The decision to have a 3D Metroid game have a first-person perspective was a stroke of genius. While especially for the 2000s it would've felt like trend-chasing, one of Metroid's core pillars is its atmosphere. And they amplify this point so hard with how many environmental effects there are, between walking through stream fogging up the visor, certain enemies causing electrical interference, causing the visor's HUD to glitch and fuzz up with static, and seeing water drop down your face, all really making the visor an extension of the player experience. As corny as it is to say this, it really puts you into the shoes of a power-suit-wearing bounty hunter exploring an alien planet.
Its story really works in this atmosphere-first approach too. The only important things to know is Samus arrived to a space pirate distress signal and she's here to investigate and stop whatever they're doing, eventually leading to destroying the source of Phazon deep in an impact crater. But to get a deeper context into what's going on, you use the scan visor to read both the data logs by pirates and the lore mural left behind by Chozo, allowing the player to piece together the bigger picture themselves, and it's brilliant to make lore more or less a collectible in a game like this.
While it doesn't have the dual-stick controls FPS games usually have, it's generally balanced around how you have to stop to look around, most enemies attacking you from eye-level and having the whole lock-on feature. Using Samus' arsenal is a snap and very intuitive for a game of this age, all the beam weapons being on a c-stick direction.
And it translates the Metroidvania genre to 3D perfectly, with there being a lot of secrets to find. Scan visor and a unique humming noise helps with detecting if an expansion is hidden nearby, especially good for beginners that don't have an eye for how they like to hide things yet.
Something about this game also makes upgrades feel a little more impactful than in 2D. Individual beam upgrades is really nice, but it doesn't quite match getting Plasma Beam for the first time in this game, stepping outside where jetpack pirates are nearby and killing this enemy that was previously a huge pain in the ass in a single charge shot.
As much as I love the game, there's two fumbles that I feel like keep it from reaching perfection, that being how often it asks you to backtrack to a previous area to grab a new upgraded needed to keep progressing through the area you're already in. At its worst when you pick up Boost Ball, have to then get out of Phendrana, trek all the way through Magmoor and Chozo Ruins, all to make your way back to Tallon Overworld to take the half-pipe there to grab Space Jump and then have to walk the entire way back to where you were.
I also feel like the boss fights are really dull. Flaggrha is laughably easy, the fight mainly just taking a while because it can knock down the solar discs you took offline. Thardus spends ridiculously long periods of doing nothing and being invulnerable to damage as you repeat a cycle of using Thermal Visor to find its weak spot, crack it open, switch back to combat visor, and then finish off that weak spot, repeat half a dozen times. Omega Pirate is only slightly better because it's easier to defeat it in as little cycles as possible. Ridley is the one winner of a boss fight, barring how long he spends flying in the background doing a very obviously telegraphed missile attack. And the final boss is just free, being real. Slightly forgivable because combat isn't 100% the focus of the game, but they're still overly long and boring.
Its story really works in this atmosphere-first approach too. The only important things to know is Samus arrived to a space pirate distress signal and she's here to investigate and stop whatever they're doing, eventually leading to destroying the source of Phazon deep in an impact crater. But to get a deeper context into what's going on, you use the scan visor to read both the data logs by pirates and the lore mural left behind by Chozo, allowing the player to piece together the bigger picture themselves, and it's brilliant to make lore more or less a collectible in a game like this.
While it doesn't have the dual-stick controls FPS games usually have, it's generally balanced around how you have to stop to look around, most enemies attacking you from eye-level and having the whole lock-on feature. Using Samus' arsenal is a snap and very intuitive for a game of this age, all the beam weapons being on a c-stick direction.
And it translates the Metroidvania genre to 3D perfectly, with there being a lot of secrets to find. Scan visor and a unique humming noise helps with detecting if an expansion is hidden nearby, especially good for beginners that don't have an eye for how they like to hide things yet.
Something about this game also makes upgrades feel a little more impactful than in 2D. Individual beam upgrades is really nice, but it doesn't quite match getting Plasma Beam for the first time in this game, stepping outside where jetpack pirates are nearby and killing this enemy that was previously a huge pain in the ass in a single charge shot.
As much as I love the game, there's two fumbles that I feel like keep it from reaching perfection, that being how often it asks you to backtrack to a previous area to grab a new upgraded needed to keep progressing through the area you're already in. At its worst when you pick up Boost Ball, have to then get out of Phendrana, trek all the way through Magmoor and Chozo Ruins, all to make your way back to Tallon Overworld to take the half-pipe there to grab Space Jump and then have to walk the entire way back to where you were.
I also feel like the boss fights are really dull. Flaggrha is laughably easy, the fight mainly just taking a while because it can knock down the solar discs you took offline. Thardus spends ridiculously long periods of doing nothing and being invulnerable to damage as you repeat a cycle of using Thermal Visor to find its weak spot, crack it open, switch back to combat visor, and then finish off that weak spot, repeat half a dozen times. Omega Pirate is only slightly better because it's easier to defeat it in as little cycles as possible. Ridley is the one winner of a boss fight, barring how long he spends flying in the background doing a very obviously telegraphed missile attack. And the final boss is just free, being real. Slightly forgivable because combat isn't 100% the focus of the game, but they're still overly long and boring.