“Past it’s Prime?” -Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Review
Introduction:
As a huge Nintendo fan, I’ve always had a strained relationship with the original Metroid Prime. I consider Super Metroid one of the greatest video games ever crafted; and I attribute similar but lesser praise to the likes of Zero Mission and Fusion. But every time I booted up Metroid Prime, I felt lost, confused, and frustrated after the fantastic first hour. Obviously metroidvanias are all about being lost, but something about the three-dimensional level design really messed with my head. Well, I recently beat it and genuinely loved it. I still have my gripes, but I understand the praise. If somebody were to tell me that Metroid Prime was their favorite video game, or even the greatest game of all time- I would understand and respect that opinion.
Despite that, I was never excited for Metroid Prime 4. What was a grueling 18 year wait for many fans was absolutely nothing for me. And once I saw the pre-release skepticism, I was cautious about it. The holiday season came about and I was given a $50 VISA gift card and decided “Well, I guess I’ll pay twenty bucks for Prime 4”.
And what I got was a very enjoyable albeit mixed bag.
I think it’s important to admit that Metroid Prime 4 was pretty much destined to have development issues. After Prime 3, Retro Studios began working on Donkey Kong games, which meant that the studio would inevitably lose many of its Metroid-passionate talent. And after years and years of fan disappointment (anybody else the now-decade old Federation Force controversy?), expectations were getting too high.
Not to mention that Metroid is one of a handful of video game series that have essentially named an entire genre of video games. The only other ones I can think of off the top of my head are Castlevania and Rogue. Within the past decade, metroidvanias have arguably become the most popular genre among indie developers and diehard gamers. And the conventions, rules, and possibilities of metroidvanias have evolved radically within that decade.
So…did Metroid itself evolve with the genre it co-created?
Presentation:
Holy cow, this might be the most impressive aspect about Metroid Prime 4. The introduction of this game takes place during this a scale explosive battle between the Galactic Federation and some aliens. Everything just looks incredibly crisp, detail oriented, and shiny.
When you get out of this flashy intro, Samus is taken to a pristine almost pearl-colored tower decorated with foreign architecture. Then she makes her way to a lush green forest themed area that seriously had me blown away. Metroid Prime 4 has me genuinely excited for the future of the Switch 2. If a game as beautiful as this one can have options for 4K or 120 FPS, I’m seriously hoping that developers can get some miracle games running on this machine. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any other Nintendo first-party series that don’t go for the cartoony aesthetic of Mario, Zelda, and Kirby (well, I guess there’s Xenoblade? Kind of?) I really hope Nintendo themselves keep pushing this machine.
Technologically illiterate people such as myself saw the Switch 2 as somewhere around a PS4-Pro in terms of power. But it honestly seems like this console can handle more than I expected.
I found the music extremely loyal to the series’ identity. Having recently beaten Prime 1, some of the songs felt ripped straight out of that game. It makes total sense too, with the music being done by Kenji Yamamoto who has worked on every Prime game and even all the way back on Super Metroid, with Minako Hamano who also returned for Prime 4!
As somebody who swaps pretty regularly between their Switch 2 and PlayStation 5, it’s hard for me to see that much of a difference between Metroid Prime 4 and a game built specifically for PS5. Prime 4 looks stunning…
until you hit the Sol Valley desert.
Naysayers online are quick to throw out the “looks like a PS3 game!” meme insult. And in this instance I actually do find it hard to disagree. The open-world desert looks like a very late PS3/ very early PS4 game with its boring sand textures, and borderline nothingness. A buddy of mine compared this drab lonely world to Shadow of the Colossus (a game we both adore), and I couldn’t disagree more. Shadow of the Colossus blends its environments so magically into one another; the fascinating ways you would step out of a lush dense forest and be brought into a desert filled with crumbled stone sculptures and abandoned monuments. Shadow of the Colossus feels so confident in its eye-candy filled world that it doesn’t bother giving you any enemies to fight within it. Where as Metroid Prime 4 feels the need to provide the player with sleep-inducing enemies to “fight” on your motorcycle. Because if there weren’t enemies in this desert area, it’s half-baked nature would become too apparent. All you do is hold the A button and wait for a target to appear on your enemies- that’s it
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gameplay:
At first glance it would make absolutely no sense to criticize the gameplay of Metroid Prime 4; it simply looks like a prettier version of the GameCube masterpiece. You get stripped of all your powers in the beginning of the game and have to find them all over again. There’s the classic Energy Beams, Charge Shot, Morph Ball Bomb, Super Missle, etc. It felt like Retro was really pushing the whole “Psychic” theme with this game, even changing Samus’ iconic green visor to purple to reflect her psychic powers. But it honestly didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of the design. Instead of the “Grapple Beam” you now get the “Psychic Grapple”. The only additions the psychic powers add is the ability to move your Morph Ball Bombs and a few other objects telepathically. You can also shoot a psychic powered Charge Beam which functions like the Beatle in Skyward Sword. I mentioned the classic Energy Beams earlier, but in this game they are based off the elements of Ice, Thunder, and Fire. So they aren’t your typical Plasma or Wave Beam. I really do wish the Metroid series would experiment with new powers and abilities.
I’ll probably be using this comparison again later, but Metroid Prime 4 reminds me of two other Nintendo games- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Star Fox: Zero. With Star Fox: Zero specifically, it felt like a pseudo-remake of the series’ most beloved entry Star Fox 64 alongside a plethora of bad design decisions. Metroid Prime 4 feels like it’s trying to place it safe at times. The forest area, the fire and ice areas, all ending with a mine-themed area. And once again, other than the elemental beams- the powers are the same ones we were unlocking back in 2002.
Where Prime 4 truly falls apart is the level design. The sad but simple fact is that Metroid Prime 4 is not a metroidvania- it is an action-adventure game in the style of the pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda titles. Sure, theres a handful of moments you have to go back to older areas to unlock a new item, but the same can be said about those very same Zelda games (having to go back to Kokiri Forest straight after visit Goron City in Ocarina of Time).
As a diehard fan of those older Zelda games, I was open to the idea of this. The first three areas you explore are Fury Green, Volt Forge, and Ice Belt. For the most part, I felt like these three areas were crafted decently well. Fury Green is the opening area so it’s only to be expected that it’s fairly simple. Volt Forge has this incredibly oppressive atmosphere akin to HR Geiger; it’s an abandoned factory that feels like a very solid Zelda dungeon. And Ice Belt was an intriguing few hours away from much combat. You really get to soak of that classic Metroid Prime loneliness in Ice Belt. I told myself “well if the core areas stay this solidly designed, I’ll like this game a lot by the end of it!”
But boy was I wrong.
The next two areas are Flare Pool and Great Mines. These areas are not only the most linear feeling in the game (Great Mines is genuinely just a rock-themed hallway), but they also focus on the weakest aspect of the Metroid series- combat.
I’m not sure if this classifies as a “hot take”, but I never find the combat in any Metroid game very fun, and it shouldn’t be the focus of the series at all. Maybe it’s just one of the many differences of 2D design versus 3D design, but the enemies in the older 2D Metroid games felt like moving obstacles that chew up your health bar. It doesn’t really feel like “combat” in those games. In the Prime games, it really feels like the games are struggling to decide if they’re a first-person shooter or not. The Lock-on ability takes away all sense of urgency because you don’t have to aim. And if you use the classic A-button to shoot style like me, good luck moving the camera. If you use the more modern RT-button to shoot, it honest begins to hurt my index finger spamming it. Because unlike other FPS titles, if you hold RT you automatically enter a Charge Beam, so you need to keep pressing it. The newer 2D Metroid games also make the combat a bit more active with its parrying mechanics, so all in all, the Metroid series has been going in a direction I don’t really care for. But with the Prime games specifically I find the combat to be lacking that “crunch” or hectic flare that other FPS’ seems to have. I’d rather save the heart racing moments for boss battles. But Flare Pool and Great Mines just feel like gauntlet hallways.
After you finish these two pathetic areas, you are confronted with the worst aspect of the game- the desert.
On Christmas Day 2025, an interview was released by Famitsu with an unnamed developer of Metroid Prime 4. This snippet caught my eye:
Q: It's been 18 years since the last numbered title. Were there any changes you consciously made to reflect the times?
A: When the project started, perhaps influenced by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we saw quite a few online comments saying, “I want to try an open-world Metroid.” However, the core element of “gaining Metroid abilities to expand your range of action” doesn't mesh well with an open world where you can roam freely from the very start. Therefore, we decided to create limited areas of freedom and connect other zones via hubs. We also thought that if players could move smoothly between these areas on the bike, it would serve as a part that eases the tension of exploration, adding pacing to the overall game.
To me, that basically says “we looked at Breath of the Wild and did not to go for that style of open world level design, but tried to make something that would give players a similar feeling fitting for Metroid”. So regardless, I do feel like some Breath of the Wild influence infected Metroid Prime 4. Even down to its story of finding a new boring character in each level (more on that later).
Unless you’ve had the foresight to spend hours collecting Green Energy Crystals on your motorcycle Vi-Ol-a, you will be blindsided by a very lengthy and boring fetch quest where you need to collect TONS of Green Energy Crystals and fill up a massive gauge to unlock the final boss. of the game. These crystals can only be found in the Sol Valley desert. Before leaving the Great Mines, I think I spent cumulatively around fifty minutes to just over an hour grinding Green Energy Crystals. It didn’t even fill the gauge halfway! I spent over another hour just grinding these crystals and doing another fetch quest which you cant initiate until the end- finding five mech parts.
Calling the Green Energy Crystal grind bad game design would be an insult to the word “design”.
It’s nothing. It’s something somebody could’ve thought of in a handful of seconds. It’s the fakest and emptiest justification for the Sol Valley desert area. And I’m worried that Nintendo is falling into this weird trend of gatekeeping their endings behind a boring grind (a la the Gold Nuggets in Donkey Kong Bananza).
I’ll quickly mention some other gripes like the bosses feeling spongey and doing a bit too much damage, the Energy Tanks feeling too easy to collect, and the bosses having weak points you can’t lock onto forcing you to use an unreliable “Free-Aim” system.
I was saying to some friends while still in the first half of Metroid Prime 4 that I could see it being my favorite Switch 2 game so far. But the second half of the game felt so devoid of genuine design and passion that it turned me off of the game completely. By the time the credits rolled I almost hated Metroid Prime 4.
Story:
There was a story in this game?
Okay so Samus and few Galactic Federation members get magically teleported to this uncharted planet during the intro battle at the very start of the game. As you unlock the new areas you’ll bump into a new Galactic Federation member and have to bring them out of the hostile territory. Some of these characters like Myles Mackenzie received extreme pushback during the pre-release coverage of this game. And while I don’t find Myles even half as bad as the internet wanted me to believe (there’s worse characters in this game…) I simply can’t forgive going against the series’ identity so critically with these characters.
Metroid is about loneliness. Metroid is about that feeling of exploring a hostile empty wasteland of a planet. Metroid is about Samus Aran- the lone bounty hunter. Metroid is not about quirky characters. Who greenlit this idea? Why? It clashes so tragically with what Metroid has been for decades. And just like everything else in this games narrative, these characters feel so lazily executed. For Pete’s sake they couldn’t even bother naming “Green Energy” something unique like “Phazon” in Prime 1.
While I’m on this topic, Samus hasn’t really acted as a bounty hunter in a very long time now. She’s always helping out the Galactic Federation which makes her seem much more an ally of the law than any bounty hunter would claim to be.
The Galactic Federation members, specifically Myles, act like Fi in Skyward Sword. Their existence counters the natural explorations players found in the older Metroid games. There was a point in the late game where I was getting a radio call from Myles every forty seconds to a minute telling me what to do. It was frustrating to say the least.
To me, the biggest sin a game development team can commit is to completely tarnish the tone and feeling a series has spent years and multiple entries establishing. And by the second half of the game, I really felt like Metroid Prime 4 was getting close to that sin.
It just annoys me greatly that Nintendo sent Metroid out like this. If Prime 4 doesn’t sell well and the series goes dormant for years, it just doesn’t feel fair that the series’ last game was an extremely ill-thought and shoddy representation.
Overall:
I really can’t believe the journey I had with Metroid Prime 4. I started out feeling incredibly optimistic and happy that I didn’t listen to the vitriol spread by the internet. But by the second half, I couldn’t help but feel like I wasted a lot of time. This game further cements my belief that any game spending an extremely prolonged period of time in development probably should just be cancelled until a team truly passionate enough picks it back up.
Is Metroid Prime 4 a bad video game? No.
Is it worth your time in a world filled with hundreds (possibly thousands) of better video games? No.
We live in a day and age where “good” sadly isn’t good enough anymore. We also live in an age where the metroidvania genre is indisputably holding its place as one of the most beloved and flexible genre of video games. And those two statements make Metroid Prime 4 all the more sad.
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Overall, I disliked Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
(In an effort to move away from traditional numerical scores, I will use the following metric: Hated, Disliked, Felt Neutral, Liked, Loved, Can’t Stop Thinking About)
Note: I have decided to add “Dislike” to my ratings, because “hate” is a bit too strong for my feelings on this particular game.
