Quick Look: Metroid Dread

Game good.

I'm like 3 or 4 hours in, and it's really grown on me. It just feels great to play. I got a few new powers, fought some bosses, and I just love how tight and polished everything is. I've played so many Metroidvanias but this stands up there with the best of em.

is this ripped out of a UPF again?

@drsunchips: Yep

Really glad to see what looks like a badass 2D Metroid again.

@esteban8612: @drsunchips: You can always help support them so they have more workforce to help make content happen.

The music is good, the framerate is solid, and it's fun to move Samus around and aim. BUT the level design sucks, the art direction sucks, there is no satisfying exploration or puzzle solving, no mastery of platforming mechanics, no feeling of danger from exploration or running low on resources, and no satisfaction from improving your ability to control Samus or having tools that make situations less dangerous. Just a bunch of tedious boss fights and poorly obscured colored keys and doors in an thoughtlessly designed maze. Every other Metroid game is significantly better including the pinball one, the both portable multiplayer FPSes, and that cool Metroid Blast minigame from Nintendoland. None of them felt like a low budget mobile game the way this one does.

Russ Frushtick is as ridiculous as his name.

lol

Saw some other person saying this game sucks, I'm just here to say I just finished the game and thought it was awesome. Only other Metroid I've played is Super and I enjoyed Dread a lot more. It did a great job of leading you without explicitly telling you where to go, the game is very challenging and satisfying, and it's a ton of fun to explore and figure out the puzzles to get upgrades.

orborborb clearly hasn't looked into the 100% category for this game. The movement is fast and fluid, and the various shinespark puzzles are some of the most creative in the franchise. Dread is definitely top 2-3, with Zero Mission and Super as the other top contenders. This game has fully lived up to the name Metroid 5 for me, a fan of the series since the NES game.

Also, @janman, during the video you say you wish you could play another Fusion. Well good news! AM2R uses Fusion assets, as far as I can tell, and is a pretty good (although I'd argue inferior to Samus Returns) version of Metroid 2

Could do without the QL ripped from UPF format.

@ripelivejam: Let's not go there. How much money/time are they wasting on bad music albums, teaching Ryckert anything and bad internet culture.

UPF segments posted as Quick Looks? That's a bad look.

Facts!

I'm loving this game... maybe just as much as I'm loving Bakalar's shirt!

I understand they are short on staff now and can't do as much in-house content as they used to, but these aren't Quick Looks and shouldn't be branded as such. They're just clips from UPF missing some of the elements that make a Quick Look work.

Also, the videogame-to-webcams ratio is already bad for UPF, where the videogame screen should be bigger, and it's even worse for Quick Looks where there shouldn't even be any webcams at all and the game should be shown full screen.

Don't care about the format of QLs changing in fact I like having the webcams. I'm a little annoyed that I paid for this content only for it to be rereleased for free...

Now I don't feel so bad, I also spent an hour being stuck in roughly the same place after getting the morph ball and wide beam.

I also just got a little past 3 E.M.M.I.s in, and I'm mostly enjoying it. I totally hate the E.M.M.I. zones, though. SA-X sequences these are not. They're far too unfocused and janky.

More often than not, E.M.M.I.s straight up walk into me while I stand there with the Phantom Cloak active. Like, they'll scan me, pause, and then just walk straight into me anyway. The hell are you supposed to do at that point?! It seems the game intends you to simply run, jump, and climb in circles until you can catch them moving the wrong direction. I'm not finding it exhilarating; I'm finding it annoying as hell.

I dread every E.M.M.I. door I see, and not in the way I think the title intended. I'm just not having fun at all with these sections.

I do agree with above sentiments. Maybe not as strongly, but I do think it's best if there's a clear separation of what the content is. UPF is UPF, QL is QL. I don't mind UPF segments going up free sometimes, by all means; I think that's great promotion. I don't think this is a way to do it though or at least not one that should be showing up more than sporadically.

I understand that there's more going on with the new features and such, but between this being just plucked out of UPF without consideration to the different formats and none of the podcasts having anything resembling timestamps it all starts to look bad, especially since the site is in need of Premium subscribers and there doesn't seem to be much consideration going towards making things better vs. just making MORE things.

@kurtbaboon: Yeah gotta remember jeff's just had a baby and another recently. He's got a lot on his plate, the least we can do is help and support a site that has done us good for decade. I'm hearing too many people sounding ungrateful saying they are mad that premium material has not been kept from the unwashed masses, those nonpayers, those commoners, peasants as you will how dare they see my beloved content. We do know all content is free if you wait long enough and get rotation on giant bomb infinite. plenty of premium content was on that I believe. Anyway, it's obvious this is a time-saving method and for the most part most understand and like it so well see. We have tons of new content cater made that's things GB has never done before. I say we give em a chance. We all watch what we want thou so it's up to you.

The only thing to Dread is playing the game itself. This video demonstrates exactly what I have not enjoyed about this game. You just get lost since there is no guidance, or you die instantly. I'm sure it is great when you find the correct route, or stop getting hunted - but it just isn't for me. I spent like an hour just running into same dead end after dead end and I decided I could spend my time better than this.

I'm fine with premium content being made available to everyone, but I will echo what some others have said on here in that I think this new trend of ripping segments out of UPF and posting them as quick looks is a bad look for the site. UPF is called UPF for a reason, and it works for that show. But taken out of context, I think it genuinely looks unprofessional when presented as a stand alone video. I get that things have changed/are changing and the site is in transition, but if the concern is that there aren't enough resources right now to do "proper" Quick Looks then I personally think it would be better to just not have them for now. It could well be that they've decided that this is actually what they want QL's to be now and that the old format is gone for good, which is their choice of course, but I still don't think it's a good look.

They’ve been doing a lot of OG Quick Looks lately and Unfinisheds, too. So I don’t quite get the complaints? It feels like they’re listening.

How can you hate on Prime? Ridiculous!