A Decent Metroidvania Buried Beneath Inexplicable Tedium

As the progenitor of one of my favourite genres, Metroid holds a special place in my heart. I wouldn’t call myself a Metroid fan – I enjoyed the original Metroid Prime games and a few of the 2D adventures like Metroid Fusion and Metroid Dread – but I have a healthy appreciation for Samus Aran and her galactic adventures.

As such, I looked forward to Metroid Prime 4: Beyond when we finally got a firm release date back in September, but I didn’t quite lament the years of silence like some fans might have. There’s an abundance of other great Metroidvania to play, after all. That’s perhaps why I’ve come away from over a dozen hours exploring the planet Viewros only mildly disappointed because the fourth Metroid Prime turned out to be a decent game buried under inexplicable flaws after 18 years since the last entry.

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Some of the areas in Metroid Prime 4 look fantastic, and are a real showcase of what to expect on the Nintendo Switch 2.

A Good Foundation

The core of Beyond is sound: Samus travels between five dungeons from an open-world hub to collect power-ups for her new, psychic-powered suit. These allow her to explore more of each area, gaining more power-ups along the way. Of course, grotesque creatures and the flora and fauna of a hostile alien planet stand in her way, warranting some methodical first-person shooting.

This isn’t a hyper-fast modern DOOM game, but rather one harkening back to the Prime series’ slower 2002 roots. Samus’s lack of mobility might put some people off, but I found the more methodical pace relaxing rather than tiresome – no heart pounding near-victories here. Regular foes and bosses alike have an arcade-like feel to them as Samus free-aims her arm cannon to blast weak points while hopping and dashing to avoid their toxic projectiles and energy waves, which blends a sense of nostalgia with chill sci-fi vibes.

Cracks Begin to Show

Cracks in Samus’s suit start to show when it comes to enemy variety, however. While each of the bosses were unique both aesthetically and mechanically, there’s only a handful of regular enemies to go up against that have different regional forms and minor upgrades as the story progresses.

By the time I delved deep into the third major dungeon – the volcanic Flare Pool – I was tired of pew-pewing generic robot after generic robot. Sure, some of them had shields while others teleported around, but how I took them down remained largely the same: keep strafing to the left or right while hammering down on ZR to fire, periodically switching to the Ice Shot to freeze the wilier enemies in place.

The Great Mines – the final dungeon in the game – was the most egregious here, throwing waves upon waves of generic enemies called Greivers at me. While the ones in the Mines were a ‘rock’ variant, they behaved like their forest and ice variant cousins: swatting away missiles, clinging to walls and ceilings, and swarming me with sheer numbers.

If I weren’t writing this review, the sheer abundance of them and lack of new, interesting ways to take them down would’ve ended my time with Metroid Prime 4 prematurely because the narrative wasn’t doing it for me either.

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Unfortunately, the enemy design in Metroid Prime 4 leaves a lot to be desired.

Let Go Of My Hand

In it, Samus and some Galactic Federation pals end up teleported to the planet Viewros where they have to track down five Master Teleporter keys in order to escape. Along the way, they uncover the history of the Lamorn race and their environmental-based downfall while butting heads with Sylux, an evil foil to Samus herself.

Unfortunately, the handful of soldiers that team up with Samus – the bumbling engineer MacKenzie, the fan-girling Armstrong – clash hard with the sense of loneliness and isolation the Metroid series is known for. They’re constantly quipping in cutscenes and – worse still – giving unnecessary or unwarranted advice, effectively pulling a rug labeled freedom and discovery right from underneath you.

Multiple times while exploring, MacKenzie would hop on the comms to tell Samus exactly where to go, triggering a prompt to open the map that wouldn’t go away until recognized. The map would then slowly pan over to the exact location required to progress the story.

I found it such a mind-bogglingly bad design decision for a series known for exploration and backtracking to forcefully hold my hand like this. To me, it felt like the developers didn’t trust me to figure out what to do, so they used the Galactic Federation soldiers as a band-aid to fix poor pacing and an uninteresting hub world.

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The addition of the Galactic Federation Soldiers is at odds with what makes a great Metroid experience.

It would’ve been less egregious if these characters were at all interesting; they’re more-or-less your “Oorah, cover my six!” American soldiers with little to no development. In a universe with parasitic alien life forms that infect other beings and warp them into grotesque creatures, I expected the soldiers going up against these horrors to be a bit more unique and maybe flesh out the world of Metroid a little. Instead, their presence makes it actively less interesting by how generic and one note they are.

A Switch 2 Showcase

Thankfully, four of the five areas you explore are visually pleasing and an impressive showcase of what the Nintendo Switch 2 is capable of – if you’re running that version and not playing on the original Switch, that is. The green-tinged lava of the Flare Pool contrasts with the silence of the frozen Ice Belt, while Fury Green makes a stunning first impression with its tangled flora and fauna.

Sol Valley, on the other hand, is a barren, disappointing hub that only features a handful of landmarks to uncover while mindlessly smashing into green energy crystals that you’re required to collect to finish the game. Samus can scoot around on her new Vi-O-La motorcycle here; however, pretty much all you get to do on it is smash through the aforementioned crystals and take on a singular boss.

To me, it felt like the developers wanted their own Breath of the Wild map filled with puzzle shrines but had to cut back to only include a handful of interesting landmarks across a barren desert. Driving from the Flare Pool to the Ice Belt and back again not only highlights how much backtracking is packed into this game, but it also is by far the most boring part of Samus’s quest.

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Sol Valley feels barren, even for a desert.

All that said, delving into one of the other four areas for the first time, scanning foliage, figuring out some half-decent puzzles, and zapping some aggressive fauna while listening to some atmospheric sci-fi beats is where Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is at its best. Though buried beneath annoying companions and a bland hub world, there’s enough nostalgia and sci-fi vibes to make this a title worth playing through for either fans of Metroidvania games or the series itself.

It’s just a shame we all waited so long for something good, not great.