SAMUS ARAN: BUG EXTERMINATOR
Welcome to the mine shafts of the Metroids’ home planet SR388. As bounty hunter Samus Aran, your mission is simple: exterminate all 48 of the titular parasites before they can spread beyond the planet and threaten the universe. By draining the magma layer by layer, you descend ever deeper, until you reach the queen’s lair in the darkest cavern of all. That’s the premise of AM2R: Return of Samus—a technically impressive remake of Metroid II that, unfortunately, isn’t consistently fun to play.
Let’s start with the good news. AM2R is a completely free fan project, available across various corners of the internet. It remains so despite Nintendo’s predictably heavy-handed attempts to shut it down, fearing it might cannibalize sales of their official remake, Metroid: Samus Returns. That cease-and-desist alone speaks volumes: Nintendo clearly regarded AM2R as legitimate competition.
And judged on those terms, it largely holds up. Creator DoctorM64 has crafted a remake that, from a technical standpoint, stands shoulder to shoulder with Metroid: Zero Mission. Visually and mechanically, it fits neatly between Zero Mission and Super Metroid, effectively completing a cohesive trilogy in style and presentation.
Where the original Game Boy release of Metroid II felt cramped and oppressive, AM2R opens the world up considerably. Detailed backgrounds distinguish fiery magma pits from underwater zones and shadowy caverns, while hostile wildlife and abandoned mining machinery help establish each area’s identity. By modern standards, the visuals aren’t exactly striking, but they’re functional and coherent, providing a clear throughline for players new to the series.
The problem is one of scale. Metroid II was a tightly paced 2–3 hour experience, built around repetitive alien extermination but smart enough to end before that repetition became exhausting. AM2R preserves that same foundation but stretches it to roughly five times the length. Somewhere around the halfway mark, fatigue sets in.
The Metroids themselves come in only four variants, meaning you face the same mini-boss encounters again and again, differentiated only by slight changes in arena layout or enemy count. Worse still, none of these encounters are particularly engaging. The later Zeta and Omega forms are especially tedious, combining bloated health pools with simplistic attack patterns. In several fights, the safest—and most effective—strategy involved exploiting a static safe spot, waiting for the creature to expose its weak point, firing a few missiles, and retreating. It wasn’t challenging, and it certainly wasn’t exciting.
That said, AM2R isn’t just about combat. Most of your time is spent navigating its labyrinthine 2D spaces, searching vertically and horizontally for paths forward. Cracks in walls and subtle environmental irregularities often conceal hidden passages, some leading to health or missile expansions, others to new weapons or suit upgrades guarded by Chozo remains. This loop is engaging at first—until it becomes clear just how heavily AM2R borrows from Zero Mission. So many upgrades are lifted wholesale that the game begins to feel less like a reimagining and more like an unofficial expansion.
The newly introduced Spider Ball, which allows Samus to roll along vertical surfaces, is conceptually clever but painfully slow. Once you acquire the Space Jump, it becomes almost entirely obsolete. In fact, Space Jump trivializes exploration altogether, especially when paired with the Screw Attack, which renders Samus nearly invulnerable to anything but projectiles. Movement shifts from deliberate navigation to effortless traversal, draining much of the tension from exploration.
Samus herself is well animated, but her movement speed borders on excessive. The controls struggle to keep pace, particularly with the Space Jump, which is triggered by pressing jump mid-air. The timing feels unreliable, frequently failing to activate and sending Samus plummeting into hazards like magma pits. I initially played with a controller but eventually switched to keyboard controls, which improved responsiveness—especially during frantic boss encounters.
The remake introduces a mini-map that highlights points of interest such as save stations and hidden upgrades. Without it, I doubt I would have endured some of the game’s more sprawling sections or its heavy reliance on backtracking. Proper boss fights do appear from time to time—ranging from aggressive mining relics to especially dangerous fauna—and these encounters are among the game’s highlights. They break up the monotony and often end with me surviving by a sliver of health, a hallmark of solid boss design. A built-in journal even provides hints for overcoming them.
Unfortunately, the standard enemy roster drags the experience down. Their rigid, often 8-bit-era movement patterns make them more of an obstacle than a threat, and they appear in overwhelming numbers. They feel like a necessary evil—remove them and the world would feel empty—but as implemented, they add little. Combined with an unremarkable soundtrack, the moment-to-moment gameplay fails to establish atmosphere. Given the Metroids’ unsettling design and parasitic lifecycle, the game should feel oppressive or frightening. Instead, it rarely does.
Ultimately, AM2R is a very orthodox Metroidvania. It plays things strictly by the book and almost never surprises. The story is minimal, conveyed primarily through exploration itself, driven by curiosity rather than narrative momentum. Discovering secret passages and hidden upgrades can still be rewarding, and that loop works well—until progress grinds to a halt. Few things are more frustrating than realizing a critical path is blocked by a wall that can only be destroyed with the very upgrade hidden behind it.
All things considered, AM2R feels like extremely successful cosmetic surgery. On the surface, it slots neatly into the classic Metroid lineage. But beneath that polish, something is off. I can’t precisely diagnose the issue—it’s a feeling more than a flaw—but for long stretches I found myself simply going through the motions. Despite acquiring numerous supposedly game-changing upgrades, the way I played rarely evolved in meaningful ways. In the end, AM2R feels like a good game that desperately needed restraint. Trimmed down, it might have been great.
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