I guess I'll just post this here since it's really about this game in particular, even though this is going to be a massive gripe post.
I haven't read the whole thread, and I'm sure these things have been addressed, but Metroid Dread is a fucking mess of a game. I'll state upfront that I liked it overall, but it sits at #5 in the mainline series for me behind all the others.
The EMMI sections don't add up to anything, first and foremost. If they're supposed to instill dread in me, they fail spectacularly compared to SA-X from Fusion, who was actually scary because you had time to stew in your fear as you waited for an opening. The EMMIs are too fast and on you too hard to ever instill fear or dread, you don't have time for that - they're just ON you. Those sections elicited only annoyance in me, even when you get the omega beam or whatever it's called to kill them. They're also cheap - the EMMIs don't have much of a pattern as to where they're going to be when you enter their zones - sometimes I'd walk in and they'd be right in front of me, kill me, then the game would reload and they'd be elsewhere when I re-enter. It was pretty stupid, to be honest! They were just these annoying stealth sections just right in the middle of my exploration game, like sprinkling the Zero Suit section of Zero Mission throughout the whole game (only way, way more annoying and dull). And then, you don't even get to kill the last one, or have a "fair" fight with it or anything, it just dies in a cutscene! You never really get any closure with these pricks, they're just grafted on to an otherwise fun game because some weirdos think stealth is fun in Metroid, I guess. I know the big bad is nominally controlling them, but they feel like they come from a different game altogether both in terms of gameplay and plot.
The other thing about the game not instilling a feeling of "dread" in me at any time is it is way more focused on combat than any Metroid I've played (I'm admitting here I haven't played much of Samus Returns). The game never slows down - you're always fighting fighting fighting, and a lot of the enemies are HP sponges. Those Chozo robots or X or whatever they were are perfect examples - you fight what feels like ten of them throughout the game, none of the fights are interesting, and they take far too many hits to kill them. I appreciate that enemies hit HARD in Dread - making the E tanks well worth getting - but it just felt like every screen had tons of HP sponge enemies I had to wade through, making exploring a pain until you get the Screw Attack late in the game. They even fucked that up - a few of the robot enemies take TWO hits with the Screw Attack, which doesn't make any sense to me lol. There's no chance to take in your surroundings in this game, Samus is just bombarded with enemies the whole time, and it's all very tedious. While I enjoyed seeing the X make a pretty major return after thinking they'd not really deal with them again after Fusion, when they first appear they take FAR too many hits to kill.
The melee counter is terrible, and while it's better than the little bit of Samus Returns that I played, it still should be completely removed from the series as well as all the QTE nonsense. The final boss is dumb. It's two later sections where you fight it normally are fine, but that first section where you are FORCED to counter it to move on to the later parts of the fight is just crap. It's not even that I can't do it - I caught on pretty early in my attempts how to get past that section and kept dying in the third phase, but it's just this tedious, TEDIOUS wait for him to be counterable while he spams the same boring three attacks while you can't do much of anything besides dodge.
The story was kinda dumb, but ymmv on that, and you know, it's a Metroid game, so whatever lol
I just don't get what they were going for here. Some of the boss battles were incredible, and once you get the Screw Attack, exploration is fun again, but so much of the game is just a slog, which has never been a thing in this series before imo. There's so many design decisions that just baffle me - why are they so insistent that Samus Aran, the woman who has a GUN FOR A HAND, have a melee attack? With all the criticism they got nearly 20 years ago for the stealth section of Zero Mission, why did they put more of that in a worse form in here? Who looked at Metroid as a series and thought "this is a series primarily about combat?" It's such a weird, weird game, and I don't see myself replaying it anytime soon.