First time playing a Metroid game. I thought the foundations of this were fantastic, even comparing favourably against modern metroidvanias. Sadly, I found a huge amount of the game to be mind-blowingly frustrating.

I'll start with the good first: The early game design is strong and cohesive. The graphics are lovely and the movement and shooting feels good. The atmosphere is primarily dictated by the music which is very impactful with a variety of adventurous and spooky themes. The vibes are immaculate. Despite me finding flaws with this game, it was still engaging to play and has me excited to try more entries in the series. I don't regret my time with this game.

Now onto the bad: The exploration is decent but there are a huge number of secret walls that you need arbitrary abilities to destroy. I don't think this is great design generally but it becomes considerably worse when combined with the open world, gated progression and vague directions. I used a guide a couple of times to save myself potential hours of aimless wandering.

As you get more abilities, the initially concise controls become increasingly convoluted. Some abilities are almost entirely useless besides opening locked doors which is a shame. Many others are just upgrades which aren't very interesting. Perhaps it's unfair to criticise the game for this since it is an early game in the genre but I'm considering how fun it is to play today.

The biggest problem I had was some of the level design and enemy placement being incredibly frustrating. It starts off with the occasional annoying room and me thinking "ok I guess that was a one-off, surely it will get better now" but then it just gets more and more tedious to the point where I have no idea how anyone would think this is fun. It's not even particularly difficult, just painful and unintuitive.

It feels like such a mixed bag with an amazingly likeable and polished core experience but getting through the whole game is somewhat maddening.