Skip this and buy Metroid: Zero Mission instead.
As a kid it took a long time for me to realize, that the protagonist of Metroid is called Samus Aran and NOT Metroid. Even bigger surprise was to find out that Samus is actually a woman in a bikini. In any case you get to play as Samus, who is an inter stellar bounty hunter landing on Planet Zebes. It’s your job to destroy all the remaining metroids, whose life-sucking properties threat the fate of the entire galaxy. Not so small thing to do as a lone chick with a space suit aye?
Graphics are incredibly ugly and simplistic. Even after 20 years I still have a hard time seeing that Samus is a human shooting beams in his arm: she looks like a weird alien shooting beams out of her nose. Environments on the other hand are memorable and there hasn’t been anything quite like it ever since. Sound effects are really nasty and terrible, but the music is at least a little better.
Gameplay is a 2D side-scrolling shooter with a lot of jumping to do. In Super Mario Bros. the game moves from left to right, but in Metroid there’s a lot of vertical jumping and sometimes there’s just too much challenge in it. Also be prepared to look for many different hidden passage ways and items.
Metroid was a huge thing when I was a kid. It took me at least a couple of years to get through it, but I simply couldn’t have done it without my father’s home-made map of the game. The lack of ANY KIND of map was and still is the biggest drawback in this original Metroid. Second thing is that instructions don’t really tell you anything what you need to and where to go: there’s just a gigantic open ended world to explore and that’s it.
There is absolutely no reason for you to buy this game, because it comes as a free bonus in Metroid: Zero Mission. So get that and then check out how it all started. Metroid was way ahead of its time back in 80’s.