In many ways, I think comparison is a disservice. Although it often serves as an easy point of reference, it can carry unintended consequences. ESA could be classified as a Metroidvania. Hell, I would even classify it as a Metroidvania. The problem with that comparison is that ESA offers an experience that differs greatly from its contemporaries. Yes, that experience is adjacent to Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, Symphony of the Night, etc. but to hone in on their similarities would undermine that uniqueness that each of those games (ESA included) brings to the table.

Maybe a better comparison would be to a game like TUNIC, where the most interesting part of the game can’t be gleaned from a simple genre-based comparison. Both of these have layers upon layers of secrets and puzzles lying in plain sight. Both of them have expansive post-games that require the player to engage with them in non-conventional ways. Both of these games appear to be iterations of their respective genres (for TUNIC, just look at the protagonists' design as proof of this alone), and they both use this to exceed the players expectations. This was the part of ESA that I loved the most, and it’s the part that most won’t worry to talk about due to the favorability of taking a direct comparison to Super Metroid.

It's this aspect that allows ESA to stand among the giants of the genre, not as a direct competitor for the spotlight, but as an equally worthy experience that is content in a supporting role.

I really struggled to review this game. So many of my feelings on it seem contradictory, and so many of my thoughts are difficult to put into words. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game, but it had a couple of really terrible riddles, but those riddles didn’t impact the experience that much, except when they did, and the combat is great and understands the fundamentals of depth on such a solid level, but it still feels like it’s missing something, and the exploration and navigation are great and fascinating and awful and frustrating. The game is a mess of crazy ideas that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and it’s also a stripped-back, more focused take on the genre that gains so much depth while removing so many things. It’s hands down one of my favorite metroidvanias and I got every ending, but I had to struggle to push through towards the end. It sounds confusing, because it is, and this review is my best attempt at breaking down why all of these things can be true at once.

The thing is, Environmental Station Alpha is really two games in one. The first game consists of everything up until you reach the first ending, and the second game is everything after that. I’m going to start by discussing that first part, and this section of the review will be essentially spoiler-free. I will give a warning before discussing the second part, as it is impossible to do so without spoiling something about it.

The first part of Environmental Station Alpha is phenomenal. I contemplated giving it five stars - it’s not perfect, but it’s still easily the best imitator of the Metroid formula. It understands why those games work on a tonal and atmospheric level, and it consolidates its gameplay mechanics by toning down the complexity of the player’s toolkit but making each tool substantially deeper and more impactful.

In this game, you have only one weapon - a laser blast that hits directly adjacent to you. Via upgrades obtained throughout the game, it can eventually be charged to fire a much more powerful blast, and upgraded to fire three blasts at once in a conal pattern. One of the cleverest elements of the combat design here is the way that the laser functions essentially as a melee weapon, and the game refuses to give you any truly ranged options.

As a result of this, you’re forced to put yourself in danger in order to do damage, and in compensation, the enemies and bosses are designed in such a way that every single attack is reliably avoidable. The encounter design here is absolutely stellar, and some of the best I’ve seen in the genre. In spite of the simple toolkit afforded to the player, the enemies are complex and deep; they stress pattern reading, attack baiting, and careful movement in order to avoid taking damage. Environmental Station Alpha is a challenging game - it’s not brutally difficult, but many of its encounters put up a hell of a fight, and its levels are no slouch either.

Towards the halfway point, the game starts throwing some surprisingly tight platforming challenges at the player, and many of these took me multiple tries in order to complete successfully. You’re expected to understand and utilize your entire toolkit in an intelligent way, but you aren’t railroaded into a single possible solution; the tools you have are deep enough to allow for some flexibility, but the game still asks some skill of you.

In addition to the standard double jump and horizontal dash, you’re also given a hookshot and a vertical dash. This doesn’t sound like much, but the design of these tools is brilliant - they can be chained together in multiple ways that affect the kind of distance you can cover, and the hookshot alone is easily one of my favorite traversal mechanics in any game. It’s simple to use: it fires diagonally up and in front of you, at the same angle no matter what, and it releases automatically after a very short period of time, but it maintains your momentum as well as the distance between you and whatever you’ve grappled to, and as such there is an astonishing amount of variance in the trajectories and speeds that can be produced from it. Skilled use of the hookshot frequently eliminates the need for many other traversal tools, and it’s an incredibly rewarding skill to master as a result.

The navigation in Environmental Station Alpha is good, though I think the abundance of teleporters and the regularity with which the game pinpoints on your map exactly where you need to go next hold it back from being great in my view. The game also throws a couple of great navigational curveballs throughout the game, forcing you to find new paths to places you’ve already visited. This helps to keep navigation fresh in spite of the teleporters and waypoint markers.

In terms of atmosphere, the game is absolutely excellent - the ambience, music, and visual style of the game are all very peaceful, which contrasts nicely with the challenging combat and traversal, and the overall mood is just really powerful in general. Only a few of the music tracks are so amazing that I’d choose to listen to them on their own, but all of them service the tone of the game ridiculously well, and they contribute to an outstanding atmosphere throughout.

My overall biggest complaint with the first part of the game is that you will often be allowed to perform some kind of tricky challenge to reach a new area, only to find yourself unable to progress further until you find another upgrade. You might revisit an area with a new tool that allows you to cross one barrier, only to be met with another that you can’t cross yet, and when this happens it can be really deflating and frustrating. This isn’t a constant occurrence, but it’s a frequent enough annoyance that it feels like a flaw of the game at large.

Still, on the whole, the first part of the game is absolutely fantastic. It could maybe have used a few extra offensive options, possibly with some tradeoffs in their utility, but the overall craftsmanship is absolutely top-notch and easily makes for one of the best experiences I’ve ever had with this genre. So why isn’t this a five star review? Well, we still need to talk about that second part I mentioned earlier.

At this point, I feel the need to give a spoiler warning - I recommend completing the game at least once and playing for a few hours beyond that before you continue to read.

I recently played and reviewed a game called La-Mulana. In that game, progress was primarily gated by cryptic riddles that required thorough documentation and occasionally a fair amount of trial and error in order to solve. In the postgame of Environmental Station Alpha, many of the same principles are applied. As such, many of the same praises and complaints I had with that game apply here as well. I recommend reading my review of La-Mulana as I will not be reiterating all of the same points here - that review is largely spoiler-free and will give you a good feel for the kind of game that the second part of Environmental Station Alpha is practically modeled after.

Some have described this experience as akin to peeling back layer after layer to reveal deeper and deeper secrets. I think that’s a fairly apt description, as each step in solving the postgame of Environmental Station Alpha reveals further details about the world and generally requires the completion of the previous step in order to reasonably attempt to solve.

There are some really effective riddles here - I enjoyed translating the alien language, and I enjoyed parsing the clues given to find the locations to search for the game’s secrets. That being said, there were also some really terrible ones that were not properly telegraphed and required huge leaps in logic to reasonably solve, and unfortunately this brought down the experience to a significant degree.

One of the frustrating aspects of this part of the game is that in the process of solving its riddles, there isn’t much in the way of new areas to uncover and explore. There are a few, especially towards the very end, but a lot of the postgame involves running back and forth through areas you’ve already explored almost completely, except now with faster but less interesting movement because in order to reach this point you essentially need to have found the game’s final traversal powerup, the Dash Booster X.

A huge aspect of the appeal the first part of the game held for me was how interesting traversal was. Once you acquire the Dash Booster X, it immediately becomes by far the most effective and efficient method of traversal, and it’s unfortunately not very interesting - it allows you to spam horizontal and vertical dashes as many times as you want without ever needing to touch the ground. There is little depth here, and for the bulk of the postgame, you will be traversing the world primarily using this ability.

The postgame also removes the focus on combat almost entirely with only a few (albeit fantastic) exceptions, and shifts the focus so heavily to this riddle-solving idea that it’s almost jarring. It’s a fascinating experience and I found it difficult to put down for a while, but that doesn’t change how different the focus is compared to the aspects of the game that I really loved during the first part.

Towards the end, though, the game started to really wear me down, just like La-Mulana did. I had been spoiled regarding the existence of a few highly appealing secrets that I wanted to find, but I lacked the energy to go through all the trial-and-error to find them entirely on my own, so I resorted to using a guide. I think this external assistance improved my experience, which doesn’t reflect well on the game.

Still, the game had me hooked for many, many hours, and the experience I had towards the end didn’t really lead me to resent the game in the way I ended up resenting La-Mulana. This, I think, is the source of so many of my conflicting thoughts on the game. The first half is extremely strong, and isn’t really soured in any way by the existence of the second half. The second half has huge issues, but is ambitious and experimental and really effective in a few key ways. The hard part about evaluating the game is deciding whether the second half drags down the game overall, and to what degree.

Personally, despite my frustrations, I still look back on my experience with the game very fondly, and the rewards at the end of the second half are worthwhile enough that I can’t bring myself to hold it against the game all that severely. This game has some really cool ideas, yet it’s a strange case where the fundamental design is already minimalist, but removing parts of the game would still have made it better. In spite of that, Environmental Station Alpha still gets my strong recommendation, for simply being one of the highest quality metroidvanias I’ve ever played.

Have some complicated thoughts on this one. It starts out almost perfectly, recreating the gameplay loop of Super Metroid. The music and sound design is some of the best in the genre and contributes to an atmosphere that rivals some of the best Metroid games. For the first 2-3 hours I was in love with this game.

After that though, the platforming gets jankier and jankier and the exploration gets less and less interesting whilst the map gets stuffed full of bosses. The bosses are all pretty well designed and fair, but incredibly tough. This stopped the metroidvania loop dead in its tracks for me as taking the time to beat boss after boss took longer than the exploration in between. Upgrades are few and far between in the mid to late game and the most powerful ones are locked behind obnoxious platforming puzzles. Along with some pretty contrived puzzles in the temple area the game started to lose its sheen about mid way through. After the temple, the main path is mostly just a boss rush anyway.

The map is pretty great in this and each area feels unique. It feels like Metroid in a way that no other indie metroidvania I've played does. Whilst the game guides you generally, you can go off the beaten track pretty significantly and it feels like a happy medium between Super and Fusion.

I wish there was more focus on meaningful upgrades or that the bosses were more spread out. The main path is satisfying at a base level though. I've heard great things about the postgame but I feel it's a little much for me, I don't really fancy deciphering cyphers and searching the map for hidden rooms for a few more bosses. Some of the bosses from the postgame look really cool, but I'm happy with leaving it where I did.

ESA is a solid Metroidvania. It's fairly challenging, the sound design is great, and it has a surprisingly large post-game. The graphics look like they came from an Atari, but they didn't take me long to adjust to and the screen lacks the visual noise that more impressive-looking games can suffer from.

The game follows the typical Metroidvania structure with unlocking abilities to progress. The best games in the genre guide you to these power-ups without making it obvious the designers are leading you there. ESA technically fails this because it places objective markers on the map, but getting to them requires a respectable amount of exploration, so I didn't mind. What I did mind is how the game locks off specific paths in the world at a certain point, forcing you to take a lengthy detour to find the correct path. I ended up getting stuck multiple times because the required path was well-hidden. If the game had a lot of worthwhile power-ups to find off the beaten path, I wouldn't mind this, but that isn't the case. The best you'll get is an extremely minor health upgrade and these are few and far between.

Beyond these issues, ESA doesn't do much to make it stand out from other Metroidvanias. It gets the basics right and is definitely worth the cheap price of admission. Just don't expect anything mind-blowing.

The station was abandoned long ago. Through its corridors of twisted metal and fire, among the mazes of green overgrowth, and deep in an abandoned cavern, there walks a robot. A robot designed to discover the Lovecraftian mysteries of the station, and to teach the multitude of enemies and bosses that await one lesson - in space no one can hear you scream.

Environmental Station Alpha is the Metroid game that I always wanted. While the majority of the game takes place on a man-made station, the atmosphere feels genuinely alien and isolating, yet somehow still comfortable in a way that encourages exploration. The best example of this would be the juxtaposition between the 8-bit art style, which lends just enough clarity to let your imagination run wild - like trying to see a whole image in a rippling pool of water - and the soothing soundtrack, which enfolds you like an electronic blanket of fuzz. It's all at once exciting, unsettling, and comforting.

Part of this comfort comes from the map design. Throughout the game, you are given checkpoints to reach, but no route is specifically laid out for you. This allows for free exploration to use new abilities, discover secrets, or just time to pause and catch your breath. The environment traversal is done through platforming sections that test your skill with ability upgrades such as a double-jump, dash, and the grappling hook, and the movement is precise and fluid. The grappling hook works on nearly every surface in the game, making it satisfying and easy to use after some practice. All of this combines to make traversal and exploration much more meaningful than meticulously bombing tiles or scanning walls with radar in order to find the path forward. After a certain point in the game, teleports will become available for fast travel, which also helps encourage exploration, as you won't fear having to backtrack to the ends of eternity if you stumble upon a dead-end.

Checkpoints throughout Environmental Station Alpha are also placed in sensible locations as well, such as before difficult platforming sections and bosses. Boss fights range from fairly easy to challenging but fair, and rely on pattern recognition and planning rather than aggressiveness. Your only weapon is a laser, which can be upgraded up to three times, which means you'll be quite familiar with its range and limitations while in combat. Victory over bosses does feel well-earned, and often comes with an ability-upgrade as a reward. There is an easy-mode for the game which increases health and decreases damage done to the player, and the creator of the game even condones save-file editing in order to further tailor the game's difficulty to your skill level (this can be done with using notepad or a similar text editor with ease). Just like any good Metroidvania, you will start the game feeling nervous upon any enemy encounter, but by the end, the Station's denizens become nothing more than environmental obstacles as you make your way across the map.

While the gameplay is certainly fantastic, it's the strangeness of the world that showcases Environmental Station Alpha's genius, specifically the post-game sections. The beginning of the game plays like a straightforward Metroidvania - you fight bosses, earn upgrades, discover hidden items, and unravel a bit more of the station's mystery, however the post-game throws the entire narrative into Lovecraftian overdrive and switches the gameplay into a platforming puzzler. In some of the most bizarre yet compelling post-game content in any game, you'll be dashing through a deadly maze of spikes, translating an alien language with real-life pen and paper, solving non-Euclidian puzzle rooms while being chased by a ghost, fighting through a glitched version of the station, and earning the ultimate upgrade in order to unlock three more endings to the game.

Each of the endings are satisfying in their own way, but most of the story-telling is done through computer logs in an esoteric fashion. The main story of the game is actually quite simple and does become clear by the end, but don't expect to have all of your questions answered - the story isn't even necessarily the point of the game; the journey is. Knowing that, the post-game puzzles become an interesting insight into a world that our robot isn't fully prepared for or able to understand, and like any good cosmic horror narrative, that's what draws the excitement. Honestly, the most impressive part of Environmental Station Alpha is that a game this ambitious and outside-the-box was created and developed by just one person. While the game certainly owes its existence to the Metroid franchise, for me ESA manages to not only capture the soul of those classic games, but it improves on them in nearly every way for a much more satisfactory and enjoyable experience.

It’s good and I wish i could recommend but:
- too much platforming. It needs to be balanced with action and exploration
- no leveling up system so it depends on exploration or luck to get a better weapon
- No weapon variety/upgrades. After 7hrs, I could only find one
- Jumping feels stiff
- Wish texts were less pixilated so it’d be easier to follow

To be fair, it has an engaging gameplay and great music. With some quality of life improvements and balance, it would be a great game. It is Deckable with some workarounds. It also feels rusty, so i guess the dev already abandoned it.

the metroidvania, for all of its ubiquity in the modern indie space, has become an unambitious genre. yes, there is artistry in just crafting a world that is fun to explore and navigate, but it is all too easy to forget that the forebearers of the genre were not (just) about touring a set of tubes and collecting shit. very few games aspire to have as open a structure and boast as liberating progression as super metroid. the way that metroid fusion exploits the metroidvania form as a language of fear and isolation got it some maligning but it has etched it a permanent space in gaming's canon. perhaps even more pioneering was symphony of the night, a game brimming with so much confidence in its interlocking systems that all meshed together

environmental station alpha forgoes grandiosity at all junctures for actions of purpose. the boss fights are not ostentatious in visual or mechanical design but are uniquely engaging to theorycraft around and pulsepounding to execute on. the powerups are not situational but instead maximally general, each one gradually increasing your intuitive command over your character while judiciously sharing space with each other.

of course, the real star is the world. the setting immediately comes off as a prosaic "lava world, plant world, water world, hub" layout, but instead of being disastrously predictable the preconceptions of these areas are more often than not challenged and broken the more you dig into the zones and explore their secrets. as the game opens you are subjected to more eclectic and even downright surreal environments, and then...

this game's symphony of the night castle-upside-down moment is nowhere near as dramatic but much more revolutionary. it begins when you find a detail that just doesn't quite fit in with the rest. it is then a certified house of leaves moment, baiting you to pull back the walls and make dangerous voyages past the familiar "find keys for this lock" quest to figure out okay what the hell is actually happening here. you are forced to think of the station not as a generic metroidvania spaghetti land of stopgaps but instead to engage with the diegesis of the world.

yes, it is sometimes tediously obtuse. yes, it takes a bit to begin unravelling. but in this game i was thinking about much more than just "oh fuck where did i find the room with that door i can get through now" and the fact that this thought did not go wasted but was rewarded in spades and spades makes this a special game.

I can see why people put this game as one of the best metroidvanias out there, but it just never clicked with me at all. Controls were very weird to control, especially when you are in water, enemies felt annoying to fight most of the time and biggest reason why this game didn't click with me was the save system. Why does the punishment for your death result in you loosing all of your progress and having to redo everything again. This was annoying especially if you've beaten a boss and then you die afterwards, so now you must fight the boss again because you didn't find the save station fast enough. As to why some metroidvanias even today have this system is still baffling to me.

I really thought I'd like Environmental Station Alpha. The graphics and gameplay looked simple, yet intriguing. A metroidvania that focuses on the essentials of the genre, it seemed exactly like the kind of game I needed.

But playing it myself just felt exhausting. I got lost constantly and while I enjoyed the challenging enemies and gameplay, I never felt as if the game actually rewarded me enough for the struggles it made me go through. I've had my fun for the first two hours but after that, the frustration outgrew the enjoyment.

Let me get the gripes out of the way before I gush, because they're bothersome enough that I feel like they're worth mentioning.

-- I'm not a fan of tying the Horizontal and Vertical Dash upgrades to the same button, because it's very easy to accidentally tilt slightly up while in movement and V-Dash when you totally meant to H-Dash, and consequently end up falling flat on your face or eating boss damage like it's candy. Maybe that's a controller-only issue, I don't know. I just know it happened to me enough times that it was significantly noticeable.

-- Despite the game sometimes holding your hand about the general idea of where to go, there are some subsections of the station that can be a bit of a pain to navigate or to be certain where you need to go to get there. Hard to really complain here, since I love exploration, but if I know I'm in the right area and I'm still having trouble figuring out how to progress, maybe the pathing could be a little better.

-- Putting a kill-plane right below a boss for an area you're expected to drop down to is just garbo. Especially if you haven't gotten the "Cheat My Face Off" power-up to make your movement nice and easy.

-- The woodland biome had a couple branches that felt like actual ledges when they weren't. Minor frustration, but it happened enough times that I felt like noting it.

With that out of the way, let's talk about why this game is some solid gold.

The boss design is pretty good in most cases (assuming you're playing on Normal -- on Easy, you can probably tank most of the bosses in a run without much grief). There's some optional bosses in the main game that will also be more than happy to take you to task if you can reach them.

Power-ups feel significant and it's very easy to see how they impact your movement through the world. The hookshot is a little cumbersome at first, but once you get a handle on your angles, it's amazing fun to just launch yourself into the air off a well-timed use of it. The game also does an excellent job of really getting you used to using these abilities, because you'll absolutely need them by the end of the game.

General world design is clever, with lots of hidden passages for you to wander into -- some are obvious, some are not, and some will leave you scratching your head as to what the point of them is, at first.

And that leads us to where the real shine of this game is -- the postgame. The postgame asks you to beat those main game optional bosses and make sure you've got all the power-ups you need, then gives you the opportunity to use them to navigate some hellish area designs that result in even more optional boss encounters and several additional endings. Clues are scattered all over the station while you're playing the main game -- veritable hints to let you know that something more significant is going on. Frankly, I'd recommend a guide for the postgame because it's just that overwhelming of a level of exploration.

Beyond that, the music's pleasant, the graphics are rough but work well enough that you're largely able to appreciate everything that's going on without having to squint to figure out what's what in a retro-looking game.

In short, the game has a few drawbacks that keep it from being in my personal pantheon of the best of Metroidvanias, but if you're looking for a solid one, it's well worth it to pick this up at full price -- a whopping eight bucks. You could always keep an eye out for a sale, though -- as I write this, the Steam Winter Sale is going on and the game has been discounted 60%, down to $3.19 USD. If you're a fan of Metroidvanias, do this dev a solid and support them because they definitely earned it with ESA.

It's a PC game where your controllers will not work. Go into the menu and change the setting for "d-pad only" to yes. Even with this, your Dualsense 4/5 won't work with the d-pad, but at least it stops the endless scrolling. I tried to use DS4Windows but still couldn't get the d-pad to work. I just had to put up with playing this with a stick that felt awful. Also, opening my map resulted in a freeze three times, so that's always great.


The music was great and really added to the eerie atmosphere. You can tell what game this is taking heavy inspiration from, but then it surprises you by giving you an insane upgrade so early. The other upgrades also really highlight the strengths of this game. If you love hookshots in particular, you will enjoy yourself. So many little stunts and just general movement between rooms make it so satisfying to master your hookshot usage. Most of the boss fights were great, even if you could tank a lot of them. 

After beating the final boss, you unlock a meaty postgame. In my opinion, it changes the feel of the game too much from what I wanted. Not to mention that there are optional items that highlight this unique style, effectively making you a god. I know Metroid does that eventually too, but it happens near the end and is really just for the collectathon/final boss. The game can be completed without these items, but they are necessary for the postgame. Honestly, I think the postgame, while cool for what it was, just dragged on way too long and should have ended after just a few events. There was also "dlc" added during the postgame, but it is somewhat separate. That at least had some good bosses, but it is easy to tell they regret making you so strong. I finished the game with 148%, although there is still a good amount of % to be had. I just got too burned out, especially with how repetitive some of the final things to do were.

Is it better than the game it borrows a lot from? It's pretty close, but it didn't really scratch that feeling of being truly lost in the main game for me. There were a few occasions when a path was item locked, only to return with the item to find another item lock 2 feet away. It just kind of makes you feel bad about taking the time to come back and would make me just want to wait until the last stretch of the game to collect. It also isn't really the prettiest game to look at. It's a good game, but I'm still on the lookout for another great metroid-like that ticks all of my boxes.

Honestly? I would redirect this to anybody who wants to capture the early Metroidvania flavour outside of the context of encompassing games history instead of Super Metroid. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's better, although it is better, and it definitely doesn't mean it is more original, because there is no world in which ESα exists without it cribbing almost everything from Zebes, but it does, to me, mean that we can articulate a purity of mechanical intercedence into the proceduralistic fashion in which we cohere artistic merit of a game's play with its thematic and visual explicity. In shortest terms, the hostility in ESα comes from a world which feels ruined and hostile, nearly unnavigable, because of the strangeness of the player's relationship with it at the time of introduction; the hubris undertaken to sow weird estrangement from the station to the world outside it is critical and unimpeded by the interfacing, yet eloquent from the delicate situating. In Super Metroid, it's hostile because Samus cannot jump, cannot shoot, and cannot avoid damage due to world design intermediating not at all with the mechanical affordances of play.

I'm sad to say this game hasn't really gripped me.
It has a good thing going for it: it wears its influences on its sleeve, and it recreates the metroid vibes immaculately. I really loved the feeling of exploring an abandoned space station completely alone, with only ambient sounds, ominous music and the occasional bestial screech to accompany you.
In the visual compartment, this game makes the conscious decision of going for a very lo-fi aesthetic, which most of the times is pretty charming, although sometimes it leads to a lack of clarity.

Now for the negatives.
I find the game design a bit clumsy. Checkpoint placement is kind of off, and I found myself needlessly repeating chunks of easy content from time to time, which was a bit annoying.
Exploration can be unrewarding at times, for a few reasons:
First, in a couple of instances the game gave me a new powerup that opened up a path somewhere else in the map (the classic metroid effect), making me run over to that place...only to find that, behind that "lock", was immediately another locked path I didn't have the ability to surpass, making the whole process pointless.
Second, most of the times the reward for finding secrets and hidden rooms is barely even worth your time (like, I kid you not, a +1HP upgrade)

Gameplay-wise, the game can be pretty fun, the bosses especially are very ingeniously design, challenging and carefully balanced affairs. But to my taste, it played it way too safe, sticking to the metroid formula to a fault (e.g. with the first standard, boiler-plate powerups), and by consequence id bored me enough to abandon the game in just 5 hours (which, based on my map completion, I guess is about 50-60% through the game). I hear the post game has some cool stuff, but I can't bring myself to pick this up again for the time being: I'm just not having fun with it anymore. That could change in the future (and I'll gladly update this review if that happens), so I'll leave this game as "shelved"

To conclude, this game shows some competence and love for the genre, but it's kind of clumsy and rough around the edges.
I realise I sounded really negative in my review, but I must say that overall, I think it's still decent. If you're looking for a metroid-like, you could do much worse than environmental station alpha.