Return to Zebes is another Zero Mission hack that I just finished in my second wave of going through missed rom hacks. I thought it was going to be one of the great ones - but it ended up falling very short.

The map in particular is fantastic (which is an easy way to win me over). It has auto-marking collectibles, completion tracker for each item, and even map stations that seemed to reveal almost every missing item in each area. But.. it doesn't actually mark ALL of them, only about 80%. I also only found ONE map station out of the 5 biomes, which is pretty weird.

The level design is the biggest pain point though. I was just constantly getting bottlenecked, with only one specific path that you need to find. And I could just never find it. I wasted hours going back and forth through the map making zero optional progress, Pretty annoying - you should either have big open level design where the player can go anywhere in any order, or linear level design with a fairly strong invisible hand. This has neither.

Otherwise, it was decent. The puzzles were unique and the individual room designs were always interesting to explore. There is just a litany of QoL pain points and design decisions that really held this one back.

3/10