I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
I really hated Dread. It feels extremely linear with no opportunity for sequence breaking or backtracking. The fact that the EMMI fights are so QTE bullshit that the game gives you autosave points outside of save rooms felt like a tacit admission that they were badly designed. Plus, it kept the dogshit forced melee counters from Samus Returns.
Dread has tons of sequence breaks. Zero Mission is also bad at back tracking chances and Fusion was more linear.
Every single time Dread sent me down one of its little no backtracking sand trap slopes felt like it was spitting directly in my metroid enjoying face.
There's really only one time that Zero Mission locks you out of the whole map, when you get shot down and trapped in the space pirate area. Fusion is very linear on the scale of the whole game but gives you much more free range to explore within each area than Dread.
The melee counters were definitely the worst thing about Dread just like they were the worst thing about Samus Returns though.
I just didn't use em aside from bosses
There are tons of regular enemies that can only be hit after being countered. Plus, a bossfight is the second worst possible place for a mandatory QTE other than a cutscene, which Dread also does.