No other series has managed to capture isolation and discovery like Metroid Prime. The solitude in being stranded on an alien planet, tucking yourself into a Morph Ball to satisfyingly weave through tight spaces, or the compulsive urge to scan anything and everything around you to discover hidden lore about your location – these sensations have all come to define the series. With Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, Retro Studios has largely recaptured the same magic that it last achieved in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption nearly two decades ago. However, some questionable choices have led to unforced errors that detract from and, at worst, undermine the experience that awaits you.
After the Galactic Federation receives a distress call from its research facility on planet Tanamaar in the Desolan System, bounty hunter Samus Aran is sent to help defend it from rival bounty hunter Sylux and his army of Space Pirates. Immediately tasked with securing a strange artifact, you battle through the facility as cone-shaped Dive Spikes puncture their way through ceilings and heavyweight-class Golem mechs unleash their charged particle cannons skyward at the attacking forces. After an eventual confrontation with Sylux, a wayward shot from his Shock Coil activates the artifact and sees Samus unexpectedly transported to a strange new planet. Viewros.
Waking in Chrono Tower, where visor scans come up empty-handed when analysing anything around her, Samus recovers a Psychic Crystal that releases the latent Psychic powers that reside within her. It also allows her to view Psychic Recordings, through which she learns from the last surviving priest of the Lamorn that she is the “Chosen One,” as has been foretold in an Ancient Prophecy. The Lamorn are now extinct and place their hope in Samus to carry the Memory Fruit to a new world in order to preserve their history and knowledge for the future. To return home with their gathered wisdom, you will need to retrieve five keys to activate the Master Teleporter. With that, your mission begins.
There’s so much to commend Retro Studios on getting right in its approach to crafting Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Nintendo Switch 2 Edition. That classic-feeling to its first-person adventure trappings, the Logbook-filling desire to learn everything you possibly can about Viewros, tense Arm Cannon-blasting combat encounters, and head-scratchingly placed out of reach upgrades to ponder for far too long about how you’re supposed to retrieve them.
The art direction is breathtaking at every turn, too. From Chrono Tower’s ethereal, marble-like structure to Fury Green’s luscious forests or the lava-encrusted Flare Pool to the tempestuous Volt Forge, Viewros is both wondrous to behold and exist in. Even as a cross-gen release with the original Nintendo Switch, Retro Studios has clearly worked hard to deliver an early technical showcase that demonstrates what Nintendo Switch 2 can achieve, and to remind us why we should always look forward to their output.
That’s clear for all to see between the Quality and Performance graphics modes, which see the game target 60 frames per second in 4K resolution or 120 frames per second in 1080p resolution when the console is docked in TV Mode. In Handheld Mode, those same modes target 60 frames per second in 1080p or 120 frames per second in 720p options. What will go unsung are the many control inputs that the game supports. From Dual Stick Fusion and Pointer Fusion with the Joy-Con 2, skating your Joy-Con 2 across your sofa arm with mouse controls, or simply sitting back with a Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed experimenting with them all, even though I fell back to the simplest option for my lengthy sessions spent playing through the game.
The developer finds further success with Samus’ newfound Psychic powers. The purple-hued Psychic Beam starts out as a familiar enough weapon until you unlock its telepathic Control Beam upgrade, which, controlled similarly (but far more responsively) to the Beetle contraption in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, can be used to activate distant switches or slice through monstrous tentacles. The less combat-oriented powers include the telekinetic Psychic Glove that lets you hurl Psychic Bombs into Bomb Slots, trace patterns to open Psychic Containers, or pull levers to open path-blocking gates. The Psychic Lasso also lets you swing from Grapple Points, and can be used to tear open doors and rip shields from enemies.
The enemy designs are great as well. From the peculiar-looking Glottagropper that hides burrowed in the ground to the hard shell-covered Bristlewort, there were times when certain enemies caught me off-guard with their attacks, like the Psy-bots and their devastatingly far-reaching laser beams. Retro Studios has clearly had a lot of fun coming up with the game’s many heart-pounding boss fights, which I don’t wish to spoil. I would go as far as to say that they easily rank among the best in the series’ history, and I loved how much they put my noggin to the test in figuring out how to exploit and expose their weaknesses.
So, where exactly does Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Nintendo Switch 2 Edition falter? After I was free to explore the desert-like Sol Valley, multiple story objectives appeared on the map, and MacKenzie explained over long-range comms that I could choose where I wanted to go next. I let myself believe that I could tackle the adventure in whatever order I wished (à la The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, for example), but ultimately that wasn’t the case. Having journeyed to the Ice Belt first, I soon realised I didn’t have the necessary upgrades to make any progress and, leaving the location, MacKenzie soon chimed in again to recommend I check out the volcano. Flare Pool it is, then. It was disappointing that this early illusion of player freedom didn’t come into fruition, when there is a clear order to making your way through the game.
There are many moments like this where the game does not respect your time. This is a Metroid(vania) game, of course. I expect backtracking. In that relentless chase to retrieve 100% Items before you reach the credits, newly acquired upgrades always flick on a lightbulb in your mind about overcoming a blocked path from an area that you visited an hour before. However, you have to make so many repeat journeys to MacKenzie’s Base Camp in Fury Green that I wondered why it couldn’t have been made a singular fast travel point for convenience. The Cargo Launcher used to recklessly chuck Samus near Base Camp was fun the first few times, but driving back to this one contraption on so many occasions became a chore, and there should’ve been multiple locations to do so.
Once you are unshackled from its TRON-like performance and combat trials, it is a thrill to ride around on Vi-O-La. I adore it. Sadly, the vehicle’s largely underused aside from getting you from A to B. I understand how tough it must be to serve both the fanbase who want to savour every minute they have with this game after waiting eight years for it, with the speedrunning community who will eventually look to devour it in as little time as possible. However, Sol Valley is as barren as I feared it would turn out to be, and any effort to provide it with more meaningful content (like its handful of tedious Shrines) is unremarkable and short-lived.
As had been widely feared, it is the Galactic Federation Troopers who quickly became a jarring inclusion. I have always wanted to see the Galactic Federation in action more to help lend purpose to what Samus must achieve, but not like this. Whether it be chatterbox engineering nerd Myles MacKenzie or self-proclaimed Samus fangirl Nora Armstrong suggesting to her gruff squad leader Ezra Duke that she can get the legendary bounty hunter’s autograph, their over-enthusiasm seems at odds with the predicament they are in. Warped to Viewros with no idea of where they are, who else is with them or how they’ll ever get home, should they not be afraid? The tone felt so strange.
That isn’t to say that these characters aren’t able to reach moments of emotional maturity in the game’s story, but these impactful scenes are few and far between. The storytelling isn’t delivered in a way that I grew to care about whatever happened to them. There are times when Samus is asked a direct question, and, as an unvoiced character, looks blankly at them or shakes her helmet. I appreciate that there was a momentous backlash to Metroid: Other M, but, for me, the game would have benefited from letting Samus converse with those willing to ally with her cause.
When the Mission Complete screen hit, I had 92% scans collected and 72% items discovered, with the in-game timer stating that my Normal Mode playthrough took 13 hours and 9 minutes. I felt like I had spent much longer exploring Viewros, but with Hard Mode now unlocked, I have already hopped back into Samus’ Gunship to start tackling my second playthrough.
The good news is that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Nintendo Switch 2 Edition’s strengths far outweigh its grumble-inducing weaknesses. The classic gameplay loop that remains at its core has received playful reinvention through the addition of Psychic powers, while combat encounters, whether against grunts or the game’s gargantuan bosses, show why the series’ gunplay remains best in class. The game’s climactic conclusion is worth the price of admission alone, and I won’t be the only one hoping that this could be the start of Samus Aran’s next trilogy of adventures. This was worth the wait, at least.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Nintendo
