I have only had a 3DS for about 2 months so the entire catalogue is all new to me and I wasn't actually aware that there even was a Metroid game on here so to be honest, when i discovered that there was, that kind of sealed the deal for me as far as whether or not I was going to purchase the unit at all. I was on the fence about whether to get this, or spend a lot more and get a Switch.
Returning to side-scrolling was actually welcomed by me because I often find that I am more old-school and 3d games are often too complicated for me. That is, unless I dedicate a lot of time towards them and I guess I could be considered a bit "low attention span" as far as that is concerned. It may also be because I am no longer a little kid and devote my time to "real world" stuff a lot more now.
Metroid: Samus Returns starts out wonderfully, and the powerups come at a steady pace to keep the game interesting and also give access to various areas that were previously unreachable. This is quite normal in Metroid games as I am sure a lot of you would agree.
I'll be honest at let you know that I have not yet completed this game and at this point I have only achieved the powerups that have existed in many games past and that is part of what i like about this game, the mechanics are exactly the same as i remember dating back as far as the SNES, it isn't complicated and it stays fun.
Now, as is tradition with me, i am going to complain a bit. The enemies: There just aren't very many of them. There is not much variety and it gets a bit tedious facing the same baddies over and over again. I guess this isn't too terribly different from Metroid games of the past but for some reason it just seems even more repetitive than other parts of the franchise.
And the one thing that really grinds my gears is the fact that level progression is determined by finding and killing metroids and sometimes they are extremely difficult to find. I am not asking the game to be paved out for me but when I have to cling to the walls of an entire zone and place bombs on the ceiling in the hopes of finding that ONE BLOCK that can be destroyed in order to get to the room that the metroid boss is in... this is not good game design, this is tedium and I don't like it.
You see the actual bosses are few and far between, the metroids are actually very easy to kill and their attack patterns for the most part is exactly the same. So rather than mixing up the bosses and requiring us to think a bit in order to defeat them, the designers thought it would be good idea to make discovering them in the first place a colossal pain in the butt. I don't know if this is intentional, but if you look on pretty much any review of this game the same thing is stated. It makes me turn the game off on a regular basis.
Overall, it is still a great game but the "seek and destroy" aspect of the game hiding the mini-metroids is not fun and since there is no XP in the game the constant running around and killing the same mobs over and over again in the search of the hidden room gets old really fast.