It’s taken a long time for us to get Metroid Prime 4, and the game is certainly excellent, but did it really need to take 8 years?
Following the events of the previous Metroid Prime trilogy, Phazon is no longer a galactic threat. However, Sylux has managed to take over the Space Pirates and harnessed the power of the Metroids, and is on a warpath, destroying Galactic Federation research outposts en masse.
It’s here where we start the game, and after a boss battle and some strange alien technology going awry, Samus ends up on the alien planet Viewros.
We learn that the original inhabitants of the planet, the psychic Lamorn, are sadly no longer with us, and Samus is apparently the chosen one meant to preserve their legacy.
However, to do that, she has to teleport back home and needs five teleportation keys to accomplish this task.
Samus also wasn’t the only one transported to Viewros, and there is a ragtag bunch of Galactic Federation soldiers marooned on various parts of the planet.
It’s here where some people online went a bit bananas and massively overreacted to the chattiness of these characters. The reality is that, yes, there are other characters in this game, but they are nowhere near as intrusive as many have raged about online. If anything, the Lamorn are chattier about their history than the human characters are. For comparison, the amount of dialogue felt similar to Adam in Fusion, which is what I was expecting.
The game’s progression then has you go to five different areas across Viewros to find these keys, with a bunch of typical Metroid backtracking, and then get back home.
Connecting these five areas is a massive desert called Sol Valley, and it’s where you use the new bike Vi-O-La to traverse.
The general progression is also more in line with Corruption, where you find weapon chips to change the abilities of your arm cannon with the help of a Galactic Federation mechanic, with the latter mapped to the missile button and switched between via the d-pad.
These new weapon chips unlock three shot types: fire, ice, and electricity, which also have separate shot ammo that can be expanded upon with item collection. The shot types can also be upgraded, so you can pack more of a punch.
Riding around on Vi-O-La is also great fun, and when you unlock it at Volt Forge, the music gets a few more mullet-infused guitar riffs, which was actually somewhat amusing.
The main thing here I would recommend is definitely to farm as many green crystals in the desert with Vi-O-La as quickly as possible, as they afford a bunch of upgrades that will make your life a lot easier.
However, while you may think that this new “open world” setup allows you to go anywhere on a funky alien bike, the reality is that the game generally channels you into certain areas based on the power-ups you have collected, and I am entirely fine with that.
The only thing here, though, is that both the desert and the bike, despite their functional excellence, feel like an unnecessary addition. There’s no reason why each area couldn’t have been directly adjacent to the others, like in the earlier Prime games.
If I am honest, I also feel like there’s been a generational shift in terms of the game design team at Retro Studios, with a lot of the institutional expertise long gone. The level design is still very good, but it’s not as mind-bendingly clever as previous Prime games, and that’s a shame.
What I don’t know is where this open-world stuff came from, because if the game didn’t have such a massive art overhead, it feels like we could have had this game four years ago.
Also, and this is just something that bugged me, the button for jumping in human and morph ball mode is different for the default controls. That’s just a weirdly bad game design choice, in a game where jumping is essential for exploration and progression. Mercifully, you can remap your buttons in the controller settings menu.
Apart from that, the new psychic abilities are fun and do change up the levels and enemies you encounter. However, every upgrade has a new “psychic” prefix, which feels a bit cheeky considering that most of the abilities are the same as prior Metroid games.
I also played the game with the Switch 2 Pro pad in Performance mode, which runs the game at 1080p at 120fps. It genuinely looks and runs amazingly throughout. However, I would recommend thoroughly going through the game’s control options before you start. The settings are very comprehensive, and you’ll want to make sure everything is set the way you want it.
One final thing is that the game does do some nice things in the semi-post-game, when it turns into a treasure hunt (my favorite part of any Metroid game). In that, like in Corruption, there’s a nice way to track items you missed, although I won’t spoil that for you.
I will also say that while I did enjoy the story, it doesn’t really answer many of the questions it puts forward. It also feels like this game is the setup for a new Prime trilogy, which I am entirely up for. Just so long as each game doesn’t take another 8 years to make.
Overall, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is worth the wait. The new story characters are not in any way overly chatty, and this is still the mysterious and moody alien treasure hunt Metroid fans have come to love, but now with a funky alien bike. I still rate the original Prime trilogy over this, but those games were pretty much faultless, whereas this is just thoroughly excellent.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond
Platform: Switch 2 (Reviewed), Switch
Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 4th December 2025
Price: $69.99
Score: 9/10
Disclosure: Nintendo sent me a copy of the game for the purposes of this review. This review was also done on a full playthrough with a 100% item collection.
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