Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

Major spoilers will be covered by spoiler tags, but there may still be some discussion of plot framing and references to specific items.

It felt so surreal to open up the package for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond on release day. Amongst the relatively small but incredibly dedicated following of fans, the game was pretty much mythic by this point. After over a decade of rumors and rumblings and people hating on Retro Studios for making (really fucking excellent) Donkey Kong Country games instead of a new Metroid, the game was formally announced in 2017, apparently being developed by Bandai Namco Studios Singapore… only for an announcement video in 2019 to tell us that development was restarting from scratch back at Retro Studios. Now that the game is finally out in the wild circa 2025, did it ever have a chance to live up to the massive hype and expectations?

The View(ros) from Down There

Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way first: how the game looks. On a technical level, this is an astoundingly polished product. When running on a docked Nintendo Switch 2, it reaches 4K 60fps, with an optional performance mode running at 1080p 120fps. It's crazy that the little tablet is pumping that out, but modern Retro has already demonstrated its technical chops with how smooth and pretty Metroid Prime Remastered ended up on the original Switch. I did not notice a single performance issue or technical hiccup during my entire 12-or-so hour playthrough.

Artistically, the game is largely a triumph. Environments and level design are (for the most part) on par with what we’ve come to expect from the series. Each biome of the planet Viewros is themed after a different element, and these ancient alien facilities really look the part and feel fleshed out. The one caveat to the game’s beautiful visuals is the often-maligned desert hub. I don’t think it looks outright ugly by any means, but it is pretty barren and bland. I’ve visited Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park many times, and I can tell you from experience that real world deserts aren’t exactly visual smorgasbords. In that way, Prime 4’s desert is pretty faithful. But that doesn’t make it any less bland to traverse.

Dungeons and Blastin’

If you’re familiar with any of the previous games in the series—the 2D and Prime entries alike—one thing that will immediately stick out is Beyond’s overall structure. Instead of the traditional, tightly interconnected and crisscrossing map design, there is only one main entrance for each region of Viewros, all accessible from the central desert hub; there are literally 0 shortcuts or side entrances from one biome/zone into another. The only shortcuts that exist basically take you from one end of the same zone to the other. Given this design choice, the game ends up being structured more like a traditional Zelda game than it is a proper Metroidvania, with separate “dungeons” branching from a central, open hub. The main difference is that these “dungeons” are not one-and-done trips; you will need to visit each one at least twice, with the final trip also being a good opportunity to clean up all of the hidden items you couldn’t grab the first time around. The lack of connections between regions was a bit baffling, and using the exact same entry point each time I had to go to Fury Green (which you'll revisit the most) and seeing the same war wasp thingy hives dotting the entrance was exhausting by the end.

An unfortunate result of this more disparate structure is that backtracking becomes more tedious. Instead of figuring out an efficient path towards your goal through a network of rooms, backtracking requires you to exit your current zone, ride your fancy new VI-O-LA bike over to the other zone, and enter through its singular access point. Backtracking to Basecamp in Fury Green for every new elemental beam and depositing crystals became pretty tiresome, especially with how important some of the crystal rewards are (more on that later).

Structurally, it’s about as linear as you would expect from a Prime game. I have only played it through once, so I can’t speak with certainty about potential sequence breaking or early unlocks. Linearity is not an objectively bad thing for this type of game by any means, but it does feel safe. You can definitely feel the linearity more than most other Prime games because of the less organic linkage between the main areas of the map; Metroid Prime 3: Corruption had some of the same problems with its separated planets, but even that game had multiple unlockable landing zones on each planet rather than one single entrance and exit for a bit more leeway in navigation. Many other games in the nearly two decades since the last Metroid Prime entry have offered creative innovations in the Metroidvania/Search Adventure genre without undermining the core appeal. I’m not knocking Prime 4 outright for playing it safe in this regard, but it might be disappointing for those hoping to see more surprises and refinement.

The desert acts as the central hub. The mostly empty expanse is there because… reasons? This honestly feels like the most underbaked aspect of the game. There's a lot of empty space with not much interesting to see or do. Some incremental upgrades and upgrade-specific puzzles litter the landscape, alongside various monuments that lead to underground puzzle chambers that are literally called shrines. There's only a single digit handful of them vs. Zelda's 100+, but the naming seems like a clear admission of the borrowed concept. And each of these shrines are only completable after acquiring specific upgrades, so the odds are if you discover them early, you’ll have to come back later to finish them.

Combat is as fun as it’s ever been. If you enjoyed the lock-on shooting of the previous games, you’ll feel right at home here. It’s more or less the same mechanics as Metroid Prime Remastered. The only thing lacking is creative enemy variety. By and large, there are only a few enemy archetypes that get vaguely different regional reskins. The most common enemy type is the Griever, a twisted and feral version of Viewros’ long-gone intelligent race. While that’s good stuff thematically that adds to the cursed and abandoned atmosphere of the planet, there isn’t really much to mechanically separate each biome’s variant. They generally just lunge at you and spit acid globs from a distance. Some of the later ones also explode when they get close, but that’s about as creative as it gets for these guys. The other recurring baddies are a group of combat robots. While not the most interesting design wise, they do offer some good variety in the combat tactics required to fight them. Some just fly around and shoot, but others have removable shields, the ability to teleport, or emit constant shockwaves. In combination, they can make for fun and challenging encounters.

Some camera control for the Morph Ball would have been nice; it’s still weird that we don’t have that, considering how the right stick is entirely unused while in the Morph Ball. But the auto camera was fine for the most part, barring a few uncooperative instances.

I found the new beam system to be pretty neat. If you’re familiar with the previous games, it’s kind of a combination of Echoes and Hunters, with the missiles as their own slot amongst an array of secondary weapons. You never switch out your main Power Beam (which sees some stacking upgrades over the course of the game); instead, you swap out the secondary weapon. The elemental “shot types” share a pool of ammo, which can be expanded with Shot Capacity upgrades and refilled at Save Stations or by collecting pickups that heavily resemble the Light Beam ammo from Echoes. Upgrades found in desert shrines also give them two tiers of charged forms, the more powerful of which effectively replace the Beam Charge Combos from the first two games. Super Missiles are now just a straight-up charged version of the regular Missile; since the Super Missile nows takes up the input that the Seeker Missiles used in the last two Prime games, that powerup is sadly omitted.

Abilities were fun, but basic. Most of what you acquire are retreads of what you found in the first Prime game with “Psychic” slapped onto the name. It was kind of neat that instead of switching between different visors, you just add more functionality to the scan visor. It streamlined things without taking away upgrade options. Some of the new Psychic abilities had creative applications. I liked the Spider Ball's new slingshot function, which lets you fling Samus like a very Angry Bird, and the remotely-directed Control Beam was fun to use in some boss fights and puzzles. Some boss and miniboss fights required clearing out obstacles and finding the right time to launch the Control Beam in order to pass it through multiple targets in one go. However, there isn’t really anything new that offers anything truly unexpected or groundbreaking. And compared with the multifaceted and multipurpose abilities of other recent, similar games like Supraland or Ori and the Will O’ the Wisps, these are mostly unitaskers.

Too Much Green

There are simply too many goddamn green crystals littering the desert. And it's too easy to miss one or two tiny pockets and have to circle back if you're not power sliding into them every time. The Green crystal quest ultimately wasn't too much of a hassle, but it offered basically nothing fun. I had made sure to get pretty much every patch of crystals I came across while traveling over the dunes to the different areas, but I still had to make a concentrated effort to acquire enough to max out the meter by the end. The requirement is high enough that it’s not really achievable through just passive osmosis; you have to give it attention and focus. I also wish you didn't need to go back to the same room to deposit them every single time you wanted to redeem an upgrade. I know the crystal quest is tied to the giant tree in Fury Green, but it’s baffling that the sole receptacle to deposit them was so far away from where you do the collecting, locked behind a couple of loading screens. And some of these upgrades are actually pretty valuable to have as early as possible, so the incentive is there to keep making return trips.

Story

Story has never exactly been straightforward in any Metroid game. For the most part, story is traditionally told through the environment. Prime added scannable items and logs to flesh out the backstory, and that is still present in this entry. However, the presence of more spoken dialogue amidst the group of NPCs also means that Beyond has a much more overt story to tell. I'll start with what worked for me: the tale of the Lamorn, Viewros’ native race, was the highlight for me. It was tragic that Samus was ultimately too late to save the them. Their logs become increasingly less optimistic as each of their attempts to save themselves come apart, and the once bright sparks of hope are gradually snuffed out. Even in their last moments, the Lamorn were still clinging to the hope of salvation that would ultimately not arrive in time. This was actually pretty affecting for me. As for the rest of the tale, there’s just not that much to chew on. The best that I can say about the Federation troops is that they were usually inoffensive. At best, they were bland; I never felt too attached to any of them. At worst, their constant chatter can ruin the exploratory vibes and undercut your planning with premature hints. The time you spend with them is relatively small, but it’s enough to be upsetting if their very inclusion is antithetical to what you enjoy about Metroid games.

Federation engineer Myles MacKenzie saw the most pre-release hate out of all of them. As he is in the final game, I thought he was fine. He's not that bad. A little bit annoying with how often he would pop in with hints when I just wanted to clean up some items, but I didn’t want to kill him or anything. The other Feds were okay as well. It was nice to flesh out the universe a bit, but nothing and no one was especially well developed. The voice acting was pretty good and didn't take me out of the game. But the fact that these people are present at all is probably going to be irksome to long time fans of the franchise who value the isolated atmosphere. I just don’t think they contributed anything meaningful enough to justify their inclusion. The surface-level characterization also undercut their sacrifice at the end. It also didn't help that this was like the 2nd or 3rd time some of them were "sacrificing" themselves for Samus. Development resources could have probably been better spent elsewhere.

The way they interacted with Samus was also uncomfortable. It felt so odd every time they would ask Samus a question—clearly expecting a response—only to be met with silence. At best, she’ll give an awkward little nod or throw something up on a hologram display as an answer. Giving Samus a significant speaking role is not necessarily a problem; the only issue is that the one time they tried it in Metroid: Other M, the actual dialogue Samus recited was poorly-written melodrama that would often grossly mischaracterize her established personality. The problem was not with her speaking in general, but with the dialogue she delivers. I think even a few monosyllabic responses could have done wonders to make these interactions less awkward without sacrificing her brand of stoicism. But unfortunately, the backlash to Other M seems to have scared Nintendo off from giving Samus any voice lines that aren’t in the Chozo language anymore. I will say, however, that I found it amusing when I scanned MacKenzie and he said “Did you just scan me? What did it say?” In some instances, he came close to embodying the meta dialogue a player might have while playing a game. MacKenzie, alongside Armstrong, seem intended to act as in-universe player inserts for aspects of the player experience: Mac makes comments on the world and its strangeness, Armstrong geeks out over getting to meet Samus. But the execution is more miss than hit for me. Many have compared the dialogue to the bathos-drenched Marvel Cinematic Universe films, but I wouldn’t say it goes that far. I found it more pointless than upsetting. More often than not, MacKenzie in particular treads dangerously close to the original Wii version of Skyward Sword’s Fi with his over eager and sometimes disruptive hints.

Sylux? Or Sy-Sucks?

The decade plus payoff for Sylux's buildup was disappointing. The rival bounty hunter made his debut in Metroid Prime Hunters for the Nintendo DS, and his return was teased in the endings of both Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Metroid Prime: Federation Force. Apparently, Sylux was the favorite rival from Hunters of Metroid series producer Kensuke Tanabe, and he seemed to be advocating for Skylux's expanded role in the franchise. After all of this buildup, Beyond delivers only the most barebones explanation for why he hates Samus and the Federation so much; I still know very little about this dude or his wider motivations after finishing the game, even after the secret 100% completion cutscene. It might have been nice to give him actual dialogue before the final boss fight. I didn't even know he was a voiced character before that. His robot doppelgangers offered some fun fights, but it reduced the impact that each one was just a bot. I feel like he could have been more developed if you fought him more in person and he had actual lines to flesh him out more. You never even find any lore entries that he’s left behind to build up his character, which was something that the previous games did well by having Space Pirate logs explain their story and goals. There could have even been an opportunity for direct confrontation if they had Sylux hack your communications and taunt Samus and the Feds over the radio.

It doesn’t help that Sylux is basically out here on this planet doing god-knows-what alone for the entire game. He technically has some mechanical supporting troops acting on his behalf, but there was still a lot of room to make him a more dynamic threat. If a band of his pirate forces were warped to Viewros as well, that could have made things more interesting. It might have even provided the chance to add some Pirate camps in the desert to clear out for upgrades. This could have offered more combat variety and more points of interest in the vast, empty dunes. At the very least, integrating the Space Pirates into more than just the intro could have helped alleviate the enemy variety issue. Another faction of well-equipped baddies to face with their own gameplay considerations could have done wonders for combat variety. But maybe I'm just a little sore because the Space Pirate design in the intro is pretty great, probably my favorite in the series. It feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity to use them so sparingly.

As he is in the final game, Sylux’s inclusion feels more like a begrudging mandate to pay off the long-standing teases than something carefully considered and necessary. It's nice to finally have an antagonist in the series that is not just the Metroid Prime/Dark Samus; but it’s like they didn’t really know what to do with Sylux, so they just kind of tacked him on to an otherwise unrelated story. It's sad that after so much buildup to this grand face-off with Samus, he still kind of suffers from "Boba Fett Syndrome": sure, he looks cool, but we're still waiting for him to actually do anything especially memorable.

A Disappointing Middle Ground

As it is, Prime 4 has got some high highs; many of the environments and bosses are on par with the series’ best. Its greatest strengths are when it harkens back to the older games and lets the Prime formula—which is aging, but still effective—shine. But the problem is that there is a great game buried underneath a lot of mediocre busywork. It adds scope just for the sake of scope, and few of the new additions meaningfully improve the experience. I could have done without the Federation NPCs; without the half-hearted attempt at an open hub area; without the endless crystal quest. When it’s given the chance to just be a Prime game, it really shines. But those moments are unfortunately only a component of a larger, unfocused experience.

Personally, I was hoping this would be the series’ “Breath of the Wild moment” that reinvents and reimagines the typical tropes in unexpected, risky, probably controversial ways. Even so, I was more than fine when early gameplay reveals seemed to peg the game as a straightforward return to the established formula; Metroid Prime Remastered was still fresh in my memory and had reminded me just how amazing of a game the original was when it came out in 2002. Another helping of that was still incredibly appetizing. But Metroid Prime 4 feels destined to be looked at in retrospect as an unsure half step: the attempts at innovation that ended up in the final game were pretty empty and pointless in my opinion, but the foundations are still solid. I just wish the game wasn’t a child of two worlds. I feel it could have been better served if the team had committed to it being either a much more drastic reinvention or a more standard, formulaic throwback; as it is, it’s too split down the middle to excel at either.

This long-awaited sequel is a bittersweet return that makes me feel worried for the franchise's future prospects. Despite its usual critical success, Metroid overall has never been one of Nintendo’s top selling brands. It’s a pretty niche franchise that has only ever achieved modest financial success. If these changes and additions were intended to make this series more appealing and accessible to new potential buyers, I think they have done more to alienate those who already loved it. I’m very interested to see how this sells and how it will be remembered by the community, but I’m kind of concerned about either outcome. On one hand, if this doesn’t sell well, it will likely be the end of the Prime subseries and could jeopardize the larger Metroid franchise. On the other hand, I’m concerned that runaway success will just signal to Nintendo that this new direction is the way to go, and I don’t really want another game with uneven design like this.

Overall, I still think that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is worth playing and experiencing. But I'd honestly have to place at the very bottom of the Metroid Prime quadrilogy. Given the pedigree of the other games, that's still not necessarily bad place to be. But the upper middle ranks is a sad place for an entry in such a prestigious and beloved series to end up. I wanted to love it, but I ended up just liking it.