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AM2R: Return of Samus (2016, Windows) Review


SAMUS ARAN: BUG EXTERMINATOR


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Welcome to the mine shafts of the Metroid's home planet SR388. As mercenary Samus Aran, your mission is to exterminate all 48 of the titular parasites before they can conquer the universe. Drain the magma level to get progressively deeper, until you reach the queen's lair in the darkest cave. That's the simple premise of AM2R: Return of Samus, a fantastic Metroid II-remake from a technical sense, that's unfortunately not altogether fun to play.

Let's begin with the good news. AM2R is a totally free fan project that's available to download on different sites around the web. It remains so, in spite of Nintendo's predictably evil attempts to eradicate it, as they feared it would hamper the sales of their own official remake Metroid: Samus Returns. This cease-and-desist reveals that AM2R is of commercial quality - they actually saw it as competition to their own sales.


And it's not bad, even when judged on those merits. With AM2R, the creator (DoctorM64) has crafted a remake technically worthy of the same praise as Metroid: Zero Mission. The visuals are on par with the chronologically adjacent entries of the series, sliding neatly into place right between Zero Mission and Super Metroid to finalize a trilogy of sorts.

Whereas the original Game Boy-release Metroid II: Return to Samus felt claustrophobic, this feels more open and expansive. Detailed backgrounds make each area distinct, such as fiery pits, underwater sections and dark caverns. Hostile inhabitants and robots help establish each area's specific theme. Today, no one would call the game aesthetically pleasing, but the visuals serve as a throughline, helping people who missed out on the franchise to catch up.



The problem is that the original Metroid II was a 2-3 hour playthrough of repeated alien extinction that ended before it wore out its welcome. AM2R rests on the same repetitive foundation but is drawn out to around five times the length. Somewhere around the halfway mark it gets tiresome. The Metroids you're hunting come in only four different variations, which means you have to fight the same mini-bosses over and over, with only slight differences in arena design and numbers. 

To make matters worse, none of the variants are fun to fight. Especially egregious are the more evolved Zeta and Omega types, whose attack patterns combine with a huge health pool to create dull encounters. In some instances, my safest way to beat them was to stand in a safe spot, waiting for the enemy to turn its back. I would then jump down and follow it down the hallway until it turned around and bared its weak point on the stomach. I'd fire a few rockets and retreat back to the safe spot. It was not difficult and it certainly was not fun.

But AM2R is no boss rush game. You spend most of the time exploring the mazelike 2D space, vertically and horizontally, looking for obvious or hidden ways forward. Searching for cracks in the wall or other irregularities might reveal hidden tunnels. Some of these contain upgrades to health or missile storage. Going past certain doors rewards you with new weapon or suit upgrades, left in the clutches of Chozo husks. All this is reasonably enticing, or at least it was until I realized that nearly all upgrades are copy-pasted from Zero Mission. In a sense, AM2R feels like an expansion to that game.



The brand new spider ball, allowing you to roll up or down vertical surfaces, is a neat idea but insufferably slow. And once you get the ability to jump in mid-air the spider ball almost becomes redundant. In fact, the space jump makes exploration trivial and kinda boring, especially when strengthened by the screw attack, which makes you nigh invulnerable. Only projectiles can hurt you in that state.

Samus is nicely animated, but her movement is quick. So quick, in fact, that the controls have a hard time keeping up. The space jump, activated by pressing the jump button while you're in the air, is frustratingly unreliable. It can fail to trigger, causing a lot of frustration or even harm to Samus as she falls down a magma pit. I tried playing with a controller at first, but switched to keyboard because it improved my reaction times, particularly against the frantic bosses.



The remake adds a mini-map that pinpoints areas of interest, such as save stations and hidden power-ups. If you ask me, this is never a bad thing. I doubt I would've endured through some of the more expansive sections and the backtracking without it. Real bosses appear every now and then, some of them aggressive derelicts of the old mining operation, others just really dangerous fauna. These shake up the old formula a bit, adding fun and unique segments of gameplay. Most of them I beat just as I was down to my last sliver of health, which is one trademark of a good boss design. A helpful journal adds some hints on how to beat them.

But the standard enemy types are just a chore in their 8-bit, often fixed movement patterns. They're way too numerous and very rarely pose a threat. I'd call them a neccessary evil - they need to be included because something would feel amiss without them. The trivial moment-to-moment gameplay and combat, when combined with the unremarkable soundtrack, fail to establish any sort of atmosphere. Metroids, with their xenomorphic appearance and life cycle, have the potential to be scary, but AM2R totally fails to deliver on that promise.



To me, this game seems like by-the-book Metroidvania. It fails to surprise in the slightest. The written story is thin, coalescing with the gameplay to tell a tale of exploration. You're driven forward by curiosity. Finding cracks in the wall to reveal crawlspaces to secret stash feels rewarding.That aspect of the game is functional and occasionally fun. Only when I got stuck for a while did I get actively bored or frustrated - especially when one crucial power-up was hidden behind a wall that was only destructible using that specific power-up.

All-in-all, I consider AM2R to be really successful plastic surgery that, on the surface level, makes it slide neatly into the old-school Metroid pantheon. I'm no expert on the genre, so I can't point out exactly what about the level design and gameplay that feels off. I can only ascertain that I was just going through the motions for large portions of the playthrough. In spite of finding numerous game-changing upgrades, I very rarely felt the gameplay change in a specific manner. And ultimately, it felt like the game would've benefitted from trimming the fat quite a bit.

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