Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

A Decade of Waiting for a Game That Almost Gets It Right

Let me be straight with you: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a damn good game that shoots itself in the foot every time it tries to be something it isn't. Retro Studios finally delivered after nearly a decade of developmental hell, reboots, and radio silence, and when this game leans into what made the original trilogy legendary, it absolutely soars. But when it chases modern open-world trends like a dog chasing a car it doesn't know what to do with, it stumbles hard.

The core of Beyond is phenomenal. On the Switch 2 hardware, the opening biome Fury Green is genuinely breathtaking—jaw-dropping lighting, drifting particles, mechanical animations that make you stop and stare. The soundtrack layers eerie sci-fi vocals with pulse-pounding boss themes that rival the GameCube classic. Combat on dual-analog sticks or pointer controls is precise, snappy, and deeply satisfying. The boss encounters are masterfully designed, forcing you to weapon-swap fluidly and memorize complex rhythms instead of mindlessly mashing buttons. And Samus's new psychic powers—purple telekinetic abilities from an ancient alien race—add genuinely fun wrinkles to both puzzles and combat, like redirecting charge shots or projecting Morph Ball bombs in creative ways.

Now here's where I stop being nice. The biggest sin Beyond commits is its forced pseudo-open-world structure, clearly a hangover from early development when someone at Nintendo saw Breath of the Wild's success and said "do that." Instead of the tightly wound, interconnected map design that defines Metroidvania progression, the game splits its biomes across Soul Valley—a barren, excessively large desert hub that has no business existing. You traverse it on a hover-bike called the Viola, which handles fine but exists solely to shuttle you across empty sand doing repetitive busywork. The end-game gates your progression behind mandatory fetch-quests for green energy crystals, making the pacing feel sluggish and artificially padded. And the unforgivable cherry on top? No post-game free-roam. Cross that final point of no return without a manual backup save, and you're locked out of 100% completion forever. That's inexcusable in 2026.

The atmosphere problems are just as frustrating. Metroid's greatest asset has always been isolated alien dread—that feeling of being utterly alone on a hostile world. Beyond torpedoes this by saddling Samus with Galactic Federation companions who deliver Marvel-style quips and generic banter constantly. The hint system is aggressively un-skippable, with waypoints and companion callouts solving puzzles before you even get a chance to think. And while the returning rival Sylux has a cool presence, his motivations are paper-thin unless you obsessively scan every logbook entry, leaving the final act feeling flat and unearned.

The verdict: If you've been waiting since 2017, the fundamental loop of scanning lore, acquiring upgrades, and blasting through alien corridors is still excellent and worth your money. But the forced open-world hub, flat narrative writing, and hand-holding prevent this from achieving the masterpiece status it clearly had within reach. It's a highly polished, incredibly fun sci-fi shooter that compromises on the very isolation that made this franchise legendary. A great game that could've been an all-timer if it had just trusted itself.