Metroid Prime 4: Beyond feels more like a rough draft of a game rather than a fully released title. There are so many disjointed pieces here that could only stem from the cursed development cycle this sequel has undergone for the past 18 years.
Let’s start with the good. The game looks great and runs really smoothly, especially on the Switch 2 hardware. While the environments are pretty generic ice area, fire area, jungle area, etc. they’re all very well detailed and I had a good time scanning everything I could. I also loved how the look of Samus’ arm changed whenever she switched between the different shot types. Moving in this game felt great as well, whether it was running around in first person or rolling around in third. I opted for joy con motion controls and aiming and shooting always felt super responsive.
And now let’s get into the bad.
While the levels looks pretty, they’re all very linear. The handful of paths that were blocked by upgrades I hadn’t acquired yet just became story critical areas that I needed to return to later and weren’t fun optional areas that contained nice to have upgrades. They were also always so direct with calling out when I needed to return to these areas, which feels like such a crime in the Metroidvania genre. “Hey Samus, have you tried returning to that single area that you couldn’t get into before in the Volt Forge?”. “Hey Samus, looks like you can use that new power to access the lower levels of X!”. It sucked every time it happened and there’s no way to adjust the amount of hand holding they do in the settings.
It’s all incredibly uneven as well. Near the end of the game you’re tasked with finding 6 mech parts to send back to your base. 5 of them are found in the desert and are clearly marked if you’ve been to those areas before. I ran around in circles trying to find the last one and it happened to be the only piece that was placed in a level and not the open world for some reason. This dude that feels the need to hit me up on comms to tell me to check my map every so often but couldn’t drop a hit that the last piece I was looking for wasn’t anywhere near the other ones?! At this point in the game I was already so done with it that I really would have appreciated the direct instructions.
The human companions here are atrocious. It blows my mind how, with entire galaxy’s worth of species that they could have tapped into, the devs went with 4 of the most generic and forgettable human NPCs I’ve ever seen in a game. Not only that, but they never shut up and their dialogue is pitiful. They’re useless in combat and they’ll even occasionally have the nerve to get knocked down and make you manually revive them. In other sections they’ll straight up slow down your progression in a number of ways. Just baffling design decisions across the board here.
We needed more companions like the big robot because let me tell you: big robot has the sauce. Sure he’s not the most unique character in gaming, but he gets the god damn job done. He kicks ass in combat and never holds you back. On top of that, he’s just a loveable goof. We needed some aliens in this party or something to help spice it up in a major way.
The overworld in this game is absolute garbage. I refuse to believe that the devs had always planned to make this huge area an actual wasteland with next to nothing to discover. This must have been a result of time or budget running out because what’s here just feels rushed and unfinished. It really feels like they created 5 unique biomes that were supposed to connect in a more natural way, but they just ran out of resources and had to put this featureless desert together instead and stick it with the handful of shrines that didn’t really fit anywhere else.
Speaking of which, the handful of shrines scattered throughout feature puzzles so simple that you’ll finish them in just a few seconds. While they are all very easy to figure out, they do showcase creative ways to use your powers. Why they don’t mark them off the map once you complete them? Who’s to say.
The bosses here were a huge let down across the board. Most of them just consisted of hammering the A and R buttons while pointing at their weak points until they eventually went down. I thought I was missing a big element of these fights, but after looking at a few guides afterwards it’s clear to see that they’re all just as straightforward as they seemed on the surface. And these fights felt like they went on 4x longer than they should have. It all feels mindless after awhile. I’ve come to expect some puzzle elements in these fights from previous entries, but they’re so light in this game. The interesting things that do show up are just repeated countlessly throughout the encounter. Do yourself a favor and just drop the difficulty down to easy. The only thing you’ll be missing is pressing the A button a few hundred times less throughout your playthrough.
Outside of bosses, enemies are pretty bland and there isn’t enough variety across the board. I did like how freezing aerial enemies knocked them to the ground and caused damage as they shattered, but there needed to be more interactivity like this. The one enemy that actually required precision to defeat was a nightmare to faceoff against, and it’s clear to see why they only reused them once in the entire playthrough.
The motorcycle had a lot of promise, but they barely did anything interesting with it. Honestly I think the most fun I had with it was just going through the handful of tutorial trials you have to play through as soon as you unlock it. After that it’s just used as a vessel in the desert to get from point A to point B in while mindlessly crashing into crystals. I was really hoping the bosses that revolved around using it would be cool, but they were arguably some of the worst encounters in the game. Fights that went on far longer than they should have with very basic move sets and attack patterns.
The green crystal gathering is one of the worst, if not THE worst, end game quests of all time. I thought I was doing a solid job picking them up as I drove to and from every location on the map throughout my playthrough and I was horrified to find out that, after I had finished the 5th dungeon and finally took a detour to deposit them, I only had half of what I needed to finish the quest. Mind you that this is required to access the final area in the game. I continued to comb through this empty, music-less desert (because I didn’t buy a damn Amiibo), went back to bank them, sat through 4 separate transitional cutscenes, found out I didn’t have enough, sat through another 4 transitional cutscenes to get back to the desert, and repeated this process about 4 more times. All the while, Mac would get on the comms to tell me to make sure that I was collecting enough green crystals. Truly a maddening 2 hours that had me absolutely dreading my time in the game. They do eventually tell you exactly when you’ve collected enough of them to grow the fruit, but there was no way of knowing that beforehand.
The overall narrative was really lacking here, especially since a lot of the heavy lifting was done by these generic NPCs I really couldn’t stand. This was all emphasized by an ending that felt really abrupt and dissatisfying. You would think for a game that hasn’t had an entry in 18 years they would want to end on a stronger note. Sadly that wasn’t the case. And the kicker is if you decide not to teleport and leave all your friends behind to die, not only do you get a Game Over, but you also have to replay through the last 2 phases of the extremely mid final boss fight. Really fun stuff that perfectly summed up my time with this one.
Overall, Metroid Prime 4 is the worst entry in the series by far. The direction felt so unfocused and sloppy in just about every area. As someone who was really let down by Mario Kart World earlier this year and wasn’t as crazy about Donkey Kong Bananza as everyone else was, this first year of Switch 2 first party support unfortunately fell very flat for me. Hopefully 2026 picks it up with some more clear cut bangers.
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