic,) blah blah blah.

Clearly though, a lot of the skips we're seeing in this early stage of Dread's life are simply the result of clever hitbox manipulation and routing. With how many power-ups come as direct rewards for completing set pieces and killing bosses, I sincerely didn't expect people to reach sub-two-hour playtimes within mere weeks of Dread's release; my expectation was that Dread would be too reliant on tight event triggers. For what it is, it's impressive the game doesn't just come apart at the seams when you break its sequence, and it would be short-sighted to dismiss Dread purely based off that earlier power bomb example.

That said, that fundamental philosophical difference between Dread and a game like Super is still deeply felt in every fiber of the experience. Dread is ultimately still a game that tries to restrict you at every turn, with its rigid wall-jump arcs and doors that conveniently lock behind you even when you're closing in on the final boss already. You can go into either experience with a solid grasp of Samus's movement, but no knowledge of specific level design skips, and Super will feel far more spontaneous and freeing than its 2021 successor; that sense of "yeah I can probably do that" is never coming back. And I feel this says a lot about MercurySteam's priorities with Dread: dogged surface-level adherence to Super's tropes, items and hands-off vibe, without genuine mechanical follow-through.

Instead, Dread is a 2021 video game through and through, meaning it's highly concerned with having you go through a tight progression of escalating challenges. Here's the part where you pull out blocks with your Grapple Beam, here's where you Shinespark through a billion walls in a row for a bit, here's where you're ambushed by a mini-boss. And you know what, I'll say Dread pulls off that modern action romp thing as well as you could hope for. The high movement speed, instant acceleration and low input lag make for a game that's immediately fun to pick up, being able to 360-aim or parry while running and slide right into tunnels without ever breaking momentum makes Samus feel like a fresh bar of soap in your hands. Sprinting through ZDR's many expansive rooms, evocative panoramas stretching out behind you, rays of light softly flowing in, thumping sound effects massaging your ears as you light up the entire screen with big neon-yellow laser shots -- it hits.

The bosses are a surprising highlight. They'll often use different types of projectiles in conjunction with each other, which either can or can't be removed from the screen with your own shots, and some even have relatively dynamic movement and spawn patterns. As rigidly as these enemies tend to cycle between individual attacks, there is enough variation and opportunities to stay on the offensive within those attacks for them to stay remarkably fresh over repeat attempts. I was especially impressed with this duo of mini-bosses you encounter a few times over the course of the game: you can freely bait each one of them to any given part of the sizable fighting arena, resulting in dynamic outcomes and spontaneous situations that feel like relatively uncharted territory for this kind of 2D action game.

But Dread's pursuit of action movie bombast comes at a cost. As I said, it's a tight progression of escalating challenges: the game never stops funneling you forward, often going as far as locking anything that's not the critical path behind you, the proverbial carrot always right in your face. In fact, if you've gone through Dread with the creeping suspicion that the game never actually lets you stray from its single intended path (unless you specifically sequence break or backtrack for capacity upgrades,) then I'm here to rip that band-aid off and tell you that that seems pretty accurate. I'd do more serious testing into this if I were writing something a little more legit than a Backloggd review, but: every one of Samus's key upgrades (minus Space Jump and Scan Pulse) has a corresponding type of lock in the world, and it seems there's never a point where getting one upgrade opens up enough paths that you could, for example, choose the order in which to get the next two.

This is my fancy way of saying that Dread is basically a straight line, except for those few cheeky shortcuts that let you adjust the item sequence a little bit. But that's really only shocking if we forget that, again, it's Fusion and Zero Mission that set Metroid on this exact trajectory in the first place. Comparing Dread to its GBA predecessors, I can kinda take or leave individual aspects of either style. Zero Mission for example showed that you can have a pretty linear game without inhibiting wall-jumps so aggressively, but at least Dread has the decency to not put big glowing waypoints on my map. Etc., etc.

Dread is forcing me to accept that I'm a bitter 16-bit boomer and how, for as much as games can't stop using the same ingredients, the particular way the Super Metroid dish is assembled has just not been matched by anything. Everyone who's played Super Metroid remembers making it back to the surface, to Samus's ship, the dreary rain giving way to triumphant horns, after running a whole lap around Zebes and getting all the key power-ups you need to explore the rest of the planet. It's not only emotionally powerful, it's where the real game begins, finally letting you search for the path forward in whatever way you see fit. This is complimented by a whole slew of genuinely optional upgrades like the Spazer or Plasma Beam, which present a much stronger backtracking incentive than Dread's endless supply of Missile Tanks.

This structure -- first a guided tour around most of the planet, then letting you loose to kill the game's remaining bosses -- hasn't been replicated by any other Metroid. But approaching Dread in particular under this lens reveals just how haphazard MercurySteam's approach to level design is, and how it and Super are too fundamentally incompatible to really be compared, even though Dread is constantly setting itself up for that juxtaposition.

I urge you to play close attention to how Dread's world is assembled. The game world's elevators always connect to these one-way horizontal tunnels: a dead-end to one side, a door to the rest of the area on the other. Individually, many of the rooms have dense, zig-zaggy layouts, but they're stacked together in a relatively linear fashion: the path keeps snaking West for example, until you reach the end of the respective map and the room suddenly curves backward, to naturally guide you back toward where you started.

This way, Dread essentially always auto-pilots you exactly where it wants you to go. Try any alternative door on this path, and they'll always feed into some kind of dead-end (again, unless it happens to lead to a sequence break.) It's to the point where, sometimes, you're funneled into a random teleporter that connects to a random room in a totally different area that you would never think to visit otherwise, and once you're there, the cycle I just described begins anew. Unlike every other Metroid, even the games outside Super, Dread never actually asks you to backtrack or figure out where to go yourself. The level design always curves and bends conveniently to guide you forward, and at best you might have to intuit which wall to bomb next.

The difference is easiest to explain with Super: here, every area is instead entered via a vertical shaft, which ends up functioning as a kind of hub, with many different spokes on either side. These can fork into one-off rooms, long horizontal tunnels, or even another hub-like vertical shaft. You play around in that set of rooms for a bit until maybe you get a new power up, which is where you're meant to draw the connection that "hmm maybe it's time to go and check out some of those other rooms."

It's not just that Super is asking you to understand its level design as an actual world, it has the knock-on effect that you can understand it in the first place. The layout feels planned and internally consistent, rooms have actual navigational functions (again, singular tunnels and shafts that connect to many different rooms on their own) instead of just being video game levels for you to blast through.

Maybe you also played through Dread and couldn't shake the sense that it was kind of flavorless? That it lacked pacing? And the sense that I'm actually moving through a world? You may find those feelings hard to pin down exactly, but they have real game design reasons behind them, and as much as Dread tries to wow you with visually stunning one-off rooms and events at key progression junctures, the way there can't help but feel hollow. MercurySteam stacked together all these set pieces and micro-challenges in the most seamless 2021 way they could, but once you take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's clear you're dealing with an un-traversable clustered mess of mini-video game levels, rather than a world you're meant to understand every inch of. It's telling you unlock the ability to warp freely between any of the game's previously one-way teleporters in the post-game: the map is just too fucking cumbersome to navigate otherwise.

This lack of commitment to actually capture the essence of those older Metroids is even more evident in Dread's use of a modern auto-checkpoint system: we're at least back to dedicated save rooms to lock in your progress and get a break from the action after Samus Returns, but anytime there's even a slight chance of death, you can expect to respawn just one room earlier. Under that light, you can't help but feel incredibly underwhelmed with how inconsequential the EMMI prove to be to the overall experience, considering they're the game's only major gameplay element not cribbed verbatim from older Metroids.

I suppose this is another aspect that has me thinking on how design and player sensibilities have fundamentally shifted over the years. To me, many of Dread's challenges felt fleeting; often satisfying to learn and execute, but ultimately with no real tension or significant room for error... and that last part is what's crucial. I'm going to state the obvious again, but if EMMI kill the player instantly, that means a single mistake will be enough to erase all their progress since the last checkpoint. It stands to reason then, that as a designer you'd make these runs as short as possible to keep possible frustration at a minimum.

So really, what makes the EMMI fall flat is less the lack of real consequence for failure specifically, and more how that reverberates on the design of the EMMI sections themselves. You never actually spend significant time with the first four EMMI (this does not include the first tutorial variant,) the run to the exit is so short you're actually likely to get it on a random attempt without having had to consciously study their behavior or the level design much. Early gimmicks like having to stand still to raise the room's water level do get the blood pumping a bit, but they're far too infrequent to turn the EMMI zones into something more substantial-feeling.

Here's the contradiction many game designers and players don't seem to want to acknowledge: if you give me a trial & error challenge that lasts a minute, kills me instantly, and will take ten attempts to get past, you actually use more of my time than if you'd given me a more substantial challenge with more room for error that sets me back circa three minutes in the event that I fail (which I might not.) Not only that, while the latter situation actually has stakes, the former will have me go through the motions and get used to it so much that I'll be too emotionally numb to feel much of anything by the time I succeed. It's too easy to forget that the idea behind game design is to elicit feelings from the player; you have to understand that they're going to be way more afraid of punishment than they actually need to be. That's the whole point.

It wasn't until the purple and blue EMMI where I got into extended tugs of war and felt legitimate... well, dread, having to move through their domains. The way water is used to slow Samus down in places is especially intelligent, as it becomes impossible to outpace the EMMI once you enter. You'll have to carefully estimate how long it will take you to get across, and you may even want to lure your predator somewhere else first based on your planning.

Consistently exciting was the use of the Omega Blaster, where you get to flip the tables and need to assess the ideal spot in the level design to shoot at the EMMI from (since you need to deal damage consistently to take out their armor.) It leverages your previously gained knowledge of the room layout back when you were the prey, and having to gauge distances and movement timings in this way feels legitimately original in the 2D game space Dread is occupying.

And UNLIKE Metroid Dread, I don't have a smooth convenient segue into my conclusion for this review. It's ultimately a game that left me excited and disappointed in pretty much equal measure. It's undeniably fun to have Metroid's base mechanics back in this giga-polished AAA 2D 2021 Nintendo game, but Dread is not really any less conservative than Samus Returns was four years ago. And even if all you wanted was "more Metroid," is Dread really meeting that bar when it's following up at least FOUR games that were all incredibly daring, sometimes even groundbreaking in their time? The most disruptive thing Dread does is not giving the normies an Easy Mode.

Earth Defense Force was a series I played some games and have a lot fun but 4.1 made me fall in love. The level desing and the balance of the gameplay is top tier, the challenge is amazing, the co-op is my favorite in shooter games, OST is great. Is such a good game and with so much love in begin himself that made me smile just seeing my ranger dudes singing with me. This game is pure fun and heart with a silly but charming history. Serious, give a try.

To protect our mother earth from any alien attack!

Horizon Zero Dawn not only proved that Guerrilla Games could make an open-world action role-playing game but also showed it could make a great one, too. The post-post-apocalyptic green wastelands were a far cry from Killzone‘s fascist dystopia and better for it. While sequels can often fail to hit with the same impact as their surprising predecessor, Horizon Forbidden West improves upon that debut in nearly every way, cementing Guerrilla’s strength in this genre in the process.

Read the full review here:
https://www.comingsoon.net/games/reviews/1210106-horizon-forbidden-west-review-ps5-ps4