Oi27's Hack Reviews - Metroid Construction

Metroid - Galactic Marine by Stat!k / Srarokz [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Nov 26, 2024 (

)

71% in 1:40

You ARE the marine!! This is what it would feel like if vanilla had a "Luigi" for P2.

Super Metroid CRE 2 by Tundain [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Nov 06, 2022 (

)

78% in 0:31

Very good quickplay! Unique item loadout by endgame and very cool use of animated tiles.

Mintroid by Golden Warrior [ MZM

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Aug 28, 2020 (

)

96% in 0:21

Great hack! It was very clear where to go and what to do. Theming was fun and it wasn't too difficult either. 10/10

Sequence Breaking Fusion by Kazuto [

Vanilla+], rated by Oi27 on May 07, 2020 (

)

49% in 2:00

Very promising; still needs more changes to be completely nonlinear. It was a ton of fun; early pb's and plasma are easy, early space jump, but that's about all I found. Since you're able to finish all the sectors without returning to the main deck, you can skip saving the animals and that was interesting. Ending doesn't change though. ;P

MDbtroid by Infinitys_End [

Improvement], rated by Oi27 on Aug 16, 2019 (

)

No completion stats.

NEStroid with a new paint job. As far as I noticed, all of the interact-able sprites are redone, and all the edits are massive improvements. This is what NEStroid should have been.

Super Metroid: Ascent by Benox50 [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Jul 02, 2019 (

)

77% in 5:11

Great hack, great puzzles. Favorite one was limited PB radius, it was pretty clever.

B2-TW by Grime [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Sep 12, 2018 (

)

10% in 0:09

Fun, short hack. Could stand to be longer, morphball-unique stuff is a cool concept.

Ancient Chozo by Albert V. [

Vanilla+], rated by Oi27 on Aug 22, 2018 (

)

84% in 3:28

Best hack I've ever played. A bit more difficult than the vanilla game, and sequence breaking is harder, but this hack looks gorgeous. Project Base integration makes gameplay smooth, and a lot of thought is put into the level design. Would be nice if there were fewer spikes that limit walljumping, which are usually the things that limit sequence-breaking, but Escape Sequence is the only real low point; it seems to have unavoidable acid dives that would make it impossible on low%. The rest of the game is fun for casual playthroughs, and I still can't get over how great the tilesets are!
8/10

V E R T I C A L I T Y by Tundain [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Apr 26, 2024 (

)

86% in 8:24

EDIT 7/26/24:
This initial review was based on the 1.0 release and many of the problems mentioned have been improved with more recent patches. Revised rating from 3 to 4 orb.
---
Verticality is well put together and free of major bugs or softlocks; I couldn't find any and I was looking for them. This hack's gimmick is that most of the enemies and game mechanics are tweaked in some way, for better or for worse (or for neutral!). It adds a couple of totally unique enemies and bosses; they're all great! More on the bosses later.

This hack uses a gate system for unlocking the end of the game, like Hyper Metroid. It led to a lot of frustration at the end of the game because I missed one of them and then spent 2 hours scouring the entire planet for it, to no avail. The next day, I learned from the Discord that each area has two switches... how was the player supposed to know that? It makes sense in retrospect but it's not immediately obvious. After that, I was able to find the switch pretty quickly because I missed some rooms on the map; it was pretty obvious once I knew what area to focus on. The grouping of the gates by area could have been better explained by maybe having some graphics in the gate room with colors or area names or something like that. Overall, this doesn't impact my opinion of the hack too much because the switches are not too hard to find; if you go for 100% map you'll get all of them. That said, 100% map is not my cup of tea & I prefer bosses as a hack objective.

One weirdo change that psyched me out is that SBAs now fire when you release the button, instead of after you charge for a while. It's fine I guess? But I also don't see why it was changed; subverting the players expectations of the control scheme is strange.

The hack also introduces super spikes that teleport you to a set location instead of dealing damage. It's horrendous! It's like having spikes that one-shot you, except there's a convenient checkpoint nearby. Due to the way the camera works, you'll often jump into spikes that are just offscreen, and have to redo the room or the section you're doing. There's no ingame lore or explanation; these things just teleport you. The camera trails slowly back to your spawn position, so it's like having respawn animation & you have to wait for the camera to arrive before you can try again. These things are everywhere. The difficulty of the things you're expected to do with them is all over the place; sometimes they just exist in the room to be a nuisance and other times it's a whole minigame that makes SM into an ultra precision platformer. Except, SM isn't a precision platformer and it really falls on its face. It gets bogged down by all sorts of weird collision things, like if you're next to a wall of these things and press away (to move away from the wall of spikes) then you'll take a hit and have to restart. Why? I couldn't think of it at the time but my best guess is that Samus is walljump checking the spikes and colliding, even though you were moving away from them. That happens a lot, especially in the close quarters that many of the precision tests give you. And you also have to deal with other SM-specific jank, like the turnaround animation moving you a couple pixels left or right. Vanilla SM has a beautiful and fluid movement system, but there's a very good reason it doesn't ask you to be precise. These tele spikes alone probably added an hour to my playthough of senselessly repeating the same stuff, only to get janked out by walljump check, or the camera, or an enemy knocking you into them. Putting them into precision tests is one thing, but it's extra annoying that they're just scattered around in random rooms, in random places. They're horrible!
They might not be so bad if they had some kind of lore and were not used as often. The way the camera has to slowly scroll back to you feels awful, and the place it teleports you to is completely arbitrary. And improved version of this mechanic could be to have a marked "teleport station" that Samus respawns in, and have the screen cut to black when you get hit so that the camera can move into position instantly. It would also be ideal to remove instances later on in the hack where these tele spikes are invisible, but those ones in particular aren't egregious given the context of those particular rooms.

All the new items work well and I was really impressed with the new HUD item; the jetpack. It slows down Samus's falling speed and it just kinda works. No jank! You can't do certain things like midair morph or downback while using it, but that's pretty acceptable; that's just how it is. The other new items are some beam/missile upgrades and they all work well. They added some true new Samus projectiles and those were technically impressive, but a mixed bag in terms of usefulness.

Charge Missiles -> shoots a Super. Could have gotten this early on & seems like it would have been useful, but I found it during cleanup at the end of the game & didn't use it that much. It's missable.

Charge Supers -> Spawns a new projectile when it hits something. It's a couple of rotating charge shots draw from whatever beam you have equipped. I ended up not using it very much just because it's new and I forgot about it most of the time; I could have gotten more mileage out of it. Sidenote: It's not good on enemies that move around a lot, because the projectile stays in one spot & might not even hit them.

OverCharge -> If you hold Charge for double the amount of time, you start taking damage and letting go gives you knockback as if taking a hit. The projectile is new & deals 3x the damage of your equipped charge shot, but this is not explained ingame & I couldn't figure out if it did anything worthwhile. The projectile itself is the same no matter what you have equipped, and it's very small. I ended up missing any time I tried to use it, because of the knockback it gives you + the projectile is smaller than normal charge shot for most beam combos. A lot of the bosses move around quickly, so hitting them with it is tough. You can dboost off the knockback, which is theoretically cool, but of zero use to most players. I turned this off for most of the game because taking damage for holding Charge is a big nerf to Pseudo Screw.

The new Shinespark mechanics are really cool & I liked the Reflec puzzles for the most part. There was one in WS that straight up didn't work / required a pixel perfect shinespark off a moving treadmill; this took many many tries and failing it caused you to end shinespark next to Reflecs, which shot the echoes back at you for heaps of damage. The room is designed to close behind you, so I think this puzzle is supposed to be easier to do / work every time? The only ways out of the room are to Kago though a gate, complete the puzzle, or die trying. The other Reflec shinespark puzzles were awesome and a treat to watch; they all worked as intended.

Graphically the hack is really good looking! The tiling is vanilla adjacent, and a lot of the areas have custom BG3 work to have multiple layers of parallax. Very impressive.

In general the room design is really good too. Disregarding the tele spikes, there's a lot of well executed Metroid tropes here, like item previews, and exit-only rooms. Secrets are cool because more often than not you get a door and another room instead of having random wall missiles.

The new bosses are all well executed & my favorite was the giant robot :D
An odd common trait that most (all?) the new bosses share is that they have some kind of stomp attack that aims at Samus's X position.
The G4 vanilla bosses are all present & have changes; the best one is Phantoon. Kraid's only(?) change is that you enter his room on a different scroll & his room is taller. Not sure what's going on there. The other bosses have significant and meaningful changes that dramatically change how the fights play out. It's great!

Difficulty should be Veteran; a lot of the stuff Verticality expects you to do is much more involved than in Vanilla. Also the boss rooms are not marked with eye doors; many of them are surprises and as a result I was often going into them having not saved for a while, or low on resources, or happened to just go the wrong way and miss the save that was right outside the [unmarked] boss room. I died several times to various things in my playthough.

Taking all that into account, the spamming (tele) spikes in every area and random places really took me out of the experience and caused a lot of unnecessary pain. Watch your head and pan the camera up very slowly and carefully. Without these spikes, easy 5/5 hack. Even replace them with normal spikes, 5/5 hack. With them? A very impressive and otherwise well designed hack; 3.5/5

Super Metroid CRE by Tundain [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Mar 19, 2022 (

)

64% in 0:33

Fun little quickplay; the CRE enemies were foreboding and eerie. It's odd how some of them came out looking legitimately really good? Standouts include the platform guys, the Rios, and the flat things that jump up/sway back down. Enemy placement was a little iffy in the room outside speed; having to deal with flying enemies and grapple at once was difficult. A few other rooms seemed like they had too many; I found myself ignoring the enemies and just tanking the damage.
Unconventional CRE is a solid 8/10; recommended.

Super Metroid Weekend IV by dewhi100 [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Jan 26, 2022 (

)

15% in 0:30

Pretty cool little hack; escape sequence was questionable and the supers counter on the HUD was invisible. 11/10 grapple mechanics, better than PB.

UpTroidDown by BuggMann [

Vanilla+], rated by Oi27 on Apr 22, 2021 (

)

61% in 1:27

Even more disorienting than Rotation!

V I T A L I T Y by Digital_Mantra [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Oct 21, 2020 (

)

63% in 4:21

The rooms very very good looking, as stated in other reviews. Super Metroid has never looked so nice! Though, I had frequently problems looking at a glance and knowing what surfaces I could walk on, especially in rooms that have a solid layer 3 in addition to the normal level layer. Sometimes you walk on the background too, which looks pretty trippy in underwater/heated rooms since the background oscillates and the foreground (the layer you've been interacting with in say, the previous room) is solid.

On the same note, it threw me off that the lava and acid are a dark gray color; it makes it hard to see against a dark background. When I got to the first room that has lava, I just kinda walked into it and ??? woah why am i taking damage. OH THERE'S LAVA??

The best advice is to take the first playthough nice and slow; if you go running into new rooms at top speed, you will be confused and probably underwater.

Aside from those minor points, Vitality is a very solid hack that uses the game mechanics well. Nice 8/10!

Super Metroid: Y-Faster 2 Fast by Metaquarius [

Speedrun/Race], rated by Oi27 on May 05, 2020 (

)

72% in 3:50

Very good hack but the time limit almost ruined it for me. Dying instantly is a harsh punishment for taking time to explore the map (a worse ending would be better imo), but it's fine if you run out of time - it's based on the game's IGT so if you want to keep playing, you just need to reset the time to 0 in RAM.

Aside from the time limit, each area was well-made. My favorite was the Homenag red Crateria; it seems like a lot of effort went into making it look buggy and broken even though it's not. The elevator is a good touch. The palette changes for Homenag and the physics changes for Redesign sold it for me; it was crazy.

Another thing I think could be better about the hack would be making each area self-contained. They are for the most part, but finding Varia to complete the Redesign area was weird since it was required* but it was in another area, meaning to complete it visiting each area only once, you'd have to do them in a specific order, even though you can access all of them from the beginning.

On the assumption that each area could be beaten without items from other area, I had a pretty frustrating time with Redesign, but was barely able to do it without Varia after collecting every energy tank I could find.

The rest of the hack was a ton of fun. Did things differently from how you'd expect and had a lot of interesting surprises. 8/10!

Metroid: Oil Spill by Spedimus [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Aug 14, 2019 (

)

11% in 0:50

Nice hack! The nonlinearity was well thought-out; I did a bunch of weird stuff and took some wrong turns; no softlocks, and I was able to finish it without collecting gravity or varia, or most of the items. The oil/acid dealt a lot of damage any time I ran into it, but that wasn't too much thankfully.
Other than that, the level design made for some really cool exploration.

Oxide by Cyclamen32 [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on May 10, 2019 (

)

170% in 2:31

Cool hack, but not perfect. Finding Kraid was difficult, and there's only 1 location to pick up your first power bombs. Aside from that, lots of drops, fairly easy, interesting level design. Too many "kill all the enemies" rooms, and one during the escape sequence(!), which the hack would be better off without.
Overall: 7/10

Super Metroid Nature by Jefe962 [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Dec 27, 2018 (

)

79% in 0:00

This hack was amazing. The item placement stuck fairly close to the original, and advanced techniques allowed a lot of things to be gotten early, or in a different order. There are a few minor gripes here and there, for instance I think the escape sequence was a little too strict, and there didn't seem to be any animals to save. There were some significant acid dives in lower Norfair as well.
The rest of the level design was a joy to play through, and everything else was about vanilla difficulty.
Quality hack; 4.5/5

EDIT: The animals are in Bomb Torizo's room, like usual, but the timer makes saving them a lot harder.

Super Metroid Arcade : Endless mode by Lioran, Tewtal [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Sep 12, 2018 (

)

No completion stats.

Cool hack, played for a few hours and I keep coming back to it. Lots of replay value.

Super Metroid Ruin by personitis [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Aug 18, 2018 (

)

100% in 0:57

Very nice hack. Early-on challenges are jarring, being late-game bosses (Fight Golden Torizo with no missiles and the Power Suit!?!) but once you actually fight them, you find that the difficulty has been adjusted accordingly. Not terribly hard to 100% either; though one item is really obscure.
8/10!

Wet Dream by Crys [

Unknown], rated by Oi27 on Jul 29, 2018 (

)

73% in 3:35

Great hack! Not horribly difficult, but harder than the vanilla game. Advanced skills like wall jumping are required. It changes up the items a lot, but leaves the level design more-or-less intact.
The real draw of Wet Dream is how it changes the physics. Samus jumps really high and fast underwater, but sinks very slowly. It's a bit like doing a gravity jump in the vanilla game, except higher maybe. Usually her momentum stops if you exit the water while crazy jump acceleration, but I had a few instances where she kept the speed. All the underwater changes work in a really strange way, but it's a welcome change from the usual. The changes in level design play around the physics in interesting ways; it's very well-designed, save for a few rooms that have "don't touch the ground" gimmicks.
The other major change is that the timer on morph ball bombs is shortened a lot. They explode almost immediately, so you can just mash the button for infinite BJ, and it lets you hover above the ground when used underwater. It's weird, but it's a fun mechanic that the level design takes advantage of.
Wet Dream is definitely worth a play; it's one of the more unique hacks I've encountered. I loved it!

Super Metroid CRE 3 by Tundain [

Spoof], rated by Oi27 on May 25, 2023 (

)

42% in 1:15

Lots of custom stuff but it's a mixed bag - also no vanilla upgrades to be found. Beam is a peashooter the whole game and missiles have a drastically increased cooldown. Supers have been overhauled into a totally new upgrade and it's neat, but ultimately not very useful in combat. It's a door key essentially. Plus, all your attacks have nerfed range where they fizzle out like the short beam in NEStroid.

Grapple has been replaced by an all-new upgrade that lets you control which direction crumble blocks break from, which is neat, but doesn't meaningfully change the way the player interacts with the level design. It amounts to extra tedium where you need to fumble around for the right key to pass through solid crumble block barriers. Its most interesting applications are when you need to quickly change between breaking vertical and horizontal crumbles.
Another note: due to its nature where you select it and then do further selection, it essentially expands the HUD by an entire 4 slots! And people already complain about the amount of clicking in the vanilla HUD. I avoided using it when possible.
A better implementation of the idea would be to have any crumble blocks break on touch without player input - currently the end result of clearing the blocks doesn't scale with the player effort of using it and choosing which blocks to break.

All the custom enemies are super cool though! No complaints on the normal in-room ones. I liked the floor-lying enemies that snap shut on you, and the stationary things that shoot you when in range.

2 custom minibosses:
First one is really awesome and I enjoyed it a lot, even if it does move a bit fast. 9/10 custom boss!
Second one has SO MUCH HEALTH! It feels like more than the final boss has. It's also pretty tough to hit since it moves around erratically offscreen... the movement is predictable *most of the time* but sometimes it can just change direction, and that can happen offscreen when you can't see it. It hits like a truck! 4/10 custom boss.

And the final boss is pretty similar; moves fast and deals heaps. The mode 7 is very cool but makes it ambiguous when the boss is vulnerable or not. Its attacks are telegraphed and avoidable, but if you're in the wrong position [from avoiding another attack] depending on the RNG you can get a pattern feels impossible to dodge. Died a bunch before learning the patterns. 6/10 custom boss!

Overall CRE 3 tries very hard to be its own thing, and succeeds at the cost of many questionable design decisions. The effort is there though, and it's good to see. The music is cool too!
Recommended but only if you liked CRE 1 and 2.

SM:Decision by JoshShoeWah [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Jan 03, 2020 (

)

86% in 1:46

Hack is well put-together, but has tons of tiling errors and the rooms feel designed to slow the player down. I missed a few majors like bombs and varia, and wound up exploring the entire map before finally coming back to them. In varia's case, I skipped it by accident and only found it after getting Gravity and killing Ridley. The other item locations seemed fine.

Super Metroid: Depth by Tedicles [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Jun 27, 2019 (

)

9% in 0:30

The atmosphere was interesting, and the item placement allowed for some skipping (looking at you spring ball). Maybe overused Metroids, since I only found 1 energy tank, and getting attacked by one killed me pretty quickly. The compact map offered several ways of approaching rooms, which was good and bad, mostly during the escape sequence. Good first hack!

Super Metroid: Recovery by MetroidNerd#9001 [

Exploration], rated by Oi27 on Dec 31, 2018 (

)

82% in 3:40

The intro sequence of picking up the morph ball and bombs is laid out in a very unique way, which sets the tone for the rest of the hack. Unique, and good for the most part.
Norfair is an exception to the "good" part; doors that put Samus under lava, enemies that deal loads of damage, confusing design, the works. Not enough refill/farming spots. Still unique though, I thought it was interesting to merge upper and lower Norfair using rooms in addition to using an elevator, even if it meant the player could accidentally go to lower Norfair way earlier than they would want to.
The rest of the game is well put-together, and the Tourian is a great example of where the hack shines. Despite being a half-hack, the room design and layout is vastly different from the original game, adding a few interesting new rooms and setpieces that give it its own flair. The escape sequence was another interesting bit, since it was so different from the original. You get more than enough time though, so you won't die even if you make a few wrong turns, and the hack is better for it.

Super Metroid: Cristener Homenag 8 by Juan Dennys [

Quick Play], rated by Oi27 on Mar 06, 2021 (

)

0% in 0:03

the legendary Homenag series ends not with a Bang, but with a block.

420 spike landing site cre edit insta death barf kraid grapple clip hack by H A M [

Spoof], rated by Oi27 on May 14, 2022 (

)

5% in 0:07

Landing site edit with two vanilla rooms attached to it. Lots of graphical bugs. On a positive note: Unusual trigger for the escape sequence.

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