Metroid Prime 4 Won’t Let Its Stunning World Speak For Itself

As the Metroid Prime series has gone on, it’s leaned progressively more into fast-paced action and linear stories, while deemphasizing the more open-ended exploration of the original game. That shift is seen in full force in the intro to Metroid Prime 4. A Galactic Federation base guarding a mysterious alien relic is under attack, and spacefaring bounty hunter Samus Aran is there to help. At the end of this short but fun sequence, with Samus blasting her way through Space Pirate troops as her allies take potshots from behind cover, an accident involving the relic sends the heroine hurtling through space until she awakens on the planet Viewros.

It’s been a long wait for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond — eight years since it was announced and 18 since Metroid Prime 3. Long enough for the game to restart development, switch studios, build up excessive amounts of both hope and fear in series fans, and make many question whether it would ever be released. Long enough even that the Metroidvania formula the series was first built on has massively expanded in popularity, which perhaps explains Metroid Prime 4’s attempts to set itself apart from both its series and its genre — an impulse that detracts from the game much more than it adds to it.

In typical Metroid Prime fashion, you’re equipped with a scanning visor that feeds you information about your surroundings, only here, it’s of no use. Samus makes her way through a strange tower, all sweeping curves and light colors, and her scanner can’t make any sense of it. Everything she scans is made of an unknown material, serving an unknown purpose. Combined with the strange design of the tower itself, it makes Viewros feel wonderfully alien, the kind of place where even Samus, who seemed borderline indestructible in the game’s opening, might be outmatched.

It’s only by collecting a device that gives Samus psychic and telekinetic abilities that she’s able to make sense of the new environment and the device’s creators, the Lamorn. Resembling some kind of deep-sea creature with its pale skin and finned appendages, the hologram of a Lamorn lays out the situation on Viewros: The Lamorn have been wiped out by a some kind of ecological catastrophe, but as luck would have it, Samus just so happens to be the Chosen One who’s been foretold to make sure the memory of the Lamorn makes it off their ruined home planet.

In retrospect, this whole introductory sequence feels like foreshadowing for the rest of Metroid Prime 4. The action feels great, it’s set in a series of gorgeous locales, and it’s all underpinned by a dull story delivered without a scrap of subtlety.

Uninvited Guests

By now, you’ve almost certainly seen two of Metroid Prime 4’s biggest twists: a semi-open world for Samus to traverse via motorcycle and a team of Galactic Federation allies who support her on Viewros, as embodied by the annoying engineer Myles MacKenzie. Samus’ mission to escape Viewros involves collecting teleporter keys from five regions of the planet, and it’s in the first that she meets Myles, who fires off lifeless quips like a background character in an F-tier Marvel movie while Samus saves him from local wildlife.

As you make your way across the planet, you’ll encounter four more Galactic Federation troopers who were teleported to Viewros along with Samus, and while Myles is the single most disastrous element of the game, none of the crew has much more to offer. You’ve got the sniper with a dark past and a family back home, the gruff but heroic sergeant, the energetic younger officer who isn’t even trying to hide her crush on Samus, and the blunt robot companion, none of whom ever develops so much as a second character trait.

For the most part, they’re ignorable. They may ping your radio from time to time and show up in critical cutscenes, but their time on screen is limited, and you could choose to mute the game’s voices and forget they’re there. A single section of one late-game level that pairs you up with a few different crew members to fight off enemies actually uses the crew well, but otherwise, they’re plot devices, there to give Samus someone to rescue.

All except for Myles, that is. Even setting aside the irritating way he speaks, Myles’ presence is a weight that drags down the experience of Metroid Prime 4. He’s the chattiest character by far, frequently calling to remind you of what mission you’re on, comment on events while adding nothing you couldn’t see for yourself, or rehash information given in tutorial popups almost verbatim.

It’s that last point that’s the most grating, and it’s not just a problem with Myles. In late 2024, Netflix reportedly mandated that filmmakers make their movies digestible even for audiences who are barely paying attention, according to a report from the magazine n+1. Dubbed “casual viewing,” one of the hallmarks of this kind of movie is a tendency for characters to repeat themselves, flatly spelling out information multiple times so that viewers can follow the action even if they’re half-asleep, or playing a mobile game. That same philosophy seems to have made its way into Metroid Prime 4.

Take, for example, what happens when you come across an item like the fire chip. First, you scan the item with your visor, where you learn that it can be installed in your suit to grant you the ability to shoot fire in combat and to open new paths. Pick it up, and a tutorial popup will explain again that it lets you use fire shots, and that it needs to be installed by an engineer. Then you get a call from Myles, who tells you that you’ve just found the fire chip (which he can install in your suit to give you the fire shot ability), and that you should bring it back to him at base. Another bit of onscreen text will tell you again that you should head back to base, with a prompt to open your map. Once you open your map (no matter how long you ignore the prompt before doing so), it will zoom in on the location of your base and place a marker there for you, reminding you once again that you should return with the fire chip to get the fire shot ability from Myles. After heading back to have the chip installed, Myles will once again explain that you’ve now got the fire shot ability and suggest some places to use it.

There’s an inherent thrill in finding a new power as you explore the world in a Metroidvania game, connecting it in your mind to a path you couldn’t open before, and finding your way back there to make a new way forward. That thrill entirely disappears when you’re instead told how and where to go at all times by the world’s most punchable man, who refuses to leave you alone with your thoughts.

Road to Nowhere

Along with the overbearing directions from your clingy teammates, the world of Metroid Prime 4 also makes its backtracking feel tedious. Whenever you find a new power, it will inevitably open paths to new areas and additional upgrades in levels you’ve completed. Searching for where these have opened up in old zones is enjoyable on its own, but getting there is a chore, thanks to Sol Valley, the massive, nearly featureless desert that separates the five biomes of Viewros. Even on the back of a motorcycle you find early in the game, it takes a long time to cross from one end of the desert to another, and hauling Samus back to base after finding an upgrade, then to the place where you actually want to use it feels arduous. It’s even worse when you factor in time spent fighting the enemies that roam the desert, through dull combat where your only options are to launch a seeking projectile or catch up and use a melee slam attack.

Like it or not, you’ll be spending a lot of time in the desert. Along with collecting five teleporter keys to finish the campaign, you also need to find a huge amount of Green Energy Crystals (which the Lamorn evidently just didn’t bother to come up with a better name for) in order to secure an item that contains the sum total of the Lamorn’s knowledge. Green Energy Crystals are scattered in clusters around the desert, and you need an absolute truckload of them, meaning you’ll spend an awful lot of time driving across its nearly empty expanse, crashing into crystal formations over and over. Even after spending time between stages hunting for crystals, I had just over half of what I needed after finding the last teleporter key, which turned my final hour or so of the game into a brain-melting slog as I crisscrossed the desert on my motorcycle, questioning how dedicated I was to preserving the Lamorn after all.

Other than vacuuming up crystals, there’s very little to do in the desert. A few destroyed pieces of Galactic Federation equipment have items you can collect once you’ve got late-game upgrades, and a handful of shrines (à la Breath of the Wild) dot the landscape as well. These shrines contain a single puzzle each, and even the word puzzle is vastly overselling how much thinking you need to do to complete them. Their inclusion is totally baffling, and they seem to exist just to complicate the process of finding minor upgrades like increasing your missile capacity.

Diamonds in the Rough

It’s a shame that getting around Viewros is such a pain, because within its actual levels, there’s a lot to like about Metroid Prime 4. Its gameplay is no surprise if you’ve played any other Metroid Prime game, with Samus slowly exploring alien environments, punctuated by fights against hostile fauna and machines left to run rampant when the Lamorn disappeared. Combat is snappy, sometimes straining against Samus’ slightly clunky movement, but it’s mostly enjoyable. Along with Samus’ arm cannon, you also have her usual missiles and elemental shots that do fire, ice, or electric damage. Choosing which ammo to use adds a bit of strategy to fights, with each having its own particular use — fire shots deal damage over time, ice shots freeze enemies, and electric shots can hit multiple targets when they’re close together. In both combat and exploration, Samus’ standout new ability is a psychic shot that slows time when you use it, letting you adjust its trajectory in the air. While it’s used sparingly, every time a puzzle or a tricky battle demands its use, it brings a clever new twist to the game’s action.

Metroid Prime 4 also makes motion controls feel more important than before. I could never get the hang of the Switch 2’s mouse controls, but the Joy-Cons’ motion sensors also let you aim by waving them freely in the air, like using the Wiimote in Metroid Prime 3. Particularly in boss battles, enemies have weak points that you can directly lock onto, meaning you need to make fine adjustments to your aim that just feel more natural with motion controls than with joysticks.

Since the biomes of Viewros are separated by a desert, they never intersect with one another — you’ll never open a door in the volcano region and find yourself in the jungle, for instance. While that does make its world feel a bit like a theme park made of multiple distinct environments, it also lets each zone stand out and tell its own story. There’s a deep mine you fight your way through with the help of your teammates, a factory running on energy from lightning strikes you navigate with ancient machinery, and, my favorite, a frozen laboratory with next to no combat where you learn the history of the Lamorn’s biggest crisis while slowly realizing how dangerous of a place you’ve found yourself in. Each region has a different balance of combat to exploration, achieving wildly different tones and asking you to navigate them in different ways. Whether their pace is frantic or subdued, most of these linear sequences are built with stunning environmental art and underscored by phenomenal music and sound design.

Almost every good moment of Metroid Prime 4 takes place on these initial visits to the regions of Viewros. They vary in quality, but even the worst of them is vastly better than scraping the empty expanses of Sol Valley or heading back through to dig for upgrades at the behest of your allies. It’s possible that a version of Metroid Prime 4 that leaned into the open-world aspects or even the party of secondary characters could work, but as it is now, both feel bolted onto a game that would be much better without them. Ultimately, much of Metroid Prime 4 feels like a failed experiment. As great as it is to explore the lightning-struck Volt Forge or pick through the haunted remains of the Ice Belt facility, the game’s standout moments are buried in drudgery. Metroid Prime 4 is thrilling at times, set across consistently beautiful environments, but it can’t stop getting in its own way.

6/10

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond launches on Dec. 4 on Nintendo Switch. Inverse was provided with a Switch 2 copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.