4/5 ★ – Sefferson's review of Hyper Metroid.

This romhack gets some things really right, but then drops the ball on some other things. Overall exploration is a bit more cumbersome for the first half of the game because of the reliance on using Grapple Beam, and during the latter half of the game, while movement becomes a lot less tedious thanks to the overall speed of Samus’ run and Space Jump, the rooms are way too big. I found myself pausing to look at the map to make sure I was going the right way so many times, and attempting to find my way around during some of the later sections of the game was difficult, even when turning to a map online to try and find my way. That being said, the overall level design on display here is really impressive for a romhack. Everything does feel very designed around Samus’ movement progression in a very natural way. Some rooms were a pain to get through initially, and then a couple of hours later when you revisit them you’ll blast through them with little to no issue. I was very impressed by the escape sequence in particular, which had Samus running back through over half of the planet just to get back to her ship, which showed off how interconnected areas are in a really interesting and cool way. The same cannot, however, be said about the game’s difficulty. There’s a lot of things that I genuinely don’t know if I did it the right way, because the right way wasn’t super clear upon discovery of how to progress. In the base Super Metroid game, while it’s easy to get stuck, as you learn the planet and learn routes through the planet, everything feels very natural and fluid. In Hyper Metroid, there’s a lot more Metroid NES DNA of running across the same 4 rooms over and over, not knowing where to go to progress, only for the solution to be bombing a wall that has no indication practically. After binging through the entire series, I’ve picked up on the subtle tells of where to bomb in other games in the series, but once again, this romhack fails to fully capture that feeling, which isn’t necessarily surprising. To add to the difficulty, the bosses are pretty absurd. Every single boss is cranked up to 11 this time around, and just goes super speed like they do when they are almost dead in OG Super Metroid the whole fight. Luckily, a lot of them don’t feel like they have a ton of health, but every fight felt like I was battling more with getting a quick shot in while avoiding cheap shots, rather than actually making the fights more interesting. Easily the worst offender of this was Draygon, who no longer has a quick grapple kill as the turrets you break in the base game are gone and instead are replaced with rapid fire, unbreakable projectiles that flood the arena from both sides. All the while, Draygon is ridiculously fast. Getting through this romhack took some patience, as there was a lot of backtracking back through long sequences of an area, but it was overall a good time. Visually, it’s pretty much a recolor of Super Metroid, but the visuals created enough of an identity that it made it feel unique. Everything feels darker, everything feels more dreary, which given the corny, over the top dark fanfiction-esque story, makes sense. I don’t think I will revisit this romhack, and I only really recommend it to those who are really pretty good at Super Metroid, as its difficulty can cause some pacing issues.