It failed completely at being a Metroid game. It's obvious the single-player "story" was just hastily hacked together from the multiplayer mode.

Maps were linear, without any kind of secrets or exploration. They were mostly boring corridors between multiplayer arenas for fights against bots.

The only abilities were different coloured guns, and while the MP trilogy gives the four beams specific properties to interact with the environment, I can't remember what most Hunters guns were supposed to do beside opening corresponding doors.

There were three boring and mostly static bosses in the whole game, two of them copy pasted once to make it last a bit longer.

I don't even think its controls or arena map design felt like Metroid Prime. The very limited Metroid Prime 2 multiplayer felt more like "competitive Metroid Prime". It was more fun to me anyway, not that I'd buy a Metroid game for multiplayer.

I have a personal beef with that game :)

I am sure there are people with good memories of it as an arena shooter, but I had little interest in that. And as a Metroid, it sucked (...sorry)

I remember trying the First Hunt demo, that was a demo cartridge from the beginning of the DS and was supposed to be a short teaser for what Hunters would be. Back then I thought, yeah, with a game around it, it could be great.

Turns out the actual Hunters was absolutely nothing like that, and focused only on multiplayer. The only reason they tacked a half-assed single-player mode on it is so it could be sold to people who wanted an actual Metroid game. I'd respect the game more if they didn't try to sell it as more than it really was.