Corey Pappas

To start with, I'm 40 and grew up in the era of NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, etc. Side scrollers and platformers dominated that era and is likely the reason they remain my favorite type of game. Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, Oni, Salt and Sanctuary are the standards I go by for that type and given the rise in them over the years I expect a lot out of them. Metroid Dread is my 3rd complete playthrough of a Metroid game with the first 2 being Metroid II and the second being Metroid Prime. Now, for the good of Metroid Dread. It is beautiful - I love the different environments as well as the enemy and Samus models. It runs smooth most of the time with only a few spots where FPS drops noticeably. I also love starting out with basic attacks and maneuvers and progressively becoming more powerful with more abilities which is a hallmark of pretty much any platformer. The ok - story is serviceable, but nothing special. There is also some repetitiveness when fighting enemies (specifically EMMIs). I also found the parry system implemented for them (and a couple bosses) especially annoying where it seemed you were given a 10th of a second window to parry. Not fun IMO. The bad, and the reason for taking away 2 stars. While the controls for most things were implemented fine, there were a number of things that made fights incredibly frustrating because of decisions made for certain abilities. When you put yourself in a morph ball, the only way to get out of it was to pretty much press straight up, not just mostly up - it can be frustrating when in a boss fight to trying to move slightly away and pressing mostly up but still be stuck in a ball. I also despised that space jump could only be used when at the height of your previous jump or only when moving to the side as well. Sometimes you want to quickly move up or not have to move left or right in the process. Then there is what I think was pretty useless of having to use L1 to aim when the right stick isn't being used for anything else. There are just a number of control issues that really are frustrating and I think really took away from the experience. A couple of other minor issues were the transit systems and warp points. It was annoying when I knew where I wanted to go but would have to spend 5-10 minutes just trying to get somewhere, sometimes being blocked by newly blocked paths. I would rather have a quick jump type system implemented. Overall, Metroid Dread is overall a good game and enjoyable, but I think with the number of alternatives out there I'm not sure its worth your time unless you're a big Metroid fan or haven't played any of the previous games and want to see what it's like.

I don't know how this movie manages to be worse than the 2017 movie, but it definitely is. The plot is predictable and the script cheesy as hell. It's like the writers/director had a list of common movie tropes and were attempting to check off every single one before the end of the movie. My family, who are usually much less critical than I am, couldn't help but laugh and cringe through most of the movie. The main actors and actresses in the film should've probably passed given their general talent and the only truly redeeming part of the film are the eye candy Gadot and Pine provide. The DC universe gets yet another bad movie to add to their list.

Interesting premise ruined by awful acting by the main character and a terrible plot.