Beat it this weekend, greatly enjoyed it. Beat it initially with 68% power ups in about 10 hours and went back to pick up everything I had missed which took another hour. I mostly loved the changes and additions. Melee Counter is better in practice than it looked in trailers (and worked great as a tool to create distance if enemies were on top of you even if they weren't lunging yet). I love how the Ice Beam was split out into a separate (rarely needed) platforming and Metroid only tool*.
Mild Ability spoilers below
I thought the Aeion abilities were really fun and hope to see something like that return, though I thought the Scan Pulse revealing hidden blocks was too powerful of an ability for the game to hand out so early in the game. It should've been a mid-late game upgrade to the Scan Pulse or something. Phase Drift felt like a poor man's substitute for Speed Booster, though I can see why they might want to avoid speeding up Samus on a small screen (I preferred Fusion and Zero Mission's approach of just adding sprite trails to indicate speed w/o actually speeding Samus up as a small screen compromise). Burst Fire is the definite winner in the suite of new abilities. God I love that thing and how it let you kill some enemies earlier than your standard weaponry would allow.
Bring this one back again.
One aspect I really didn't like were the boss fights. Ok, the boss fights
were cool. However, they leaned far too heavily on pattern memorization and each boss only had seemingly 1 correct maneuver for you to do at any given time, and it felt like trial and error until you figured out what it was and then memorized the patterns enough. This might not be so bad if the damage the bosses dealt wasn't so high as to always kill you after 3-4 hits at most. If we're counting Metroids, some it was just 2 hits to death! It all felt very un-Metroid, like it had fallen out of another game all of sudden into this one.
The approach to revamping the Metroid fights was fantastic. I loved it. I feel like the Omegas could've been a little bit more epic, but I never got tired of fighting any of them.
Not all power ups were put to good use. The grapple beam was hardly used for mobility, largely only used for pulling or destroying blocks. Even where it was used, the action of swinging felt bad in this game to me. Power Bombs jumps made for a decent replacement for shine spark, but I really missed the skill challenges in Zero Mission and would've liked to see something more like that return. Not a single power up in the game was "hard" to get nor felt particularly earned.
The ending and new ties into both the rest of the series and where the series may go in the future were fantastic. The way that it tied elements of all the various incarnations of the series together was almost perfect. Metroid 2's skeleton combined with the refined gameplay of Zero Mission, music from Super, graphical design touches from Prime all combined with the new 360 aiming and the melee counter -- brilliance!
It's biggest weakness in my opinion is the overall relative linearity. You never
need to go back to previous areas. The only reason is for completionists or if you feel you need to go back and find a few more power ups to give you a little bit more of an edge (though missile power ups rain upon you frequently). A lot of this is inherited from its source material, but I would've liked to see them re-weave the areas together better. and more organically.
I'd have also liked to have heard more music in the game. Any time a remixed theme from Super or Metroid 2 came up it filled me with glee, but most of the game is just empty of musical background tracks. I get that Metroid 2 was this way, but we're trying to improve on a 26 year old game here. Give us some tunes! They could've contributed a whole new set of creepy subterranean music to set the mood.
Overall, it ranks in the middle of my list, at the bottom of the "modern" (SNES+) 2D games, but there's not a lot of distance between the individual titles except where noted.
- Super Metroid
- Metroid Prime
- Zero Mission
- Metroid Fusion
- Samus Returns
- Prime 2
- Prime 3**
- Other M**
- ------Gap here. Big Gap
- Metroid Prime Hunters
Metroid is my favorite Nintendo franchise, and I hope this does well so that we can see more 2D Metroid games in the future. The Prime subseries is fun, and I enjoy it, but nothing will compare to a great 2D Metroid adventure for me.
*
As an aside, thinking about the design of the Ice Beam in other games, its primary combat utility is stopping enemies from moving towards you and hitting you. With the new melee counter, the ice beam isn't really needed for this purpose, and the counter is a skill based ability so more rewarding to use, thus ice beam isn't needed at all times for gameplay balance purposes as in older titles...NEAT! Clearly a lot of thought went into the change.
**
I'm not sure how I'd rank Prime 3 and Other M against each other definitively. I've only played each of them once. I need to replay them again.