[Open Assets] = Metroid Vanguard = Samus Aran in SRB2 [v1.5c] v1.5c

Just finished up with my 1st playthough and I got to say I'm very impressed with the story and the overall support with this mod.

It was overwhelming at some points and kept me on edge but its really cool to play.

Verygood indeed , you putted a lot of effort with this excellent mod!

absolutely perfect, one of the greatest mods of srb2

I would say that Samus is the best FPS Character of SRB2 yet since Tailsguy and Duke Nukem, but it would be better if there were cutscenes, more Metroid enemies and a boss battle against Ridley could be added in the game.

Bruh, swap out the Sonic-themed objects and give it original levels and you have an all-out Metroid TC right here. A Metroid TC for a Sonic mod for Doom. I'd buy THAT for a dollar.

My biggest two complaints are the performance which gets REALLY BAD in DSZ and CEZ (probably not your fault but still, it was so bad I was able to charge the gun by tapping instead of holding) and the acceleration. Samus feels more like a ball than a person. I don't know much about Metroid but I figure that Samus isn't a ball *all* the time... probably...

The first original boss and the bonus boss also have an issue where they don't give off the right feedback to successful attacks, so they feel like damage sponges that take 10+ minutes to take down. At least, I'm *assuming* it's a feedback issue and they aren't as resilient as a planet.

But this was incredibly enjoyable overall. I've played it in Hyper Mode and it just transformed SRB2 entirely, and the potential for greatness really came through in certain sections and in the original stages. You could totally make a Metroid TC out of this - as it is, it blurs the line between a character mod and a custom gametype to absolute nil. Beautiful.

Samus has a variety of moves at her arsenal, and the new 2 stages for her makes it feel like SRB2 is a different game for her!

I seriously love the concept of giving modded characters their own story and events. This mod is one of my favorite ones so far actually.

The events in the bonus levels definitely caught me off guard, really made me feel like I was playing something truly special.

i really really want to type out a huge, overdetailed review as to why this mod is as good as it is...but i can't do it justice like that, so i'll keep it brief. this mod completely reinvents the way you play sonic robo blast 2 and is, in my opinion, an immersive masterpiece of a mod.
if you enjoy metroid as a series, play it. if you enjoy first person shooters, play it. if you enjoy metroid prime, play it. actually, you know what, just play it, regardless of your interests. you'll immediately see how much time, effort, love and care for the metroid series was included in this mod.

Two things before we start: I have no prior experience to metroid besides refrences and i completed this game twice once on zero mission and a second time on the second difficulty with 100% armor.

Overall this mod was Incredibly fun and well made. It fully utilizes the open Map design of the levels making exploration very fun (only thing that was a little annoying was getting health batteries). combat felt satisfying and platforming was decent. extra credit to the overall tone of the game with it always having an ``abandoned´´ fell to it thx to the soundtrack and slight weather and time changes. but here are some minor complaints that would make the game perfect in my eyes.

1. Some bosses are WAY too easy same can be said about the regular enemies even on harder difficultys

2. The hyper beam is way too overpowered for how easy it is to get all emeralds. i would recommend either nerfing (boring route) or making the emeralds harder to get by bringing special stages back (epic route).
I would recomend making em small arenas where you fight a horde of regular enemies within a time limit (seriously i loved fighting those small metroids would be a shame to only fight em once)

3. i feel like theres a gap between egg rock act 2 and the level after that because it all happens so sudden, another level inbetween wouldnt hurt.
also the last two bosses feel very anticlimactic in the first playthrough (although the 100% bonus makes up for it)

4. (Huge spoiler warning) The story feels like its taking place shortly after the bad ending (implied trough time differences and someones body still twitching and being down there in the first place) which brings me too two issues.

The story has build up from showing the danger of metroids too actually killing a main game character, giving (me at least) expectations on how it will end. But after the boss fight with my faker the story just stops developing anymore and goes straight to destroying eggmans base.
What about the other characters? what was the point of killing someone if your not gonna expand on that. just either dont kill someone or atleast mention what happend too the rest (like for example you could make the escape pod crashland when you get outside after beating the faker).

In short i dont think you are confident in your story to be able to kill of characters (no offense to you, your mod is still amazing and i know it took you alot of effort)

Second issue is samus questioning how someones transporting metroids so fast followed up with two levels later with the blood writing ``beware of the blue´´ this made me assume sonic is involved in those two things which wasnt the case.
Here you just need to phrase the blood writing differently.

5. Egg rock act 2s music isnt fitting with the tone of all the other levels.(this is very minor)

and that sums it up. theres no need for my complaints to be coverted into an update since my oppinion may not line up with others or yours even and i know you also have your own life (i wasted an hour of mine writing this) and you probably want to work on other projects.
i would gladly like to hear your thoughts and wish you good luck on your future work.

Dude, I was trying to write this and didn't know how to even start.

This mod is just amazing, all the new mechanics and abilities, I'm impressed with all the new movement and fighting options that this mod gives, is like playing a totally diferent game.

I love how the different weapons work and all the stuff you can do with them, freezing enemies with the ice beam and then finishing them with another cool weapon, do some funny trick shots with the wave beam, beat easily (almost) every enemy with the charge shot or destroy absolutely everything with the suprise of the 7 Chaos Emeralds

(Spoiler Alert:)
Something funny that happened while I was playing is that I was expecting just another good mod character and then I got yeeted into Deep Sea Zone Act 4 and my mind explode when I saw the Metroid breakin' through the wall, same thing happened when I saw the Omega Metroid & Dark Samus (and I'm expecting something big for the last areas)

Also, the music selection 10/10

Last thing I wanna say is that I love this mod and I really wanna see what are you gonna do next

(PD: Please can some one tell me what are the map number for the extra acts? Thank you)

A banger as always, Shine -- the quality of your work here is absolutely aweing. Samus seems to perfectly blend her home game's mechanics with those of SRB2, and it's an added bonus that there's a mode for better compatibility with vanilla characters. Haven't gotten my hands on an official Metroid title yet (Metroid Prime 4 will happen eventually) but I'm convinced this is pretty darn close to what it feels like.

I've loved this mod ever since its very first version in 2.1. It's genuinely a shining beacon of how much one can love a series. All the details, all the references, how you've managed to implement tricks from Super Metroid into a 3D space and make it work in a Sonic game! I've never played a Metroid Prime game, but I have played Metroid, MII:RoS, and beaten SM. This actually encouraged me to play the latter of the three.

Even after making what felt like a perfect mod, you've managed to make it even better! The new maps are a very welcome addition, and the new bosses are exactly what Samus needed to feel like there was a challenge before the endgame and outside of Hyper and Fusion mode.

If I had to give any criticism, it's that a lot of the enemies in Hyper(+) are extremely touchy and sometimes downright obnoxious in the case of Pyre Flies, Egg Guards (I played an outdated version so ignore this one if it doesn't apply anymore), and Gold Buzz's.

-Pyre Flies take up a huge amount of space, sometimes forcing you to fire at them long before trying to platform, and slowing the pace in what is otherwise a fast-paced endgame.
- Egg Guards on the bridge, and pretty much anywhere else, are just... actual pain, and cause the same problem as Pyre Flies, slowing the pace down to a crawl until you demolish each last one of them at points where you just want to speed and not get sniped by a Robo Hood.
- Gold Buzz's are... well, obvious. They'd be fine if there weren't so many of them in THZ1, and if the Emeralds didn't require no-damage runs. Thanks to the combination of circumstances, it makes Gold Buzz's excruciatingly painful unless you have Wave Beam or are really good with your shots.

Even those enemies aren't enough for me to falter on giving this 5 Stars. This is just *the* best character mod SRB2 has ever seen. Worth every minute of wait.

this mod is amazing, my only problem with it is the multiplayer stage revive system
if you die and have a stage revive and you accidentally press jump instead of custom 3, it won't use the stage revive and it'll force you to wait until the end of the level; i've done this by accident a lot
i also dislike the stage revive system in general, as being forced to wait for long periods of time (sometimes even 20 minutes!) can be pretty boring; at the very least there should be options to turn it off completely or to allow dead samus players to switch to non samus characters

Five stars, most OP Samus out there. Between the command shine-spark that you made the screw attack into, and the ability to get the gravity suit in the second or third level (like I did), this Samus would turn Metroid Dread from a horror game to a kids game! I also like that since Samus has a respirator in her suit, she can't drown. Good on you for thinking of that, that's clever.

I should start this review off by saying I've never been a huge fan of the Metroid series. For some reason the games just didn't really click with me in the way I had hoped. I guess maybe it felt a bit too slow paced for me in the early game and it somewhat turned me off.

With that said though... holy shit! From start to finish, this mod is an absolute marvel to behold. I've always been a HUGE fan of mods that manage to completely remix the way a game is played while still working with the conventions of the original design, and this does it in spades.

The exploratory ethos of Metroid gameplay merges very well with Sonic Robo Blast 2's level design, and the implementation here also solves my issue with Metroid games being a bit too slow paced for me. Upgrades come fast if you go out of your way to look for each item box and it becomes an incredibly rewarding experience to get super powered early on and be able to blaze through levels with ease in the lategame.

On top of that, my preferred way to play through SRB2 is co-op with friends, and this mod has absolutely wonderful support for it! There are many settings you can choose to tailor fit the experience to what you and your friends want, including changing the spawn behavior for item boxes, limiting it to fresh saves so everyone is on an even playing field, and a wealth of other options. I am extremely happy to see my favorite way of playing this game so fully supported!

One comment I will make is that me and my group of about 8 friends experienced a lot of lag at one point in the Samus exclusive area in DSZ. It got so bad that most people dropped to 1 frame per second! We had to use the exitlevel command to skip to the next level. Trying to avoid spoilers where I can, but three of us moved on to the encounter in that level while 5 of the others were still working on the platforming section, and our running theory is that the game had a lot of trouble handling that many people spread out across the map, as when we went back to it again in a later session it was fixed by simply waiting for everyone to catch up and sticking together before entering the encounter. I feel like this might be more a limitation of SRB2 netgames rather than the mod itself, so I will not be deducting any points, especially since there's a simple fix.

Overall, I was impressed with this mod, and I can say without a doubt that it's one of the absolute best I've seen in my ten year tenure of playing SRB2 and lurking the MB. (just look at my join date!) As someone who really loved SMS back in the day, it makes me extremely happy to see that you're still around and making cool things for the community, and I will continue to keep a close eye on the content you produce. Thank you!

holy shit, this is amazing, its basically its own game, i dont even have anything to nitpick, suprised to see it work in splitscreen

Wow. Unbelievable work.

amazing work i love the system of returning to green flower zone i used it to grind out chaos emeralds and actually destroy the omega metroid but can you add the grapple beam it would come from invincibility boxes

Meh. coming back after playing all the modes, its bland. we only have things from Metroid prime 1 (and no phazon suit? CMON! SERIOUSLY!?) and nothing really new. also, it crashes every two seconds. there is no full reset to just Reset literally all of it, no save files, no nothing. and don't even get me started on multiplayer. also, update hyper beam to what we actually know it is when not on something like a SNES?