Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is enjoyable enough, and has glimpses of vintage Metroid shining through, but this game could and should have been so much more.
Taken as a whole, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond feels like something of a composite. On one hand, it is clearly a follow-up to 2007’s Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, drawing close many of that game’s greatest triumphs and fumbles with a fascinating reverence. On the other, it is something new for the series, structurally most comparable not to other Metroid games but rather to a different Nintendo adventure franchise (more on that shortly). Then there is how the game is built, feeling almost modular, with different modes and moods of play stitched together with visible seams. With all that said, it certainly – at least broadly – works rather well.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond review
- Developer: Retro Studios
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Platform: Played on Switch 2
- Availability: Out 4th December on Nintendo Switch 2
At the onset of Metroid Prime 4, bounty hunter Samus Aran finds herself called to the aid of the Galactic Federation once again. The federation has in its possession some all-powerful ancient relic, and one of its bases is under attack from Space Pirates who also want the MacGuffin. In the course of the ensuing battle the Relic ends up getting ‘activated’, if that’s the right word – the long and the short of it is that it sort of explodes, sending out a wave of energy that transports Samus and others ‘Beyond’, to an unknown, far-flung planet.
This is the setup you need to understand, in short, to grasp Metroid Prime 4’s structure. Once stranded, Samus’ iconic ship is gone, for instance. There’s no planet-hopping to be done here. Instead she finds herself on a single world which is in a strange way most reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda’s Hyrule – specifically, that of an older entry, like Ocarina of Time.
Think of it this way: Prime 4’s rolling desert is functionally Hyrule Field; that is to say a relatively sparsely-populated map that serves to connect more explicitly-themed biomes at the extremes of the world. There are essentially five locales joined by the desert: a lush forest, a mechanical factory beset by endless thunderstorms, an iced-over mountaintop research facility, a forge in the heart of a volcano, and a deep underground mine.
CAPTION
Think of these locations as dungeons in the finest Zelda tradition, but in a Metroid style. Think of Vi-O-La, Samus’ new bike, as Epona, used to quickly ferry yourself from one side of the desert to the other. And think of the giant tower in the middle of the desert as Ganon’s Castle – curious, always looming, but blocked by a forcefield and inaccessible until the endgame.
In the dungeons – and I will keep calling them that, for that’s what they feel like – the classic Metroid Prime action reigns. You’ll enter a zone, explore, take on enemies, solve small puzzles, and eventually pick up some sort of new ability. Said ability is then inevitably used to open up progression-critical areas of the dungeon you couldn’t previously access, and then is used to defeat the dungeon’s boss. At this point, you’re free to leave and move on to the next area. There’s a bit of classic Metroidian backtracking, mind – so after finishing dungeon three, you can go back to dungeons one and two with its item to get into extra rooms to find new puzzles and bonus items. Some of this is entirely optional, while other parts are required by the narrative.
This sort of backtracking has been present in Metroid since traversing the depths of Zebes in 1986, but a funny thing about how it’s presented here is that it also reminds me a bit of another Zelda game, and so the comparison continues. Specifically, the way you go back and forth between slightly larger spaces and gradually push slightly deeper into them to progress the story is reminiscent of Skyward Sword. So too is one of Prime 4’s two new gimmicks. Its big new weapon greatly resembles that game’s ‘Beetle’, where you can fire a projectile and manually steer it through the air. This is used to great effect in numerous puzzles, and by a couple of bosses.
The other big new gimmick is Samus’ psychic powers. These don’t amount to much revelatory in gameplay terms – manifesting platforms or grapple points out of thin-air here, a bit of telekinesis there – but it’s a nice bit of colour ability-wise. Most of the other skills unlocked are variations on familiar Metroid offerings, be that known quantities with the word ‘Psychic’ grafted on front for some reason (for instance, the Psychic Boost Ball is functionally identical to the Boost Ball you know and love) or more missile-based variations on elemental beam weaponry.
When you’re spelunking in these dungeons, the hours just melt away. Much as with the selection of abilities, there’s nothing planet-shakingly new here, but what is here is a very confident expression of what made the previous Metroid Prime games great. To dip into cliche, I had a good time with the core dungeons, but I also found them nothing really to write home about. They’re just a good but fairly forgettable time.
Image credit: Nintendo / Eurogamer
The stand-out is probably how each level subtly changes. A theme of Prime 4 is that each area is somewhere of importance to an ancient, long-extinct race – and you’re cobbling together keys and items from their time in order to find a way off-planet again. In multiple instances your main task in each dungeon is to find and restart its power generator in order to gather the stuff you need. But when you do that, each dungeon shifts: the factory whizzes to life, suddenly full of movement and electrical hazards. The icy research facility’s doors creak open, revealing what was being researched, while the surge of power begins to melt the ice, leaving water dripping everywhere throughout.
I liked this stuff – it’s good atmospheric work. It also demonstrates well that Prime 4 is probably the best-ever looking Nintendo game, at least as far as games with semi-realistic art styles go. On Switch 2 at 4K and 60fps, it’s a pretty remarkable looker. It’s less so on the 120fps mode, and Metroid is not a game built with twitchiness in mind – so while the option is appreciated, I’d recommend 60fps, maximizing the visual splendor on offer.
We can’t speak of the atmosphere, though, without addressing the chatty elephant in the room: Samus is not on this mysterious planet alone. Five Federation space marines got zapped to the planet at the same time as Samus, and each dungeon will have you link up with at least one, helping and rescuing them. This is a Metroid game where you have allies, and those allies actually build a home base you’ll return to regularly as the story progresses. Some items found Samus can equip on her own right away, but in other cases you’ll need to return to base to have your resident engineer parse and install it.
Image credit: Nintendo / Eurogamer
There’s going to be a lot of debate about these marines, and I expect they’ll come in for a lot of criticism. It’s such a heavy topic that I’ve crafted a separate article solely to talk about them, in fact – so I’m not going to spend ages on it here. What I will say, in brief, is that I think the marines themselves are fine as broadly-sketched archetypal characters for this sort of universe and story.
Some will find them annoying, I know, but what I found more jarring is how the narrative introduces a range of verbose allies for Samus to recruit and lead while insisting that the hero remains deathly silent. They chatter to her – or rather at her – and she regards them with stony-faced silence. Even her body language is less characterful than in 2021’s excellent Metroid Dread. It feels weird, and didn’t work for me. I’m absolutely not saying Samus needs to be spewing her emotions at every turn, as in the much-derided story of Metroid: Other M, but there is a middle ground here; a leaf could be taken out of Master Chief’s book. Even the Doom Slayer gets a few lines, when he really needs to.
What’s more interesting for the purposes of this review is to examine how they’re used to drive the game’s action. Engineer Myles Mackenzie – the one from the previews – becomes a Navi-style figure, staying home at base but ever-present over the radio. It’s in Myles you can sense a curious push-and-pull, a hearty debate among the development team. How much help does the player really need?
Image credit: Nintendo / Eurogamer
After some initial, more heavy-handed hours, Myles mercifully fades into the background whenever you’re out of the home base. But if you’re driving around the desert for too long, he’ll buzz and unsubtly remind you that if you’re not sure where to go you can give him a call for a tip. On a few occasions – usually after finishing one dungeon but before you have the necessary skills to enter another – the game casts you fully loose to figure out how to get the keys you need on your own. But this only goes so far – take too long, or enter an area that is irrelevant at that point, and Myles will pop up on the radio eagerly. ‘Hey, Samus – wasn’t there a door you couldn’t open in the volcano?’ You can sense the design strain of wanting players to experience the ‘search’ part of the ‘search-action’ genre moniker without any handholding butting up against an equally large desire to ensure people don’t lose patience. In this, we can perhaps sense the most difficult part of making a game like this, for Nintendo no less, in 2025.
The central desert, which you’ll be crossing often as you go back and forth between the main areas, is fun enough. Vi-O-La, the bike, is a blast to drive, with a few fun and simple mechanics to experiment with. The desert does give the impression, though, that it was designed separately from the rest of the game. I genuinely wonder if it was outsourced to a different team. Even the loading zones seem to suggest this, as it doesn’t even directly connect to the dungeons. In each case, there’s a loading zone, then a tiny ‘staging’ area you can cross in about a minute, then the dungeon.
There’s a handful of things to do out in the desert, but the list of things is very short indeed, being honest. There’s a few little underground shrines you can unlock (See! Zelda again!) that each bequeath an upgrade to one of your primary weapons. There’s some stranded Federation gear which you’ll need to collect later in the game. And then there’s green crystals, which you can drive through to satisfyingly smash, which in turn is required for a few upgrades – you feed the crystals gathered to a magic tree (of sorts) back at your home base. The desert-crossing is the sort of thing that could easily be supremely crap – but mercifully it works because the bike is fun to use. In fact, I wished for more of the bike throughout, as it’s only used twice in dungeons, really – it would’ve been nice to see it become more of a staple.
Image credit: Nintendo / Eurogamer
All of this descriptor helps you to sense, I hope, the curious thing at the centre of Metroid Prime 4. To some degree it is Metroid Prime by-the-numbers, a familiar follow-up to the previous games. In other ways it has quite a bit new to say, though largely with concepts and structures borrowed from elsewhere. This is the most difficult sort of game to review, by the way: the sort of thing you enjoy a great deal in the moment that nevertheless feels rather bland in the retelling. It’s revealing, I think, that I finished the game and felt a great surge of Metroid fandom – but had no desire to replay it and go for the hard mode 100 percent run to see what extra unlocks that holds. I reinstalled Metroid: Dread instead. That might be the most telltale thing of all, in fact.
Part of me leaving the game less enthusiastic no doubt has a lot to do with its final stages. Once you’ve finished all five ‘main’ dungeons, there’s a fair amount of busywork. I’m used to late-game mop-up, but to continue the Zelda analogies this is Triforce Piece Hunt nonsense. Those green crystals you smash in the desert? You seemingly must have shattered a certain amount of them to trigger the endgame, so if you’ve done everything else you will be forced to drive loops of the desert smashing crystals before you can trigger the end. I’d been quite diligent about smashing the crystals all game – I wanted the upgrades – and I still had to spend too long doing mind-numbing crystal mop-up in the endgame. “It’s like if GTA asked you to knock down a certain number of lampposts to unlock the next mission,” I scribbled in my notepad.
When the time finally came to trigger the end, I found it underwhelming. I was expecting a big finale with pay-offs for what the game had built up so far – a thrilling final series of challenges to make use of all the skills you’ve acquired. Instead, without mentioning any embargoed specifics, that enticing tower that’s been teasing you all game ends up being a totally mechanically-straightforward anticlimax.
One thing I can’t speak to, being honest, is the ‘complete’ ending, because we all know Metroid games like to hide bonus tidbits behind hard mode, fast completion times, and full completion percentage. On Normal Mode with 100 percent of items and 80-something percent of scans, however, I was rather baffled by where it’s all left. While I understand the villain’s core motivation, I don’t think I could explain what their actual endgame is, other than to just be a pain. I also don’t think the relationships the game is at pains to try to build with those marines pays off, even as it tries to tug at the heartstrings. There’s a core plot thread about the ancient alien thread that does set up, escalate, and resolve, but anything past that felt half-baked and incomplete – even after poring over scan text.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond accessibility options
Three difficulty options which can be changed any time – though lowest difficulty used in a given run determines post-game bonuses. Individual toggles for speech, music, and SFX, plus optional subtitles, which can be transparent or on a solid background. HUD can be customised to remove any UI movement, and remove the helmet. Aiming supports controller sticks, gyro, and Switch 2 Joy-Con mouse controls. There are sensitivity options for every control variation. Discrete sensitivity settings for camera and aim control.
No matter how much you enjoy the gameplay part, I don’t think there’s much more disappointing than finishing a game that’s relatively narratively-driven and thinking, “that’s it?” at the credits. Don’t give me this rubbish about Metroid not being narratively-focused, either: I felt a sense of narrative satisfaction ushering that baby Metroid to safety in black and white, without any dialogue, back in 1993. I also understood the emotion behind why Samus decided to rescue a manifestation of the very thing she’d spent all game killing.
I watched this game’s finale and then text messaged another critic: “I’m baffled by it,” followed by a bunch of questions to check if I’d missed something they hadn’t. A naff ending isn’t the end of the world, obviously. But in Metroid Prime 4, it forms part of an overall pattern of mild disappointments in the face of some otherwise excellent, easily-lovable stuff.
It is one of those games that is – excuse another cliche – less than the sum of its parts. I enjoyed my time with it; when you’re deep in those dungeons, the design is snappy and confident and the atmosphere impeccable even in the company of chatty NPCs. Puzzley boss encounters, where you die once but use that death to ‘download’ a strategy before wrecking the boss on your second attempt, are each a delight. These things are glimpses of vintage Metroid. But the way it all stitches together just isn’t. In fact, those heady highs serve to really emphasise how this game could have – and perhaps should have – been so much more.
A copy of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was provided for this review by Nintendo.
