I had barely played the original Metroid 2 on gameboy because, for some reason, the audio and graphics scared me when I was a kid, so this remake seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to see what's up with this game. While it's an interesting project, there are some choices that I didn't enjoy, and in general I can't say that I've been hooked by AM2R. Some stuff in it feel like it would never be in a 'real' metroid game, and some stuff was just plain too frustrating.
After a mission briefing presented in a non-obtrusive way, you start on planet SR388 much like you just landed at the beginning of Super Metroid, but the art style is more Metroid Zero Mission. You already have missiles and a vague objective - killing one metroid to advance the story - but already things are a bit weird. There's a rounded room just west of where you start, it's a small thing, but AM2R has a bunch of weird rounded or diagonal rooms while usually, metroid games never do, they always have square rooms, that's not a big deal, but it makes things seem a bit off.
The metroids were kinda grotesque in the original gameboy version and they still keep this particularity in AM2R. Now, however, it's easier to say what they were supposed to look like than the garbled mess of pixels they once were, but that doesn't help too much. In the original game, you had to shoot missiles at them to defeat them and nothing else would work; It's the same thing here, but they have very specific spots where you need to shoot them and the controls are finicky, if you run out of missiles you have to leave the battle arena, farm up some more and retry. That frustrated me a few times. I wish you could still just shoot them everywhere, it'd make the fights a bit 'too' easy, but I was playing on easy after all...
You still get the wide array of Metroid gear; Bombs, spider ball, space jump, speed dash, super missiles and the like and the progression seems to fit the model I had seen of Metroid 2; You kill metroids, lava drains somewhere and you can go to new areas, rinse and repeat. I think the 'new' bosses this game adds are a bit weird. They probably 'could' fit in a metroid game, but some of them are jarringly out of place. That Chozo statue that flies around while you have to space jump constantly felt to me like a boss in a flash game, some of it was off and didn't fit with the rest of the game. That 'mini-game' where you controlled a robot that dropped super missiles around was also really slow and boring, and I'm sure there are other instances of off-putting situations that I'm forgetting.
To conclude, AM2R is an ambitious project that ultimately gave birth to this very impressive remake that you should probably play if you're a Metroid fan. It was too rough for me and dying + losing my progress made me stop playing it. It's well made, even if not everything in it would pass for 'real' Metroid material, but that shouldn't stop you.
