From a gameplay standpoint it's a fine update to Metroid 2, but feels slower and clumsier than Fusion or Zero Mission did. Especially with the addition of Aeon Abilities that adds what feels like another unnecessary resource into the game and the melee counter attack, which halts Samus in place while using it and devolves a lot of the combat into waiting on enemies to do their very obviously telegraphed attack that allows you to insta-kill them and then your encounters with anything that isn't a boss becomes robotic and boring.

I'm mixed on the presentation. On one hand, I appreciate the soundtrack being reasonably faithful to the original; really atmospheric and unsettling tracks. But then it throws in random remixes from other game like Ridley's lair and Red-soil Brinstar and man. Remember when Ridley's lair was a cool track hyping up your approach to Ridley, it got brought back in Prime 1 as a nice simple callback, and here it's been reduced to "Fire level music". Jesus.

The backgrounds on their own are nice looking, but they really undercut the tension of Metroid 2 because of how brightly lit and visibly teeming with life they are. Metroid 2 is one of the mainstream Nintendo games with THE most rancid vibes ever and it feels off that a remake of it sticks in a giant fungus forest for no reason.

Speaking undercutting the tension, remember how in Metroid 2, it's just a constant decent deeper and deeper into a cave system, a linear trek downwards to a point where you can't help but think "wow I am really deep underground at this point, when the hell am I ever going to see the surface again?" Well, they stuck teleport stations in so you can just zap back to the surface whenever it's convenient to you. Yay.

And y'know, Metroid 2 is not a glorious game. You're almost basically doing a villain's dirty work by going to a planet to wipe out all of a species by some vague metric of them being "too capable of being used as bioweapons". And it felt very purposeful that killing a Metroid in the original game hardly ever felt gratifying. And that hits especially hard in a post-Fusion world where we see the consequences of Samus' actions, cause it turns out playing god and killing an entire species because they're too inconvenient isn't a very good idea because it can fuck the ecosystem up to a catastrophic degree. So it then feels RIDICULOUSLY tone deaf for Samus Returns here to have all these glory kill cutscenes against these things like it's trying to sell us on how cool Samus' job is.

And as if that wasn't enough, it completely butchers the ending. Like, Metroid 2's ending stands out because pretty much every other Metroid game ends on some big, climactic setpiece, escape sequence or not. Metroid 2 instead has you quietly take the baby Metroid back to the surface, in an almost somber and reflective manner. You just murdered this species out of existence when it's just an animal all the same as anything else. Is what you just did right? Or does it just make you as much a cold killer as the ones supposedly posing to use Metroids as weapons?

That's too lame for us gamers, gotta take the baby Metroid around the world to go 100% the game and then fight a boss because we need a big red arrow pointing at the REAL bad guy in this situation. Bllllluuuuuuuugh.

I like this game in the end, it's not like my mountain of problems with it makes it unplayable. But look at this game and all the missed potential and feel very :/

This one's weird to judge. The multiplayer was a fun Sorta-Kinda-Quake-Thing, almost like a hero shooter a decade before hero shooters took off. Each hunter has their special quirks and unique alt-forms, and there's something inherently cool about giving Samus a rogues' gallery of competing rival bounty hunters when she's not taking on her more personal/serious-business missions.

But in an era after Nintendo Wi-Fi is gone and Nintendo has still yet to rerelease this game, (and you're not using netplay or whatever), you're stuck with either playing against bots, or doing the single-player campaign.

And. The devs admitted it's an afterthought and it shows. This was apparently going to be a multiplayer-only game until they cobbled together a story mode that's very obviously made of hallways connecting multiplayer maps together. It's an ankle-deep Metroidvania, because basically the only upgrades in this game are the other hunters' beam weapons, and those are just glorified keys in a lot of cases.

Conceptually it's cool that you can run into the other hunters just randomly, but they're comically easy to ignore in some situations, and in situations where you HAVE to fight them, well, they're bots in a mid-2000s multiplayer shooter.

And god the actual bosses are so lame. The tower and the eyeball were already nothing to write home about, but then you realize you gotta fight both of them three more times after than and Jesus. Then of course after collecting The McGuffin Whatever, an escape sequence starts, except it's never clear what you're even escaping from. The planet's not blowing up or anything, and you just die randomly when you run out of time. What's Samus running from? Her performance anxiety???

It has its moments of atmosphere and having Metroid Prime on a handheld system in 2006 was nothing to sneeze at, but. Eh. S'alright.

It's a great game in its own right, but feels like a downgrade compared to its trilogymates just because the other two games are just that good. It introduces motion control aiming, which is great for having a mouse-and-keyboard-esque experience, and they have enemies that take advantage of having lock-on and actually aiming be separate actions now. I just think everything else they do with motion controls is annoying. There's several different types of interfaces throughout the game, all of which being a weird little motion-control input gimmick that feels like it's only there because Nintendo mandated showing off the motion controls. Gotta pump this thing or turn that thing or have Samus physically input a passcode. The only waggle gimmick that feels good is flicking the nunchuck for the Grapple Lasso/Beam, and then yanking it back to pull an enemy's shield off or pry something open.

I just wish the combat and map design didn't also go down with it too. It's a step down in difficulty from Prime 2, which is fine, but it gets even easier in light of the Hyper Mode feature, where you can chug an energy tank to infuse your beam with phazon for a bit, and doing so absolutely melts just about any enemies for comparatively little sacrifice, especially since you're effectively invincible in this state. And of course, to make up for Hyper Mode taking an energy tank off of you, it feels like enemies drop and obscene amount of energy, meaning you can afford to use it carelessly and still get your energy back.

The maps are far less organically connected, instead now having basically a level select screen to go to different sections of different planets from your ship, and because of that a lot of the areas, while being some of the most visually creative areas in the Prime trilogy, are comparably smaller and traversing them feels far less involved. Individual puzzles are still the Prime goodness, but globe-trotting is far less satisfying this time around.

The bosses in this one are a mixed bag. For every Rundus, Gandrayda, and Omega Ridley, there's a Helios, Security Drone, or Mogenar that feel like they go back to Prime 1's boss philosophy of spending long periods of time being invincible and multiple phases of the same thing happening, But More.

At the end of the day, it's still a Prime game, and comes with all the goodness that entails. It still has a lot of atmosphere and cool moments, and feels like a satisfying conclusion to the Phazon trilogy, but I'd still recommend 1 or 2 more.