Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Is A Mess
[Review] Samus returns in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
Note: Due to technical difficulties this article was delayed and I had to write much of the latter half on my phone and it’s only thanks to Chris that it’s reaching you at all this early. Please forgive any formatting errors and sloppy typing, this has not been ideal.
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This is not a meta joke about Retro Studios running out of time halfway through the game.
Metroid is a franchise characterised by its ability to cheat death.
The original Metroid on the Nintendo Entertainment System was far outsold by the likes of Punch Out, Dr Mario and Excitebike, yet Metroid persists to this day while those franchises are dead and buried. Super Metroid didn’t even crack the 30 top selling games for the SNES and yet franchises that defined the console like F-Zero, Star Fox and Donkey Kong Country are all M.I.A.
A history of lukewarm sales, niche appeal and a protagonist who shoots people: Metroid is a series that should have died long ago but the passion of its fanbase and consistent critical acclaim have kept Samus’ adventures going even if Nintendo often forgets about her. But after all these decades, with the release and massive success of Metroid Dread: itself a game that languished in development hell much like the subject of today’s review it seems that Metroid is finally gaining the popular recognition it deserves.
This is a Nintendo IP that has always been very close to my heart.
I owned and enjoyed Metroid Prime on my Gamecube as a kid when nobody else I knew had heard of the series, I was only allowed to bring a single DS game on holiday with me to the US in 2007 and the game I chose was Metroid Prime Hunters, I looked upon Metroid Prime 3: Corruption with jealousy as our living room Wii was off-limits for serious gaming as a consequence of tea time game shows and Dickinson’s Real Deal and when Zelda fans have piped up proclaiming that it should be Nintendo’s ‘mature’ franchise, I’ve been quick to rebuke them and inform them that the IP nobody buys is exactly what they’re looking for. I love Metroid.
I’ve gone on this big preamble so I can convey the nervousness I felt going into Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. The fan and critical reception to this game has been incredibly uneven to the point where I was more dreading playing this game than looking forward to it when my copy finally arrived; I am as red-blooded a Metroid fan as it gets, I replay Prime and Super yearly, I finished a 100% run of Dread just a few months ago, I’m looking for the same things you are in this long-awaited sequel.
But did Prime 4 deliver? Let’s find out.
The Galaxy Is Not At Peace
After the main menu treats you to a stunning new rendition of the Super Metroid theme, you’re thrown head first into combat as Samus comes to the rescue of the Galactic Federation… again.
Sylux of Metroid Prime Hunters ‘fame’ has been waging a one-man war against the Gal Fed, sacking research installations with an army of Space Pirates he is somehow controlling using Metroids. Samus intercepts one of these raids on the UTO Research Centre and after a wild west-style showdown with Sylux a mysterious artefact is damaged by their stray gunfire transporting them both and some of the warring forces to the mysterious planet Viewros.
Planet Viewros in true Metroid Prime fashion was once home to an advanced civilisation, this time it’s the Lamorn: a race of psychically gifted, 4-armed mystics who were convinced that Samus was their prophesised saviour. The famous bounty hunter is gifted a Psychic Visor and Beam allowing her to interface with Lamorn technology and to understand their language and is then tasked with collecting 5 Teleporter Keys from across Viewros.
The imagery and cultural features of the Lamorn are clear: the Psychic Visor is a gem that sits in the forehead of Samus’ helmet like a third eye, Lamorn architecture is full of flourishes inspired by nature like leaves, running water and ovular shapes, their structures reach up to the heavens and harness the wicked lightning of Viewros. This is a spiritual species, in a way that most others in Metroid are not.
After a trilogy of games where Samus was another civilisation’s equivalent of Christ several times over I was really hoping for a better setup than this.
Worse still, Metroid Prime 4 never seems to commit to any part of its concepts fully leaving the entire scenario feeling half-baked. We see both Sylux’s Forces and Gal Fed forces pulled into the portal leading to Viewros in the intro, yet the former are entirely absent from the first half of the game and the latter are too few in number to raise the stakes or to really feel like a reliable ally but just numerous and talkative enough to obliterate the moody isolation this franchise is known for.
Tonally? I find the decision to open with a huge, bombastic battle at all to be strange.
Metroid Prime 3’s big action blowout campaign felt earned because for the first 2 games, Samus had been waging an unseen war against Phazon in the outer reaches of space on decrepit worlds but for the big finale, with the hazardous, semi-sentient material threatening the galaxy her labour had bore fruit and she’d managed to alert a sizeable military force against it. Metroid Prime 4 has earned nothing.
It is the reboot of a long-dormant sub-series with a new plot and characters, the personnel on the UTO Research Centre should have all been dead in the prologue when we arrive, their mangled bodies and ravaged equipment used as visual storytelling to sell us on the threat of Sylux and his army.
To lay off this beatdown a little I do want to acknowledge something that Prime 4 gets very right: its environmentalist themes.
Now, I’m not trying to push any kind of agenda here but the Prime Trilogy was known for its environmentalist undertones; the primary threat of Phazon wasn’t its destructive capability as a weapon, it was the pollutant, malforming effects it had on the environment and the moral corruption of those wrecking the worlds it landed on to harness it. I’m happy to say that these themes are alive and well in Prime 4 with a different spin that feels both fresh and relevant.
This isn’t a hit piece on the game, while it is undoubtedly the worst Metroid Prime I didn’t suffer while playing it and generally enjoyed the campaign, it was just thoroughly flawed and a weaker offering than I would have hoped.
Samus is among my favourite characters in all of gaming. Without saying a word (we don’t talk about Other M) she is intimidating, resourceful and just a dash arrogant; through nothing but body language and some flashy moves every Metroid fan knows her personality. Furthermore, Samus has never been given the Lara Croft treatment.
For those who have never played Smash or Metroid Zero Mission, Samus looks like this beneath her suit of armour:
You just know another Japanese developer would be piling on the skimpy outfits, suggestive poses, sexualised noises and more but Samus has always been treated with dignity. Lara Croft is held up as a feminist symbol in gaming but from my perspective, Samus Aran has always been handled even better.
This has been a long tangent, what I’m trying to say is that this is a character I love playing as: a character that men and women can get attached to, so even at its worst, a Metroid game can always fall back on our collective affection for its lead. Don’t fret, Metroid Prime 4 has plenty of moments were Samus just does cool shit.
A question I kept asking myself while playing Metroid Prime 4 was whether it really should have bore that name at all. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption back in 2007 brought a conclusive end to the trilogy with only the vaguest of teasers at the end of that game, a first-person perspective and its place in the wider franchise timeline tying Prime 4 to the trilogy. Regardless of how you feel about Prime 4 I think given the gap in time and the incongruence of the plot that simply naming it Metroid Beyond would have been smarter: cool off the anticipation and allow more wiggle-room to experiment without letting down expectations.
A Generational Leap
I’ve been playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond on the Switch 2 so I can’t speak for the original Switch version beyond comparison photos but what I can speak for is how gorgeous this game looks. It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of Switch 2 games so far started development on the previous platform before being moved over, so we haven’t really seen what the console can do yet outside of some ambitious ports like Cyberpunk 2077 and what looks to be a flawless version of the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem, nonetheless, Prime 4 runs better and looks sharper than any game I’ve played so far.
As always, these screenshots look a touch compressed when filtered through the Switch app and then into the article but rest-assured, Prime 4 is a game that will have you mashing your screenshot button and collecting new wallpapers like Pokémon.
Fury Green has sweeping vistas looking across forest that stretches to the horizon, deep orange, crystallised amber and dark tunnels filled with thorny undergrowth. Volt Forge swirls with ominous purple clouds, lightning rods capture explosive forks of wrath from the sky and entire rooms buzz as the energy is harvested into batteries. Ice Belt is dotted with frozen arcs of ice where the region is battered with endless strong wind, its battleship greys and frigid blues make you feel a bit chilly just looking at them.
There aren’t many aspects in which Metroid Prime 4 equals its predecessors and fewer still where it surpasses any of them but sheer beauty, creature designs and artistic spectacle are some of them.
Samus’ new suit is awesome, need I add more? It’s red and purple.
I love some of the environmental storytelling in Prime 4 and the Lamorn feel less like a race of demigods or omnipotent beings and more like a species that actually built a society with its own hierarchy and places where people lived and worked.
Mild spoilers here, in the Ice Belt area you come across rows of preserved corpses in capsules, tissue samples and ominous looking machinery for autopsies and the like, in Flare Pool you can find Lamorn heat-resistant equipment stowed away for use by workers, Volt Forge: probably my favourite area in the game, takes you through the entire manufacturing process of the Vi-O-La bike complete with discarded piles of faulty parts and conveyor belts before you get your hands on your very own.
When Retro Studios commits to crafting a section of Prime 4 that actually looks and feels like a Metroid game, it’s fantastic.
When discussing sound and music, I usually hop straight into the latter and pay only lip-service to things like voice performances and weapon sounds but today, I want to pay special attention to these areas because I have a lot of praise to give.
Samus Aran’s injury sounds in the original Metroid Prime trilogy were voiced by Jennifer Hale who you’ll no doubt know as the voice of female Commander Shepard in Mass Effect with the famous death scream performed by Vanessa Marshall who is known for various animation and Star Wars projects. In Metroid Prime 4 however, Erin Yvette has taken over the role of Samus and this might be heretical to say but I think she may be my favourite voice as far as the various hit sounds go.
Samus Aran goes through a bit of an arc in the Prime trilogy, starting off less experienced and confident, fresh off the original NES Metroid in the timeline and eventually winding up more seasoned and closer to her Super Metroid self, I was hoping this growth wouldn’t be ignored and it hasn’t. Prime 4 Samus doesn’t yelp or gasp when hit, she growls and roars in anguish, an angry undercurrent to every bit of damage sustained, it’s fantastic.
The arsenal of weapons sound no less excellent. Missiles boom with just the right level of impact, the recogniseable whirring of the Super Bomb is fully intact and the new Psychic Beam gives off a pleasing whine when charged up and sounds even better when upgraded.
Let’s get onto the soundtrack. Prime 4 doesn’t really sound like its theremin-laced ancestors but what is on offer is equally fantastic.
After trudging through eerie laboratory interiors and stumbling through wind and snow, you finally restore Ice Belt’s power. As the ice thaws and the full realisation of what that means sets in you’re treated to this: my favourite piece of music in the game.
The criminally short Fury Green’s lush vistas and tangling roots are made all the more serene by an excellent theme. This will inevitably go down as a fan-favourite.
Sylux pops up as a recurring boss, similar to Dark Samus in the second Metroid Prime and is accompanied by this awesome track. There’s an 80’s feel to a lot of the guitar in Prime 4 and it sets the tone for a high tempo showdown well.
Half Lived
There’s been a lot said about Prime 4’s NPC’s, the poor quality of its writing and the resulting ruined atmosphere but these complaints are small fry. The biggest issue with Beyond is its atrocious level design.
Metroid Prime games have always been more linear than their 2D counterparts.
In Metroid on the NES, apart from needing to grab Missiles and the Morph Ball first and to fight Mother Brain at the end, virtually every other main objective and upgrade could be acquired in a different order; Super Metroid wasn’t quite as open but introduced movement techniques that advanced players could pull off to sequence break and do things early. Metroid Prime has never been like this but it made up for it with well-hidden and non-essential upgrades and optional areas.
Prime 4 has none of this, every single level is a straight, flat line.
Fury Green is a 90 degree path with a small hub area and a cave section, Volt Forge is 3 towers connected in a triangle each of them with no optional areas, Flare Pool is literally a straight line. Zero interconnected levels, zero hidden areas and every upgrade is either in a room adjacent to the main path or teasing you from behind a lock you haven’t the correct beam for. Remember Phendrana Drifts in Prime 1? How you had to hop across floating platforms and shoot down icesickles to reach higher areas? Well you can forget that, no verticality here!
The fascinating thing about Prime 4’s design is that you can pinpoint the exact moment in development that time ran out. After the Ice Belt, the entire game devolves into corridor shooting and out of place action set-pieces where you revive squad mates. A revive mechanic for NPC’s in a Metroid game, need I say more?
The implementation of Sol Valley also deeply harms the game. This ‘valley’ is an enormous, free-roam desert you have to traverse to travel between the major areas, it’s sparse, visually uninteresting and is used only for some non-essential upgrades and not one but TWO endgame item hunts. Defenders of Sol Valley have pointed out its resemblance to Ocarina Of Time’s Hyrule Field but you could still travel to the different areas without crossing it unlike Sol Valley; the Lost Woods has a shortcut you can bomb to enter Goron City and Zora’s Domain links to Lake Hylia via a tunnel underwater.
Let me pull my punches for a minute and offer some praise because I want to reiterate that Prime 4 is fun to play but structurally twisted and rushed.
After Fury Green, before your first big trip across Sol Valley, you are directed by Miles Mackenzie to visit Volt Forge where you obtain Vi-O-La: an akira-sliding, energy disc-shooting, slick cyber bike Samus uses to cross the desert. This thing is an absolute treat to drive. Vi-O-La’s homing energy disk makes quick work of the rolling robots and harrassing gulls that stalk you out in the dunes, handles sharp turns like a dream and can pull off long jumps over hills and ramps, it’s Sol Valley’s one redeeming quality.
The usual excellent Metroid Prime gameplay is here as standard but one area where Prime 4 does improve is in its combat.
I replay the original Prime yearly and did so along with Prime 2, Super and Dread back in Spring, in neither game did I die or find myself particularly engaged in the combat but things were different this time. The bosses in Prime 4 are satisfying brain teasers with some nasty, high-damage attacks and so are the Griever enemies. These things crawl along walls and ceilings, can dodge your charged shots and swat away missiles with ease forcing you to get in close and contend with those claws to land shots. Prime 4’s bosses and the Grievers are best fought with the Switch 2 mouse controls or with the Prime Trilogy version’s pointer controls if possible, so I recommend playing that way.
Let’s talk about the awful end-game collectathon. A staple of the Prime games is an item hunt at the end, in the previous ones this was an opportunity to revisit previous areas fully-kitted out to scoop up any upgrades you missed but in Prime 4 there is little reason to do this, so the two separate item hunts are both crammed into the Sol Valley desert.
To Prime 4’s credit you can mostly complete these 2 item hunts: for the Green Crystals and the Mech Parts, long before the end game but the crystals are a giant pain to collect. You mostly find Green Crystals in giant clusters out in the dunes (like that one planet in Ratchet and Clank 2) but they also appear in some Zelda shrine-like mini dungeons too. It’s fun to smash through these things on the bike but the amount you need to collect is just too much; I was consciously scooping up as many as I could during the campaign and in the end game, I still only had about 25% of the needed amount.
As of writing, I haven’t booted up the game for about 2 days to finish off the great Crystal grind and honestly? I’m not sure if I will.
While Playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond I feel this horrible stain upon the whole thing: the stain of a rushed and troubled project. Everything feels as it should… except a little bit worse and the things that are new: those things that will give Metroid Prime 4 its own identity in this long franchise are sorely lacking.
Fury Green looks nice but it lacks the interwoven design and atmosphere of Super’s Brinstar and Sol Valley’s empty desert manages to feel less dry and hostile than Prime 2 on the Gamecube’s Agon Wastes: the examples are endless but the long list of outside developers in Prime 4’s credits, a restarted development and rumours of missed deadlines demonstrate that all was clearly not well behind the curtains better than I can.
White Noise
Before we finish I want to share my thoughts on Prime 4’s NPC’s and their implementation, I mentioned before that they are not the biggest issue with the game… but an issue nonetheless.
I am not fundamentally against hint systems and guidance in games for those who need a helping hand and while I’m happy to open a quick guide on my phone when I’m stumped, I understand that this is inherently immersion destroying and can pull the phone addicts among us away from playing entirely. I’ve seen a lot of whining online that Mackenzie calls you up to point you in the right direction the moment the player actually has to think about where to go much, this is a complaint I agree with but let’s not forget that the rest of the Prime games: especially 3: Corruption also had moments where the game would very blatantly point out the exact room you needed on the map when you took too long.
Yet again, like the Green Crystals, the issue is a matter of it all being too much.
Miles tells you early on that he’ll be there via radio in future if you need him, and he mostly sticks to his word… except in Sol Valley. There were a few moments where I chose to get off Vi-O-La and take in the sights and check some random boulders for surreptitiously hidden upgrades, I enjoyed the solitude until this little nerd had to buzz me on the radio to offer unsolicited help.
You have to go back to Miles every time you get a new beam type for you Arm Cannon, I absolutely detested this since Sol Valley takes ages to cross.
Other than Mackenzie the other characters are just bland and uninteresting: you have the old veteran, the plucky, incompetent rookie and the vaguely mysterious sniper, these are archetypes that have been reused again and again. The only one I genuinely liked is the robot (I can’t remember what anyone is called apart from Mackenzie, that should tell you enough) because it does as its told and gets out of my way.
I believe there are ways to introduce hint systems and potentially voiced NPC’s into Metroid… but this isn’t it. It failed in Prime 3, it has failed again in Prime 4, third time lucky?
Much Ado About Nothing
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is disappointing but it’s difficult to be too surprised or upset by it, at least for me; barely any gameplay footage, a messy development and a long-dormant series (that was over anyway) hardly the recipe for a triumphant revival. As well as that, it’s far from an awful game. Prime 4 is a game I’ve enjoyed well-enough but I don’t know if I can be bothered to finish it and I certainly don’t have plans to replay this particular entry in the franchise. It is simply fine, probably destined to be remembered as “The one with the bike.”
This has been an unusually sloppy, soulless feeling first party offering from Nintendo and an experiment gone awry when so many others this year like Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza went well. In a broader sense, Prime 4 all but confirms to me something I’ve had on my mind for a while: that the state of North American games development is dire. Between mass lay-offs to replace talented individuals with AI, the faltering of massive IP’s like Call Of Duty and Nintendo’s long-time collaborators at Retro Studios thoroughly fumbling this bag, I think American and Canadian games are becoming the new Eurojank… Atlantojank? Amerojank?
2026 Is looking sparse for the Switch 2 at the moment, we’ve had no Direct showcases or hits as to what’s coming, I hope that changes soon.
IMPORTANT: My final 2 posts this year will be coming this weekend and another on Tuesday: the day before Christmas Eve.
I’ll be returning on the 5th of January 2026 on the 1 year anniversary of this Substack’s first post. In that post I’ll be outlining some of my plans for the year and sharing my Switch Online for those who want to spy on what I’m playing. I’ve found myself in the unexpected and bizarre position of people caring what I think and I’ve answered quite a few questions from commenters lately, so I’ll also be incorporating a Q and A into that post, feel free to DM me any questions before January if you’d like to know my thoughts on anything from films, food, TV, music and other games, as long as your question isn’t absolutely unhinged I’ll happily take it.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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I'm so intensely happy to still have no reason to get a Switch 2.
The crap with the big central hub of nothing where you drive around while NPCs chat at you - that doesn't remind me of Ocarina of Time, it reminds me of the modern God of War games. And not in a good way. Those games had the same exact problem with layout and backtracking, where every area was basically a linear route and then if you wanted to get the things you couldn't collect along the way you pretty much had to just do the whole area over again.
The part that’s struck me (haven’t finished yet) that I don’t think you mentioned is I kinda feel like the creators either don’t like or don’t get or didn’t want to make a metroidvania game.
The backtracking feels so joyless, like there was a checklist somewhere saying to have it.
That’s my explanation for having to take your weapon power ups to “base camp.” It’s backtracking! The Metroid thing! Other examples feel just as perfunctory.
You combine that with the npcs, the deliberately kinda bad auto lock, the revive mechanic, and it feels like they wanted to make a regular shooter but had to slap in Metroid stuff.