RolStoppable said:
On the plus side, the regular path through the game is thought through well enough and afterwards it doesn't take ages to collect everything.
But... the game's difficulty is off. Boss fights are all too often "take only a few hits and you are already dead," so at times an additional energy tank would make no difference whatsoever. Hard mode doesn't change the game much, it's basically "you are dead in three hits instead of five." None of the enemies have more health nor is there a penalty on collected items like Zero Mission had. And again, a few of the Speed Booster challenges are more trolling than satisfying challenging level design.
I was on the brink of reconsidering my 8/10 score for Dread, but then the game's art gallery adds Other M as a mainline game instead of doing the right thing and let the game be forgotten. I also looked up the requirements for unlocking the images and it turns out they are simply time-based, so collection rate does not matter at all. If I had known that, I would have finished hard mode right away instead of going for 100% which ultimately put me half an hour above the time limit, so I'll have to give hard mode another go eventually. No variations to the ending whatsoever is also a bit lame; I have no idea why they didn't keep the series' tradition of having Samus taking off her helmet/suit based on completion time and/or item collection rate.
Last thing to address is whether or not Dread is better than indie games because earlier in this thread I had apparently committed an offense by suggesting that Metroid does Metroid best. So...
Dread is better than every indie game. There's no question about it. |
Bosses have always been like that, though. In all other Metroid games before you'd have to learn the patterns and figure out how to react to their attacks. Every player who faced any boss in, let's say, Super Metroid gets their ass kicked hard, but once you've learned their behaviours they become pushovers. It's the same in Dread. Once you've learned to read the moves you can beat any boss without even a single hit. So I don't get your point, sorry.
And Other M belongs to the mainline, it's right in the middle between 3 and 4. It's a hard to swallow pill, I know. Just let the dissapointment go, it's ok.
Not having ending variations I agree, that's a bit sad. And I would have loved the ability to crank up the music volume, I think it's not loud enough.
