This game seems to be Mercury Stream's Fusion remake with a few elements of the DS Dread pitch. Every aspect of this game from the items, to the controls, to the high damage bosses, to the enemy stalking, to Adam, to the x parasite, and even the strictly linear progression are all ripped from Fusion. Even specific story beats like returning to an area only to find it frozen over so you have to go back to another area and fight a boss is just ripped from the overgrown power generator in Fusion.

Starting with some positives the game controls a lot better then Samus Returns with faster movement and 8 directional aiming (the wall jump is still super nerfed sadly) and the secrets are way better hidden. No longer do you just scan blocks and hit them with the right item as many items are hidden beyond shine spark puzzles or using bombs in a clever way.

Sadly in every other way the game ends up just a pale version of Fusion. The EMII are a poor replacement for the SAX with the special EMII zones and their bland copy paste nature taking away the horror of them. It doesn't help that you can simple QTE away from an EMII which turns them into absolute jokes. While both Fusion and Dread are strictly linear, Dread goes one step farther by constantly blocking off backtracking every couple of rooms, which does allow for there to be a more tightly controlled item grab, but also means that you can't really explore till right before the final boss when you have every item. It is also frustrated some sequence breaks have been removed. I was able to get 3 Power bomb tanks before getting the power bombs, but the game wouldn't let me actually use the power bombs until I got the upgrade in the story. Compare this to zero mission where a super missel tank can be grabbed early and used immediately.

Fusion had, with the exception of one boss, the consistently best bosses in the 2-D series, but while Dread has a few okay bosses too many are either direct copy pastes (you fight 6 different mother brains and a dozen of the same chozo warriors), or have way too much health/too many phases which cause the fights to drag. Fusion wanted to be a horror game where Samus was underpowered, which Dread also seems like it wants to be, but Dread also goes the Other M route of having Samus flip around and do crazy cutscene stunts every fight. In the Prime games great care was put into Samus's facial expressions to make her seem genuinely disturbed by what she saw, while in Dread she casually blasts everything in her path. The less said about the story the better. It is mired with incredibly badly written exposition, strips any mystery away by retconning the Chozo's role in Metroid 2, and ends in a star wars tier twist that is super forced and adds nothing to the story.

I'm sure fans will be pleased with this game. Unlike Samus Returns it has competent level design and movement, and Fusion is well liked enough to make more Fusion a palatable concept. But I can't shake the feeling that a better version of this game came out 19 years ago. Metroid used to be at the top of the pack with a dark and horrific atmosphere, and very different gameplays between main entries. 19 Years later the indie scene has greatly surpassed Metroid and the tone has entirely shifted to bland alien planet action. Samus isn't fighting for her life on an alien world, shes doing front flips onto enemies and shooting a charge beam directly into their mouths. If you just want a decent game that has Samus in it then you can't go wrong with Dread, but if you want a game that pushes the genre foreword like Metroid used to do then stick to something else. For my money 2021's Axiom Verge 2 takes the cake for best exploration based platformer of the year.