They farmed it out to MercurySteam, and we know what their track record is like.
One interesting tidbit I got from the developer interviews was when one of the guys from Spain said that they didn’t provide any musical direction to the composers — they just let them do their thing. Thus, when they requested a track for the lava rooms scattered around the game, they got Magmoor Caverns again, rather than something like an arrangement of the area’s theme.
I feel like that incident is very telling about the game’s production as a whole.
I like its kinesthetics and find it almost visually passable, but it feels like it suffered from a rather weak vision of what a remake of Metroid 2 should be like. AM2R is a lot better in terms of raw deaign, but also suffers on this front.
My elevator pitch for a Metroid 2 remake would be “a game with half a dozen areas that take cues from the design ethos and atmosphere of Super Metroid’s Wrecked Ship (the Wrecked Ship being an area from Metroid 2 in nearly all aspects except the game it appeared in),” but I also don’t think that Metroid 2 ever needed a remake in the first place.
Anyhow, by this point I’ve played ~60% of the Metroid 1 hacks out there, and a lot of them are very, very bad. Please look forward to more posts about them.