More than almost any other Nintendo first-party franchise, Metroid’s history is… Let’s say inconsistent. It started with the universally praised 2D games, but eventually veered into odd directions that no one really asked for. Online multiplayer, pinball, and the ill-fated, narrative-heavy Other M weren’t exactly what fans of the lonely, spacefaring adventures of Samus Aran were clamoring for. And to this day, no one on the planet has any idea what the hell Federation Force was.
Skepticism of the series’ direction first reared its head during the reveal of Metroid Prime. They were turning Metroid into a first-person shooter? Don’t forget, this was around the time they turned Zelda into a CARTOON FOR LITTLE BABIES, so the early 2000s were truly the salad days for grown men being very angry about Nintendo games. This was before social media, so to bear witness to all the impotent yelling you’d have to visit forums or, in my case, be working behind the counter at a Funcoland and dealing with that ponytail guy that comes in every day just to let you know how upset he is about Cel-Da.
But then Retro released Metroid Prime and everyone shut up pretty quickly. It was and remains one of the greatest games of all time, and has aged beautifully whether you’re playing the original or the excellent Metroid Prime Remastered on Switch. The first entry is almost universally considered the best, and for good reason. Metroid Prime 2 and 3 were both good games, but they came with their share of downsides and didn’t come close to the standard set by the original. Prime 2’s concept involved a cumbersome light world/dark world theme that permeated most of the experience, and 3 was a Wii game, so there was quite a bit of forced waggle to contend with.
Add all of that up and you have a recipe for a healthy amount of skepticism whenever a new Metroid project is announced. It certainly didn’t help when Nintendo made the shocking announcement that development of a long-awaited fourth entry had been effectively scrapped and restarted with a new team just two years after its E3 reveal. It’s now eight and a half years since that initial announcement, and I spent most of my waking hours over one November weekend playing Metroid Prime 4. As a fan of the series since the NES, I can only compare this experience with my first time playing Metroid Prime in the winter of 2002.
As was the case with the original, it’s reductive to refer to this game as a first-person shooter, despite the fact that it’s in first person and you sure do shoot a lot of stuff in it. Over twenty years later, Metroid Prime still feels like a bit of an anomaly and a genre unto itself. No other first-person series out there manages to so deftly balance combat, puzzle-solving, atmosphere, and platforming. With a focus that the Prime series hasn’t had since the original title, this fourth entry manages to avoid the missteps that brought down the otherwise solid 2 and 3.
My initial hour or so did not immediately quell the skepticism I had coming in. If the traditional spirit of Metroid is one of an isolated trek through hostile and haunting alien planets, this opening is not that. Samus lands her ship amidst a battle scene that more closely resembles a Halo or Call of Duty campaign level. Chaos, gunfire, and even a giant mech serve as the backdrop as the player shoots their way through this opening while being taught Samus’s abilities. After a boss fight and the re-emergence of rival bounty hunter Sylux (who you do not remember from Metroid Prime Hunters), a mysterious artifact explodes and warps Samus away. Upon awakening on a mysterious new planet, Samus – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – discovers that she’s lost almost all of her weapons and abilities!
Metroid has never wasted much time on narrative, and the same rings true this time around. As is usually the case, you'll get some whiffs of lore via spooky ghost priests of an ancient alien race. And surprise, you're the Chosen One of prophecy! Wow! Cutscenes are pretty few and far between, but if you're the type to dig deep and update fan wikis, you can find more details via copious scanning and various logbooks. All you really need to know is that the ghost aliens want you to find five Master Teleporter Keys scattered across the planet Viewros, and then you can go home.
This sounded a bit familiar to the beginning of Breath of the Wild to me. “Hey Link! Glad you woke up. Now do these four things and kill the boss and save the world.” It made me wonder if I was about to experience the BOTW-ification of the Metroid series. My suspicions grew when the main map opened up and I realized I was able to set markers to indicate the location of missile expansions and other upgrades.
By the time that happens, you'll already have two of the five teleporter keys from the more linear initial areas. These areas serve a couple of key purposes — introduce you to your new buddy Myles (more on him in a bit), and unlock your sweet-ass motorcycle Vi-O-La. Everything about the bike kicks ass. You don't have to worry about picking it up where you left it or summoning it like your horse in Breath of the Wild or Red Dead Redemption. Rather, it works more like Torrent in Elden Ring where it just shows up underneath you at the press of a button. No matter what Samus is doing, she'll just do a 20-foot backflip and land perfectly on the coolest motorcycle you've ever seen. Oh, you're in Morph Ball mode? No problem, here's a sweet animation of Samus unfurling and landing on a shiny space bike. It's the best.
Vi-O-La is mostly relegated to travelling throughout Sol Valley, the hub area of the game. I can see this area being polarizing. If someone were to call it “empty,” I could understand the argument. It is, after all, a desert, so it's not exactly riddled with fascinating things to discover. You'll run across some green crystals that you can collect for upgrades and the occasional shrine with power-ups, but when it comes down to it, it's an awful lot of sand.
After cruising around the desert for a while on my motorcycle, I realized that it absolutely wasn't the open world from Breath of the Wild. It was Hyrule Field from Ocarina of Time. It's a relatively large but ultimately utilitarian area that you'll traverse between extended periods in more bespoke environments. Ocarina had you riding Epona across Hyrule Field to get from Death Mountain to Lake Hylia. Metroid Prime 4 has you riding Vi-O-La between Volt Forge and Ice Belt. Sol Valley isn’t the highlight of the game by any means, but I didn’t dislike my time in it at all. If anything, it serves as a nice palette cleanser between the combat- and puzzle-intensive dungeon-like zones.
Ocarina of Time and the original Metroid Prime were the two titles I kept being reminded of while playing Metroid Prime 4. Evoking those two all-timers isn’t something I do lightly. Like my initial experiences with those games, my sessions with Metroid Prime 4 turned into day- and night-long marathons that made time completely melt away. I may have been playing on an accelerated timeline due to the fact that I’m reviewing the game prior to embargo, but I can tell the difference between “I gotta get this review done” and “I am loving this game so much that I’ve lost track of the passage of time,” and it was definitely the latter.
It strikes a perfect balance by never being too hand-holdy or too reliant on objective markers. Before you get the map in a new area, your map screen shows you where you are, where you’ve been, and the room you’re trying to reach. There can be large blank areas between you and where you need to be. You’re basically pointed in a general direction and how you get to your ultimate goal is something you’ll just need to suss out as you go. Even after getting an area map, individual rooms and areas feature tons of hidden nooks and crannies and details that you can only discover by exploring the space and making good use of Samus’s scanner.
Exploring is so satisfying that even the backtracking doesn’t feel like a chore, which even the best Metroid games can be guilty of. You won’t be cruising back to Volt Forge just to spend 20 minutes backtracking to a crumbly bit of wall that you can now break for a missile upgrade. Instead, you’ll face new minibosses, access new areas, and revisit environments that have evolved since your first trek through. Volt Forge can feel slightly dark and dormant on your first visit, but later, once the towers are powered up, everything erupts with electricity and light.
Quality of life upgrades also improve the return experience, such as new Morph Ball elevators that let you quickly zip around the towers. A scout drone can be activated which pings missed collectibles. Plus, you’ll likely have your new Thunder Shot, which wreaks havoc on the various Psy-Bot enemies that were much more of a threat earlier in the game.
Other tweaks have been made to the way Samus utilizes her arm cannon. In the past, your arm cannon abilities would frequently be “overwritten” by whatever the new upgrade was. Now, instead of changing the entire base arm cannon, upgrades simply unlock the ability to switch between elemental shots. With a press of the d-pad, you'll toggle between missiles, fire shots, ice shots, and thunder shots (and each of those can be upgraded further). Elemental shots all share the same ammo type, so you don't have to worry about juggling four different types of pickups.
Early in the game, one of those friendly ghost alien priests gives you a psychic crystal that conveniently fits in your helmet. This unlocks Samus's psychic abilities, which are largely confined to putting the word “psychic” in front of Metroid terms you've heard before like “Boost Ball.” It's not a real game-changer, honestly. It's the same cool stuff as before, except the Grapple Beam is now the PSYCHIC GRAPPLE and it's got some purple/pink smoky effects. You can also use psychic powers to move various door lock mechanisms around, but I'm not gonna act like it’s anything revolutionary that couldn't be done with a Wii Remote in 2008.
Playing Metroid Prime 4 reveals how far motion controls have come since the days of the Wii. Back then, Nintendo constantly told us that the Wii Remote would forever change the way we play FPS games, whether that was Metroid Prime 3 or The Conduit or that one Medal of Honor no one remembers. We all thought the dream of the Wii died, but the tech sneakily got much better! Whether you're playing handheld, docked with Joy-Cons, or using a Pro Controller, the gyroscopic controls in Metroid Prime 4 are fantastic.
Holding ZL will lock on to an enemy, but with some slight motion, you can “break off” the reticle to target specific areas while still tracking the main foe. This is especially useful during boss fights that feature numerous weak spots. I would very much recommend digging into the options and tweaking all of the motion controls to your liking. I found “Free-Aim Motion Threshold” to be an important slider, as it determined just how much I'd need to move my controller to snap the reticle free of the enemy's center mass.
We heard plenty about the Switch 2's mouse mode in the console's early marketing, and I was curious to see how it held up here. It worked surprisingly well at a preview event that I attended earlier this year, but that was obviously under perfect circumstances. The kiosk I played at was outfitted with the widest and smoothest mouse surface imaginable, which isn't a realistic scenario at home. I tried using mouse controls in various forms — on my thigh, on my couch, on a mousepad on my couch, on a table in front of me — and found it to be inconsistent at best. It's not a totally useless way to play but at the end of the day it doesn't offer anything that the gyro controls don't do better.
We’re still early in the console’s life cycle, but Metroid Prime 4 is undeniably the best-looking game on the Switch 2. You know how a good remake will look the way you remember the game looking back in the day? Like how The Wind Waker HD looks like your memories of the original game, but if you actually put them side-by-side you’d realize how it’s been improved by orders of magnitude. I felt the same way as I played through Metroid Prime 4. Everything is so sleek and polished and beautiful that it took me back to being blown away in 2002. We’ve seen so many permutations of Samus’s suit throughout the years, and this game still managed to surprise me with just how cool they could make her look as she upgrades her gear.
Everything is complemented by the most Metroid-ass music you can imagine. I’m no music scholar, so I’ll describe it as “ethereal and warbly with a bunch of cool chanting.” Early in the game, you enter a jungle area and the camera pans up to show a majestic sparkling tree while the “FURY GREEN” area title card appears and the music kicks in. It was so cool, I instinctively felt the need to hold the capture button so I could relive that beautiful 30-second stretch.
Immediately after this transcendent moment, I met Myles Mackenzie, the Galactic Federation engineer and subject of much internet debate. To be fair, I can see why Myles rubbed people the wrong way in the context of a preview event. He absolutely comes across as antithetical to the vibe of the series, ESPECIALLY after that beautiful Fury Green title card and music sting that felt so traditionally Metroid. Suddenly you’ve got this weird little guy saying things like “Win!” and “Booyah!” and “Things are about to get real nerdy in here.” This type of Whedon-ass dialogue is typically Kryptonite to me, but I’m happy to confirm that Myles is ultimately no big deal.
If he were akin to Mimir in God of War Ragnarök, I’d have hated him and it would have negatively impacted my enjoyment of the game. He’s not, though. Unlike Mimir, he’s not a consistent presence throughout the game and he doesn’t constantly tell you what to do whenever you’re confronted with a puzzle. Very quickly, he gets relegated to the guy that will nudge you in the right direction if you’re just idling in the desert for too long between main areas. I was initially worried that he’d be more hand-holdy, considering that in one of the first main areas he does spell out the map for you as well as the direction you should head in. This was complete with “would you like to hear that again?” and the default selection if you happen to be mashing through his dialogue is “yes.” The spirit of the Ocarina of Time owl lives on!
Outside of the VERY occasional radio support, he’s just the dude that upgrades your weapons. He’s not the only side character Samus runs into, either. By the end you’ll have assembled a small, ragtag crew, and I have to admit that I did end up liking them.
The end of my Metroid playthroughs usually go down the same way. I can tell I’m getting near the final area, so I mop up what I can, grab a couple easy upgrades, beat the final boss, and I’m told that I completed the game with somewhere around a 60-80% item completion. For the first time in the series, when I was presented with an obvious “hey you’re reaching the point of no return” prompt, I backed off and spent hours trying to collect every last item. I was not yet content to end my experience. Despite thinking I had gotten everything pinged by my scout drones, I actually ended things at 16 hours with a 98% item rating. Oh no, guess I gotta play it again!
Despite a few tweaks and new features – motion controls, psychic powers, a nonlinear hub world, and the occasional side character – this is Metroid Prime through and through. It’s without a doubt the closest the series has ever felt to the original Metroid Prime, in terms of tone, gameplay, and quality. Time will tell where I place Metroid Prime 4 in the ranking of the overall series, but fresh off my first playthrough I feel comfortable putting it among the likes of Super Metroid and the original Metroid Prime. It’s the best Switch 2 title yet, and I have to imagine that fans of the series will find themselves captivated by Metroid Prime 4.
