Metroid Prime 4

Playtime: 14.7 Hours

Finished 10 December 2025.

Played the Nintendo Switch 2 version on release, bought a physical copy if that means anything (load times, unpatched, etc.). Chose Normal mode for my blind playthrough. Collected 96% scans, 100% item pickups, and 100% green crystals (ugh). Nice little extra achievement is that my playthrough was completely deathless! Outside of a close call on the final phase of the final boss, I never really dropped below ~75% health. I definitely would have eaten a fat death at the end if I didn't do 100% completion though.

The remaining "achievements" in the game are for 100% scans and Hard mode, neither of which are appealing to me. Scanning things isn't fun and is particularly bad in this game, and there's always the risk of missing one here or there and botching the entire playthrough (I missed Aberax, the first boss, on mine...). Hard mode reportedly just makes everything extremely tanky, which was already a complaint I had in this game - there's absolutely no way that would even be remotely entertaining to me, especially since your ammo is further limited and not replenished by Save Stations. In any case, for many reasons that I'll rant about below, I think this game is very much a one-and-done.

After a nearly 20-year hiatus, Metroid Prime finally comes back with a new entry... and it's a little bit of a disappointment. A lot of the signs were already there pre-release; people questioned the purpose of the bike, and previews of the game in the month before release suddenly revealed the existence of multiple NPCs that you encounter on Viewros, and worse, that they had to be escorted for some reason. Reception was understandably mixed; I personally hoped they would be a very minor, or even ignorable element of the game. After actually playing through the game, I unfortunately feel like these were strongly overdone, and coupled with a number of other issues made for somewhat of a mess of an experience.

Before I start trashing on some of the baffling decisions made for Prime 4, it's first worth mentioning that this game does a lot of things very well. Significantly, the fundamentals of the game are absolutely rock solid. Performance was perfect during my playthrough on the Switch 2, maintaining a steady 60/120 FPS throughout without any notable frame drops or other lag. This is coupled with a gorgeous graphics; I'd consider this to be the prettiest of the Prime games, and is one of the best-looking games on the Switch platforms as a whole. It's true that the game could reasonably be considered somewhat aesthetically lacking, especially after the first few areas; environmental details don't really uniquely scream "Metroid", and the last few areas (especially the Great Mines) are much more boring visually. To really split hairs, it's not difficult to find lower-resolution textures, and I'm sure some very technical breakdowns can find out where some quality was reduced in favor of performance, but it really doesn't matter given that the end result looks and feels amazing.

In a vacuum, the gameplay of Prime 4 is actually quite good. Samus controls well; everything feels very similar overall to the original Prime trilogy (in a good way). Samus doesn't start with Space Jump or Morph this time, and you never get Screw Attack, but I don't have any gripes with that. Screw feels really awkward in Prime anyways; 3D movement just doesn't play well with it in my opinion. Beyond the basics, I honestly really liked how your different abilities were integrated into the game. The different elemental beams you get throughout the game all use a common ammo type, justifying their slightly-upgraded power and immense utility beyond the basic beam, while the generous amount and capacity of the ammo upgrades allows you to use them frequently without constantly worrying about them, unlike Prime 2. Additionally, although some people are quick to say the game doesn't feature any new gimmicks, I think the Control beam is a cool mechanic that is used pretty thoughtfully, though not enough throughout the game. The ability to turn your bombs into motes that can be held and launched via telekinesis was also fun, but also underutilized. And as a whole, I really like how the new features maximize the available controls with the Visor enabled; it all feels quite intuitive and smooth during gameplay. I don't particularly miss the constant visor switching of Prime 1 & 2; honestly, only Prime 1 had a good implementation and it was already extremely shoehorned in for Prime 2 anyway.

Any talk about the mechanics would obviously be incomplete without mentioning the bike, which is the most significant "gimmick" introduced in this game. To be honest, I think it handles quite well; it doesn't turn on a dime, but the controls once again feel tight and consistent. The ranged attack is really weird though; the weird auto-aiming TRON disc that you charge and shoot out isn't really interesting to use, so it definitely feels like something added as a mechanical response to the enemies you encounter in the desert, and to destroy some environmental objects. It's very obviously undercooked though; for some stupid reason, they refused to let it lock onto and destroy Green Crystals, and the only boss in the Sol Valley doesn't really react to it either. The secondary Vi-O-La IC mode turns the bike into a hovercraft to float above lava, which is unsurprisingly a bit more floaty but otherwise feels similar. In general, my issue with having the bike in Prime 4 has a lot less to do with the feel of the bike itself, and much more to do with the level design choices that result from it - which will be mentioned more in depth later.

I understand the complaints that people have about combat in this game, but I don't think it's an issue with the core mechanics. Rather, it's an issue with the enemies -- specifically, the lack of enemy variety throughout the game. What's there isn't bad; the flying hive enemies are common throughout the entire Prime series, the Grievers feel like typical aggressive "predator" enemies, and the bots have a decent move pool requiring dodging and positioning to avoid their sweeping laser beams. There is a general issue with everything being just a bit too tanky; balance would feel better if they did a little bit more damage and had a little less health (maybe 1/3?). But the bigger problem is the stunning lack of enemy diversity - I'd say my list above already accounts for over half of the major enemy types you encounter through the entire game. In the 5 main dungeons, you're mostly fighting: Grievers, Bots, Grievers, Bots, Grievers. I'm not kidding; there are no significant enemy types outside of just these two - each area has a couple of other basic organisms, but all the main combat setpieces always seem to gravitate towards one of two types of enemies. It gets really old after the third area; and the unending hordes of boring zerg you get to fight in the Mines (Dungeon 5) kind of ruin the experience. It doesn't matter how much fun it is to shoot your gun in this game if the things you're shooting at never really change, if that makes sense.

Thankfully, the issue with monotony doesn't extend to the boss fights. As a whole, I actually love the boss fights in this game! The game starts off strong with Aberax, which really teaches you how to use the lock-on free aim in action. Carvex is a fun tutorial for the possibilities of the Control Beam, and while the rest of the bosses aren't quite as tightly coupled to specific mechanics or gimmicks, they feel very fair and consistent while having a wide array of interesting attacks. Throughout most of the game, the only one that I found a bit lame was the Omega Griever in the Mines, but even that was mostly because I was just tired of Grievers, and the boss was still a fun fight. Special shoutout to Phenoros, the boss of Flare Pool, which had a decent bike phase and a fantastic main fight phase, ending with a really cool application of the Control Beam; I think it's my favorite one in the game. There were only a couple of near-misses: I missed the fact that I was supposed to use the boost for Varmis, the desert sandworm, so I bashed it with the TRON ring probably ~300 times before realizing I could kill it way faster just by ramming it; user error, not the game's problem (the scan gives you a hint that I didn't pay attention to). Beyond that, the first phase of the Sylux fight was genuinely awful - you have to play medic for your entire squad, while simultaneously dealing with these really jank and hard-to-hit tentacles across ~7 sub-phases. Some kind of actual squad fight was inevitable given the structure of the game, but I wish it didn't need to be. Thankfully, Phase 2 is a free (if silly) auto-scroller that mostly exists to refill your health, and Phase 3 is an awesome slugfest. Overall, the only general criticisms I'd give the bosses is that they have a bit too much health, and they're generally a bit on the easier side... the only health scare I had throughout the entire game was in Sylux's final phase.

Unfortunately, all of the good points of the game are kind of marred by the way the levels and world are structured, which is one of the Achilles' Heels of this game (both of them were left undipped in MP4). While they're pretty aesthetically, and everything works well, this is by far the worst level design I've ever seen in any Metroid game. Details and comparisons are all over the place online; every single dungeon in the game is effectively a straight line from start to finish, stringing along rooms of boring combat setpieces with little to no room left for any exploration, and with no chance of getting lost or left to figure out the next step for yourself. This is best represented by the map of the Great Mines, which is quite literally a single-corridor spiral pathway down to the boss. Even if there was, most of the areas also have a handy NPC that will give you exact directions point-blank, and the maps you get of each area are complete and leave no additional room for you to find cool secrets. Furthermore, this is exacerbated even further by the complete lack of interesting rooms. Platforming is rare, puzzles are simple to the point that they can be solved by toddlers, and there are exceptionally few items that involve any interesting maneuvers to grab, with most just hidden behind some unlock. Endgame exploration feels more like a chore here than in the other Prime games, because it's not fun to traverse the world! It's insane to me that a Prime game could be so fundamentally lacking on this. There's also some really strange, baffling design decisions; the final tower in Volt Forge is basically a DMV that Samus needs to visit to take her license exam to get certification for the bike. WTF?

All of the above applies to the dungeons of the game; I feel a bit loath to call them true "areas" or "regions" given that they're not interconnected, and have such simple layouts. The bigger problem for many is Sol Valley, the giant desert hub that acts as the "open world" of this game and the only way to move between the separate dungeons. The map is huge, yet almost completely barren of anything to do; traversal involves setting a course and driving a straight line for minutes to get there. In a desparate bid to give the desert any real purpose and to pad out the playtime by ~2-3 hours, they dump a ton of these Green Crystal spawns all over the desert, and force the collection of most of it as a hard pre-condition to beat the game (I'd estimate around 75-80% of total available crystals). I should mention that this isn't even the traditional endgame key grind; those require mech parts that you find at various places in the desert (and thankfully isn't that bad). There's around 3 or 4 different enemy variants total, and combat just involves spamming your TRON disc everywhere whenever they appear. Meanwhile, your NPC pal Miles McKenzie is constantly yapping in your ear for no reason and there's basically no other music in the area. To be pedantic, there is an extremely quiet ambient track in the desert that I never really noticed, and the ability to change it to something more interesting is locked behind a $30 Amiibo. What the actual fuck were they thinking? Finally, there's a few shrines dotted throughout the desert as the only real optional and interesting content in the area; these provide upgrades to your elemental beams. The "puzzles" are once again dead simple, but I'll admit the idea is pretty interesting, if very obviously ripped from BOTW/TOTK. All in all, the desert region is a wash; it's a pathetic, bald-faced attempt to shoehorn in some actual use for the bike and to drag a sub-10 hour game into a near-15 hour game for no good reason.

The other Achilles' heel of MP4 is everything to do with the story and characters. This is another baffling element of th game; given the history of the series, it's difficult to believe that the developers would have such a fundamental misunderstanding of what draws people to Metroid - isolation & exploration. The funny thing is that someone must have already been starkly aware of how this would all go down, given that the existence of Miles (and by extent, the rest of the NPCs) was pretty closely hidden until the November previews. Given that, it's so incredibly strange to me why the development of these stupid characters ever made it this far to begin with. They completely nuke the tone of the game, have obnoxious personalities (IMO), and come packaged with annoying escort missions that nobody ever wants - especially in a Metroid game. They'd fit fine into some other generic game, but they're such a sore thumb in this; the gameplay implications, and the incredibly awkward silence that Samus gives in response to anything the other guys does the game and characters an incredible disservice. As the poster boy for this from his obnoxious personality throughout the preview, Miles really doesn't let up the entire game. He'll chime in constantly every few minutes basically telling you where to go, or giving pointless advice. At one point after Volt Forge, he tells you that you can choose between the last 3 areas, only for you to realize later that you MUST do them in a fixed order! Consider too that he literally gives you an option to call him directly from the map screen, yet will not let you just explore in peace for more than 5 minutes without yapping. I actually muted speech volume the entire game to spare myself the insanity; this is handled inconsistently by the cutscenes -- most also mute speech, but the last few in the game (and a few others) don't for some reason. The other characters are generally less offensive; Duke and Armstrong are fine, though Armstrong definitely lays it on thick. Tokabi is OK, but becomes more and more of a proselytizing bible thumper throughout the game for "Sollan", which is totally unnecessary and incredibly lame writing. VUE is a bro though, I liked him a lot and wouldn't have minded him too much in the game even if the other NPCs were eliminated.

Continuing onto the story, the entire thing feels like a non-sequitur in Samus's career. You have no idea why or how Sylux is in league with the Pirates, nor how he gets a bunch of special Metroids that fuse with other monsters (something they have never done before). The importance of Viewros is never elucidated, and your purpose there seems to be predicated entirely on Samus being the "Chosen One" to fulfill some dumbass prophecy, as if the story could be any more generic. Also, given that elements of the Federation base (and a few soldiers) are transported to random parts of Viewros with you, it's surprising how you see neither hide nor hair of the Pirates after the first 15 minutes. Meanwhile, Sylux is basically entirely irrelevant to most of the story; outside of hitting the artifact that initiates the teleport to begin with, he's an afterthought in the story. If anything, this game just goes out of its way to highlight how much of a fraud he is as a character, both in-universe and from the player's perpsective. Outside of heckling you a couple of times, he has absolutely zero agency in the different things that happen in the game and just shows up a couple of times to remind you he exists. Then, the handling of the entire ending where they pretend he's super powerful or w/e just kind of falls flat where he delivers some cringy lines and reveals a lame backstory of him being incompetent. I kind of like the idea of him being a loser, but something about the way everything shook out here just doesn't interest me at all; I'd personally recommend they forget MP4 exists in the future and avoid reusing Sylux any further to avoid embarassment. Speaking of the ending (and sacrifices), the game tries to pull a quick one in the Mines where every character "sacrifices" themselves for some dumbass reason for Samus, ignoring that the Mine Grievers can just keep tunneling down - I was actually excited to have a chance to explore alone. I was kind of disappointed when they did an ass-pull at the end of the Mines, just to have them sac themselves again at the end of the game again. Miles getting zapped by Sylux's taser was pretty funny at least.

As a quick aside, I'd like to shoutout how unfinished the game feels as seen by all of the placeholder names for everything. Green Crystals, seriously? That's not a descriptor, that's the actual name they have in the game, and they store Green Energy - gee, I'm really excited by these mysterious concepts. Dungeon names are also awful on average. Fury Green? Ice Belt? Flare Pool? The Great Mines? C'mon. I'm personally a fan of the way Volt Forge sounds, but even that's a really lame name if I really think about it. Nothing in the game is named to give you any impression that the world is truly alien; it seems like a small detail, which it is, but there's no mystique to anything since it seems the developers just didn't have the fundamental creativity to think of anything. A huge part of what makes Prime interesting is the history of each place you've been to, and little details in the world hinting at the culture and history of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, I'm not really interested in an icy area called Ice Belt. It just feels like the writing team just lacked any steam to get anything going, you know?

In any case, my overall conclusion is that MP4 is an incredibly deeply flawed game with a solid technical structure. It's an awful Metroid game, perhaps even the worst (haven't played Other M, can't judge), but it's a decent generic corridor shooter. The problem is that you'd never think to mix "linear corridor shooter" with anything Metroid, and it's astounding that anyone at any point though this was a good idea. I've seen a lot of comparisons to the output of 343 studios for their Halo games, given that some members moved to Retro, and I can totally see the DNA. Samus leading a squad of rank-and-file soldiers, linear and boring level design, tanky enemies juxtaposed with great technical and graphical work. The biggest disappointment for me is in seeing how close this game was to being fantastic - it really only faceplants for the level design, NPCs and story, but in such a fundamental way as to put into question whether anyone on the team actually played a Metroid game before. It's not all bad, though; if they are ever to make another Prime game that addresses the key issues that are commonly brought up, rather than taking another step towards 343 Halo slop, Prime 5 could very possibly be the best game in the series. But I'm no longer willing to hope that they'll handle it properly.