Metroid Prime 4: Beyond review — Metroid Prime Bore.

Samus has had adventures on dozens of planets across her nearly 30-year career. In that time, she’s toppled massive monsters, space pirates, and opposing bounty hunters. Now, in the long-awaited fourth entry to the Prime franchise, she’ll be joining a ragtag crew of soldiers scattered to a new planet in an attempt to get them home and help the long-dead inhabitants of planet Viewros. It’s just a shame the storied bounty hunter’s latest adventure feels so painfully mediocre.

Everything starts like your normal intergalactic space pirate skirmish. You work through a Galactic Federation base, helping the soldiers there fend off the insect-like space pirates and scanning things with your visor along the way. When you reach a room full of soldiers guarding an alien artifact, everything goes south. After fighting off a monster taken over by a metroid, Samus is surprised when her nemesis, Sylux, bursts in through a rift and attempts to take the relic. When he fails, the object reacts, warping Samus and the Galactic Federation forces to the desert planet Viewros. Stripped of her equipment (in classic Metroid style), she sets out to begin again. 

Along the way, she encounters video logs of an ancient civilization long lost that speak of a “chosen one” who can help carry their legacy to a new planet. As she explores Viewros, Samus runs into a handful of soldiers still fighting for survival after the jump. These range from a (relatively) likable engineer to a hard-boiled veteran to a sergeant and his Samus-fangirl private who’ve clearly spent time in the same company together. They bring something different to the formula, but everything they’re involved in feels forced and awkward, save a couple of minor scenes here and there. This is only amplified by Samus doing little more than the occasional expressionless nod here and there as they carry on full conversations with her. 

This is made even worse by the fact that Sylux is an awful villain. You’ll see him a handful of times throughout the 10-12 hour adventure, and the only time he ever has speaking lines, they’re hamfisted and forgettable. Don’t get me wrong - encounters with him are interesting and well-designed, but from a narration point of view, he’s virtually worthless, bordering on detrimental to telling a reasonable story.

From a gameplay perspective, Metroid Prime 4 follows suit with the franchise. There are various areas set apart, each with its own thematic elements and environmental hazards for our intergalactic bounty hunter to work through. You’ll dive in, solve some puzzles, get a few upgrades or new abilities, and fight some sort of big bad to wrap up your required time there. These “dungeons,” for lack of a better term, are when Prime 4 is at its best. Scanning environments, fighting monsters, and solving environmental puzzles with your upgrades make for the sort of satisfying experience you want out of a Metroid game.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of gameplay elements outside the game’s main dungeons that drag down the experience. I personally attribute a lot of these missteps to the inclusion of the Vi-O-La motorcycle. On its face, having a motorcycle is objectively cool. Because of it, though, they’ve built the most boring, empty open world I’ve seen in a game in years. I get it - they wanted to give folks something to drive around in. In doing so, they violated the first rule of open-world game design: you have to give players things to do in that world. The world of Viewros has maybe 8-10 landmarks for you to visit once you’ve uncovered the map, and all of them are single-visit experiences (or should be). Beyond that, you’ll spend your time in the vast desert driving around trying to smash into green crystals.

I thought the green crystals were a goofy incentive - something to occupy my attention as I’m going from A to B (serving much the same function as a urinal freshener company printing a bug on their goods). Much to my chagrin, these green crystals are required to finish the story. Before I was allowed to embark on the final mission, I was forced to waste an hour and a half collecting them in the desert to fill a bar before I could proceed (and yes, that was with other accelerated paths of crystal retrieval included). 

On top of that, the game features no fast travel, save a single point on the edge of the map that includes a 20-second unskippable cutscene every time you use it. Oh, and every time you find a new beam upgrade out in the big, open world, you’re going to have to drive across an empty desert, take that unskippable cutscene, and go to home base so the engineer can decipher and install it. The entire game would’ve been improved if they’d gotten rid of the Vi-O-La (or kept it to one dungeon), scrapped the open world, and tied all the dungeons together like any other Metroid game. It disrespects my time as the player, and it’s beyond frustrating.

Visually, I think it’s fair to say Metroid Prime 4 is the best-looking game in the franchise, fighting for the most visually impressive Nintendo game to date. Colors pop, the resolution is crisp, and the framerate never dips on the Switch 2. I personally love Prime 4’s boss monster designs, too. The game’s soundtrack is top-notch, with vibes reminiscent of some of the other series entries’ finest tunes. Unfortunately, the game’s voice acting feels relatively awful on the whole (though I personally found Myles, the engineer, to have great delivery despite being an awkward character).

Metroid Prime 4 feels like a game with solid bones that was given the directive to “make it open world” after the success of Breath of the Wild. The team didn’t pivot to fill that directive with interesting things, opting instead to employ mechanics that actually make it more cumbersome. Couple that with a disjointed story, a narratively pointless villain, and a mediocre support cast, and you have a recipe for a boring, frustrating experience. The classic dungeons and gameplay are the fun you want out of a Metroid game, but everything outside of that core experience acts like a motorcycle in a bog, held back by too much mud.