I like the old school 2D Metroid style of atmosphere and gameplay even if I am not a diehard fan who has played every metroid, and a modernized version of metroid sounds really cool. I picked up the game when it came out, and bounced off it after a while. Picking it up again years later I realize why. Its not horrible but its lopsided, and unfortunately the bad has made it less than the sum of its parts for me. The good parts weren't worth powering through the tedious parts.
It does lots of cool things, like the visuals, soundtrack and atmosphere. Having melee weapons in a metroid style game is also a cool touch, as is the overheat mechanic where shooting your gun heats up the barrel, making it fire slower, but using melee does more damage with higher barrel heat AND cools off the gun. Which is an interesting game loop.
But the main issue is that the game is tedious too often. It has a lot of unnecessary Soulslike mechanics like leveling up, and running back to where you died to pick up your currency/exp, you also lose a bit of max HP when you die and it costs a tiny amount of currency to repair. Leveling up only has 3 stats, none of which really have "builds" I just split points between the Gunpower and the one has does a bit of everything whose name I forgot. I'd rather find upgrades in the world than grind out boring tiny, incremental levels. The badge system is cool but its just Hollow Knight again, and requiring a lot of grinding to have the badge points necessary to use much. The secondary shot feature was cool but most options were not great and it also cost badge points so you really only want missile and the gun option in the first slot, from an optional boss early on, that fires low cost long distance good damage shots.
The map requirings a lot of backtracking and disables fast travel whenever you need to bring back one of the 5 macguffins, it is tedious and has no in game explanation as to why. Fast travel points are too spaced out and rarely are positioned well. You have to spend too much time doing corpse runs and it takes up way too much game time when better checkpoints could have aleviated this. I never have trouble getting back, just the fight where I died. Boss like enemies are also very spongey, and felt like they dragged on too long, and health/healing is quite stingy and recovery items also heal over time to make it even worse. You can't change difficulty unless you restart the whole game either. Just not a great way to implement difficulty.
I also wasn't a fan of the characters. The player character had this kind of shy awkward waifu thing going on when they talk. The other characters are mostly okay but also I didn't really care about them, nor care for them in a metroid like game even if I don't think they did anything wrong by including them. Its just not my cup of tea and I wouldn't miss them or any dialogue.
TLDR: Good visuals, good music, control well, gamefeel is solid, like a modernized metroid with some good ideas, downsides are that the game is dragged down by a lot of tediousness world design, souls like mechanics that play against the strenghts of an exploration based game, meh story and spongey boss enemies that tend too often frustration rather than thrill and mastery. Only really worth it for diehard metroid fans looking for something new.
