2.5/5 ★ – Sefferson's review of Metroid.

For a game often times looked at as NES hard, its difficulty only really comes down to being a nuisance. Enemies can hit you through door transitions, when you die you restart with 30 energy regardless of how many tanks you have, etc. The overall progression of the game isn’t terrible. There’s a few spots that if you didn’t know you were supposed to bomb certain walls I could see how it would be annoying, but given my Metroid instinct is to just go around bombing things, especially in earlier games where there’s no real tell, I never really had a huge issue with it. I like that the game allows you to get all your upgrades right away, the game gets a lot more fun once you get Screw Attack because the obnoxious enemy placements become almost a nonissue given how powerful Screw Attack still is. There’s final boss is beyond annoying. The poor NES can barely keep up with all that’s on screen, the barriers on the way to it take an absurd amount of missiles, and if you run out of missiles it’s back to the drawing board trying to find more. With no missiles, you can’t go back and grind Metroids (which already tend to drop energy over missiles), and if you die it’s back down to 30 hp and painstakingly grinding back all your energy and missiles. Again, the difficulty of this game just comes down to the game wasting your time, which I guess was the idea given the rewards for beating the game being tied to clear time, but it’s just not fun as a result. Unlike later entries in the series, enemies don’t have nice drops. The bugs that come out of the tubes are a pain to grind in this game, and if they drop energy, you better believe it’s only 5 energy. You can spend upwards of 15 minutes just trying to refill your Energy Tanks.