[Fuzz]

Finished Dread. It really ended up being a disappointment. Spoilery review.

Spoiler!

I have played and finished almost every Metroid game(skipped Federation Force), and this one is near the bottom. I mentioned before about most of the environments being samey and boring, well so is the music. I felt ushered through the game, similar to Fusion. Attempts at exploration or re-visitng areas are often totally cut off to prevent it. Not locked away, like when you don't have a beam to open a door, but temporarily shut out. So there was no motivation to explore areas after upgrades, because you could only reach what the game wanted you too.

The boss fights are mostly irritating, particularly the last one. Maybe it's because I'm old, but I hate QTE, being forced to execute them to progress. EMMI battles all come down to the same thing. Every EMMI section felt less stealth, and more run. Trying to be stealthy just meant it would hang around long enough for your stealth to run out, then still be close by. Better to bolt. I loved the stealth sections in Zero Mission, so this turned to a major disappointment.

The final boss was perhaps doable if you tried it 50 times to figure out all the moves, but I ended up looking at videos, because who wants to keep banging their head against a wall? Earlier Metroid games also had boss's patterns you had to figure out, but you could also spend time collecting upgrades, and kinda force your way through. I always liked that.

I don't even see a reason to revisit the game. I 100% itemed it, despite some annoying challenges that were annoying just for the sake of it...like, having a speed boost area be barely long enough, before a series of jumps and moves. Fine for the second part, but what is the point of arbitrarily making the speed boost zone short? Add 2 more steps, because getting that part of the timing is annoying, while the rest of it is the real challenge.

I should say some of my issues may be because I have a projector, but input lag is only 16.5ms. It should be fine.