The best action games like Metroid are Super Metroid, Metroid Dread and Castlevania Symphony of the Night. Below are 10, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Metroid worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
The one to play instead, and arguably the best-designed game on the SNES.
The modern 2D entry, and it plays better than any of them.
The other half of the genre's name, and where the RPG layer came from.
The modern benchmark, and it withholds the map in the same deliberate way.
The most faithful modern take on Metroid specifically, glitches and all.
A small, hard, very well-built indie Metroid with a real secret underneath it.
The same structure, far kinder, and beautiful with it.
Melancholy, slow and combat-led, with the map opening the same way.
The other NES game that handed you a world and refused to explain it.
NES exploration with a vehicle you leave behind to get into the small places.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
The full list is on games like Metroid — 10 picks, no genre filter.
Super Metroid. The one to play instead, and arguably the best-designed game on the SNES.
No. Metroid released on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Metroid list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.