Samus Aran, a bounty hunter with a cannon on her arm, is Nintendo’s somewhat undersung heroine. You don’t see her as much as Princess Zelda, even though that character is usually the damsel in distress rather than the playable protagonist.
Still, the Metroid games that star Samus have a reputation of being more mature than Nintendo’s other kid-friendly franchises — sci-fi action-adventures with an atmospheric, often claustrophobic feel of exploring strange alien worlds.
And yet early previews of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond worried some fans. Journalists wrote that a slice of the game they played at a preview event featured a chatty, bumbling sidekick named Myles. VGC’s Andy Robinson was “slightly aghast” at this player guide and comic relief side character, for “stripping away at any trace of atmosphere or tension with his comedic quips and exclamations.”
The full game, which should take most players about 15 hours to finish, thankfully isn’t a full-time sounding board for characters like Myles. When it works, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a sublime new entry in the series, hitting all the points that longtime fans love.
But for every awe-inspiring level design or exhilarating boss battle, it tries and fails at something new, leaving us with some of the most frustrating or disappointing moments in the series’ history.
Nearly a decade in development
The first Metroid Prime was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002 — and lauded for translating the older 2D games’ vibes into 3D, instead of turning it into a run-and-gun affair like so many first-person shooters of the time.
Metroid Prime 4 was announced in 2017, but reportedly underwent development troubles including being restarted entirely. After a years-long information blackout that ended with a trailer in January 2024, it’s set to launch this week on the Switch and Switch 2.
WATCH | Metroid Prime 4 trailer:
Beyond starts with Samus answering a distress call from a base under attack from space pirates. After a short encounter with a menacing figure named Sylux, Samus is caught in an anomaly that transports her to an unknown alien planet.
Like nearly all Metroid games before it, most of her combat suit’s weapons and abilities are disabled, beginning another quest to regain her strength while figuring out where she is and how to get home.
Back to basics …
Metroid Prime 4 mostly follows in the footsteps of its predecessors — a good thing, since the first Prime is a timeless classic.
As Samus, you’ll explore strange alien biomes on the planet, called Viewros. You’ll have to fight off hostile flora and fauna, as well as formidable combat robots with Samus’s arm-mounted energy cannon.
But it’s not all about running and gunning, as you’ll spend much of your time using Samus’s scanning visor, documenting Viewros’s life forms, architecture and facilities left behind by its seemingly long-extinct inhabitants.
True to tradition, you will visit locations multiple times, as you gain abilities that let you explore new nooks and crannies.
Doors with a heat-sensitive lock, for instance, will only open once you’ve acquired a fire beam weapon; an out-of-reach ledge will need a grappling hook to swing over a crevasse, and so on.
New psychic abilities add complexity to Rube Goldberg-like puzzles, requiring you to thread energy bolts through obstacles to hit targets or, unlike in prior games, hold onto pulsating energy bombs before flinging them to faraway switches or enemy weak points.
… mostly
Other additions fare less well — sometimes far less.
Myles Mackenzie is only one of a handful of characters you’ll meet from the Galactic Federation (humans mostly relegated to the series’ background). Most are likeable, if generic tropes — there’s the gruff sergeant, the quiet sniper, and the big robot with vaguely human dialogue.
Most interesting might be Nora Armstrong, the rookie soldier who is also a longtime fangirl of Samus. She makes for some funny interactions, though Samus’s status as a mostly mute protagonist pushes the limits of believability when her allies this time around are so chatty.
By the end of the game, the player might develop some affection for the squad. But despite brief flashes of character development, there just isn’t enough to make them truly memorable.
A vast open world desert separates the main locations in the game. Samus has a cool new motorcycle to speed through the sand, but it is mostly a featureless, boring landscape. The more time you spend, the worse it looks in comparison to the sumptuously detailed and designed open world in the recent Zelda games.
Most frustrating, perhaps, is the game’s insistence on using the Switch 2’s new controls for some difficult enemy encounters. Some boss battles require you to hit very specific weak points, which are made easier by rotating the right JoyCon on its side to use like a computer mouse.
It’s not a bad idea, and the controls grant you added aiming speed and accuracy. But the controllers are awkward to hold in that position for long, and are only really needed in the most taxing situations. You’re better off using a Pro Controller, but will likely still have to swap to the JoyCon mouse controls at the most inconvenient times.
After nearly a decade in the works and what one must presume were many different abandoned or half-implemented new ideas or features, it’s a miracle that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was finished in the first place.
Fans of the series will be able to scrounge through the odd choices to find what made previous entries stone-cold classics at the core of the game. But newcomers curious about what makes Samus tick would be better served by playing Metroid Prime Remastered, Metroid Dread — or even Super Metroid, available on the Switch’s Super Nintendo retro library — before this one.
