Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Beyond good, Beyond evil, Beyond your wildest imagination!
Wait, no, that's The Transformers: The Movie (1986).
--Warning! This contains spoilers with various levels of specificity for the entire game!! Only read on if you are okay with that!--
Any big name game that takes this long to develop is going to go into the history books, for better or for worse. On one side of the scale is Team Fortress 2 - After nine years in development, it was well worth the wait, becoming a genre-defining title with an immense cultural legacy and a strong devoted fanbase to this very day over a decade and a half after it's launch. On the other side of the scale is Duke Nukem Forever - a record-holding fourteen years of development produced a game whose legacy is spoken of in hushed tones, living in infamy as one of the worst games of it's time and possibly the most mismanaged development cycle ever, and an average review score of about 50. (which is like, unconscionable by videogame standards.)
So where does Metroid Prime 4: Beyond land on this scale after 8 years in the cooker? As to not bury the lede here, it's no TF2. And while I hesitate to label it a catastrophe on the scale of Duke Nukem Forever, it leans more on that end of things.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is the seventh game in the Metroid Prime series, releasing eighteen years after blah blah blah you know what this game is. You know it got restarted 2 years into development and it was passed from Bandai Namco to Retro Studios to try and get the direction back on track. You probably also know this game has a motorcycle in it. We'll get back to that.
At it's best, Metroid Prime 4 is a beautifully rendered game, with incredible visual setpieces, solid soundtrack, engaging puzzle-solving, and... okay enough combat and exploration. At it's worst, Metroid Prime 4 is a basic brown desert with nothing to do or see, repetitive grinds for meaningless resources, a complete lack of any music, and downright apalling combat.
Prime 4 has such a broad range of quality that I don't think it's possible to make decisive claims about any singular aspect. The graphics are both breathtaking and mindnumbingly boring. The story is at times engrossing and others baffling. The gameplay can swap on a dime from thoughtful puzzle solving to aggravating drawn-out combat segments. For each interesting new upgrade there are 5 uninspired or blatantly recycled ones. The only consistency, despite what some complainers may say, is that your NPC allies are overall positive. (Do videogames journalists deserve basic human rights? Sound off in the comments below.)
As such, it's kinda hard to unpick the knot of how I feel about this game. Sure, there are the easy bits to single out; the desert obviously sucks and nobody really is arguing on that, the enemy variety is horrible, Sylux is completely pointless, et cetera. I guess let's start with one of those and see where the thread takes us.
So. The desert. From frame one I saw it comin', man.
There really is no better descriptor for the desert's role in this game. It's filler, pure and simple. This entire massive map is for the most part completely empty, with the only thing to do most of the time being smashing into piles of Green Energy Crystals with your motorcycle. The motorcycle, as an aside, is completely pointless. It basically can only be used in the desert, and is only necessary because they made the desert way way too big to try and get a slice of open-world hype pie. This type of gameplay has no place in this game, but honestly the fact it's mostly empty is almost a blessing in this regard. Speaking of open worlds and emptiness, the desert also has six of what I would generously label as Breath of the Wild style 'shrines', though they pale in comparison to even the most basic shrines of that game. All six consist of one room with a 'puzzle' requiring one of your 3 elemental shots and then you get an upgrade for that shot and leave. All six could've just been challenge rooms placed in the actual levels and not in the desert. Then we have four parts of a Galactic Federation mech which can only be collected in the final moments of the game and serve as one half of this game's traditional Metroid-Prime-Last-Second-Fetch-Quest content, with the other half being the aforementioned Green Energy Crystals.
Now, thankfully, I was spoiled on this aspect of the game, so by the time I needed to farm Green Energy Crystals I had already gotten close to the required amount as I had been focusing down collecting them whenever I was in the desert between zones. But for a player who didn't know this would be a required task, such as @hoshizoralone, this grind is suddenly thrust upon you right in the game's final moments, forcing you to spend hours patrolling the desert smashing rocks for no material gain. This absolutely sucks, no way around it.
Compare this to the final-moment grinds in previous Prime games: Prime 1's artifacts and their importance can be learned very early on, and each artifact's location is a puzzle and they often require exploration and lateral thinking to acquire, fitting perfectly with the game's goals. Prime 2's temple keys play out very similarly, though those are sprung on you a bit later. Prime 3's energy cells are introduced the earliest of any, and again require exploration and puzzle solving to discover, plus the GFS Valhalla requiring their use is itself is a cool area with it's own secrets and exploration to be had. The Green Energy Crystals are not known to be a requirement until the last minute, and getting them takes literally no thought or skill, just drive the desert until you find some, smash into em, turn around to make sure you smashed all of em, then drive on again. And again. And again.
But honestly, one of the worst things to me about the Green Energy Crystals is not even their effect on gameplay, it's their name. Green Energy Crystals. It's a mouthful, right? You're probably tired of hearing me say it and I've only been at it for a couple paragraphs. Now imagine that for a majority of the game. Green Energy Crystals. Green Energy Shower. Green Energy Extraction Device. This shit is a placeholder name!!! Do you know what the weird coloured energy was called in the first 3 Prime games? "Phazon"! Because those writers knew that if they called it "Blue Energy" nobody would give a shit! This is a major production published by one of the titans of the game industry and was in development for EIGHT. YEARS. And they couldn't find a better name for this shit than "Green Energy"????
And this is not a one-off issue! The game is full of placeholder ass names for things! If 'Psychic' was a brand name, the writing team would be getting a fat check from their advertising branch. There is I think one random door that is labelled as "PK" (Psycho-kinetic) rather than Psychic, and a puzzle element used in the ice level is denoted "TK" (Tele-kinetic), and then the other 100 things that use the purple psychic energy are simply called Psychic [Noun]. Twelve of your unlockable upgrades fit this template. Another nine upgrades are taken up by your 'shots' and their upgraded forms, which have equally uninspiring names. This game gives you new attacks flavoured to three elements: Ice, Fire, and Thunder. (Daring today, aren't we?) Previous Metroid games have touched on these elements before, such as the Cryosphere from Other M, the Plasma Beam from Prime 1, and the Grapple Voltage from Prime 3. What cool sci-fi name did these weapons get in Prime 4? Ice Shot. Fire Shot. Thunder Shot. What about their upgrades? Other Prime games had cool charge-attack names like the Wavebuster and the Sonic Boom. Prime 4? Charged Ice Shot. Super Ice Shot. Repeat for the other two elements. It's uninspiring and I again can't believe these were the best names they could scrounge up after eight years of development time! These are literally the exact same 3 beam elements used in Prime 1, at the bare minimum just reuse those!
Which brings us nicely to another issue I have with Prime 4: it's redundancy. At it's core, when you cut out the desert filler, Prime 4 is very, very reminiscent of Prime 1. With the exception of the Control Beam and Psychic Glove, both of which are unlocked in the opening moments, every, and I do mean every, upgrade Samus gets is recycled from Prime 1. Except they're purple now. Which, granted, I like purple, but that isn't enough to make them not recycled. The one outlier of an item to genuinely offer something new is the Psychic Bomb which you can grab psychically and throw at stuff, which is really cool and useful both in puzzles and combat! And it kinda sucks that it's an outlier because more upgrades should have been new and fun and exciting! Why couldn't we have had more items like that?
Moving on from items, the environments don't fare too much better in originality. Of the main areas, you have a lush jungle starting zone (Tallon Overworld), a dry desert area with ancient temples (Chozo Ruins), a frozen tundra that's also a research facility (Phendrana Drifts), a molten core that's also a center of energy production (Magmoor Caverns), and lastly a mine stuffed to the brim with the main antagonistic force (Phazon Mines). The one area that isn't a Prime 1 rehash is Volt Forge, which genuinely has a strong identity of it's own as a collective three colossal towers blanketed in an eternal thunderstorm which autonomously work to produce vehicles and robotics under supervision of an AI core. Also the third tower has a bunch of holographic racecourses for some stupid reason but ignore that part the first two are cool and immersive and awesome. It is again these glimpses of great originality which make Prime 4 all the more disappointing as you can see the incredible game it could've been if more bits were like that rather than following the recipe of Prime 1 to a fault.
One critical aspect in which the game world does not follow Prime 1 though is in the linearity and interconnectivity of the maps. I think there is literally one room in the entire game that has four different ways to go branching off of it, and none of the zones feature any sort of connectivity with each other. Rather than follow the tangled web of interconnecting elevators from Prime 1, Prime 4 boldly goes in the direction 2 and 3 did in having completely disconnected areas from each other. It then goes an extra mile by adding a giant pointless desert inbetween them all that has nothing to offer.
Now this is not inherently a bad thing, debates can go on forever on the merits of linear vs nonlinear design, the illusion of choice, developer intent, etc. Personally I think large-scale linearity and disconnected areas are fine, such as in Fusion and Prime 2, but on a micro scale a Metroid game needs to have branching paths and exploration, and Prime 4 is largely lacking in that throughout it's map design. Volt Forge is literally a straight path from beginning to end, and so are the Mines. The jungle and fire levels are better, and Ice Belt is actually genuinely great. IDK why that's the only area that they used the TK puzzles in, they're excellent. Plus the atmosphere and story of the area was peak. (Well, except for the parts where the scientist characters have to talk about Green Energy. I still can't believe that was the name they went with)
In general, the story of the Lamorn and Grievers was pretty well executed. Long lost civilizations on the verge of extinction chronicling their downfall is nothing new to the Metroid series, but the logs detailing how and why the Lamorn civilization took the path they did from industrialization to environmentalism to psychic spiratualism and the great tragedy is compelling, especially the notes from the Ice Belt laboratory describing their experiments to find a cure for Griever-ification. They were trying their best to improve themselves while also being aware of the needs of their planet, but despite their best efforts things still fell apart. They also, thankfully, have an actual name and are not called "Sad People" or "Psychic Chozo". Granted their names might be a bit on the nose for their themes of mourning and grief, but they fit well.
On the other side of the story, we have Sylux. Why is this guy even here? Like, seriously, though. What is his deal. He was so hyped up and for nothing. I can only assume Sylux played a bigger role back when this game was in planning and he got shoved further and further out of relevance as development progressed, but who knows maybe Nintendo really just wanted him here to sell copies and didn't care what he actually did. His presence in the game is like 10% aurafarming 5% boss fights and 85% not actually doing anything. Nothing about him is explained literally at all. (ive heard you learn more about him if you use an amiibo? if true, fuck off LMAO) His only character trait is hating Samus and the GalFed for some unknown reason which was already established in Prime Hunters so... yeah. TBH I don't know why people were so hyped for this guy to begin with but even as someone who didn't care I was still let down.
OH ALSO WHY THE HELL DOES THE GAME END LIKE THAT!? You can't just leave my guys stuck on Viewros! Truly the worst possible fate, being stuck with Sylux in Prime 4's world for the rest of your life. The NPC companions deserved better than that. Sure, Myles chiming in after a few minutes of not progressing to ping the next objective on your map is annoying, but that feature has been in every Prime game, just from your suit or ship telling you where to go instead. I'm not going to say that the GalFed crew are peak cinema or anything, but their presence is a positive on this game, with each of the five having their own fun personality quirks and cool moments. Armstrong being a Samus fangirl having to balance her Meet Your Hero moment with the horrible situation they're stuck in is such a fun dynamic, I love how proud and excited VUE is to be able to help out and fulfill his purpose, I love Tokabi's personal conflict between his religious beliefs and what he has to do to make ends meet, etc. I think the weakest of them is Duke simply because he's the archetypal tough-but-fair commander, but he still has good chemistry. Also even if having to drive back to base camp is annoying, I like that Myles gets to help create and install suit upgrades for you. Honestly the fact that he calls the upgrades Ice Shot, Fire Shot, etc is extremely out of character for him. The one thing that would've saved those boring ass names is if Myles called it like "The Pyroclasmic Blast Activator Mk. I" when passing it to Samus and then she plugs it in and calls it "Fire Shot". But yeah, the NPCs are great, and their character moments in the Mines are like a life preserver in a sea of the absolute worst combat sections you've ever seen.
The combat in this game is seriously something else... I'm so sick of Grievers, dude. Enemies in this game generally fall into one of two camps: either they are a passive enemy that only deals damage if they happen to bump into you, or they are an aggressive enemy that will chase you to the ends of Viewros to obliterate you on sight. Enemies in the first category are more obstacles than anything, and tend to die in one shot. Enemies in the second category are all either jumpy bastards who don't stand still, damage sponges that take way too many hits to finally go down, or both. Despite being superficially a first-person shooter, the shooting action has never been a focus of the Prime series, but I guess the Prime 4 devs didn't realize that part. Frequently you will be bombarded with waves of annoying ass enemies in a tight space that your beams do piddly damage to at best. Every zone has at least one if not multiple of these horde encounters, and not a single one was enjoyable in the slightest. By the time you're a quarter of the way through Volt Forge, you've practically seen every enemy the game has on offer, with the three main threats being Grievers, Psy-bots, and Maintenance Drones. Those three enemy types show up everywhere in different NES RPG style recolours, though the Psy-bots at least gain a couple new moves. They all take way too long to kill and both the Grievers and Psy-bots are hypermobile on top of that.
But that's just regular enemies, are the bosses fun at least? Well... uh... eheh... no. I mean, they're better than the regular enemies! I'll give them that! But they are even worse on the damage sponge aspect, to a ridiculous degree. You know how the prevailing trend in Nintendo bosses is the boss does their thing, you counter and do your thing, repeat 3 times getting slightly harder each time? Prime 4 thought "well that's stupid, I can do way better" and instead made it so the boss does their thing, you counter, they keep doing their thing, you counter, they keep doing their thing, you finally get to do your thing, repeat 6 times. Each boss will do like 10 attacks in a row before finally showing their vulnerable spot and you can at best do like 20% health in damage if you pop all your best weapons with perfect timing. The one exception and actually kinda fun boss was the giant lava serpent whose first phase consists of chasing it on your bike while shooting it's body segments and then the second phase transitions to attacking it's weak points while on foot and the weak points are exposed the entire time and don't take forever to break. "Oh, so the bike is good for combat?" you ask, foolishly. No it is absolutely not at all. The bike is good for combat against this boss specifically, and every other bike enemy is the most annoying shit ever. The only other significant fight that uses the bike is up there in contention for the worst part of the game, where you're fighting a big sand beast in a massive sand pit and you have to ram into it's tail like 10 times and it only has 1 attacking move which is 'charge at you and launch you up into the air where you can't drive' it's so awful.
After reading all that you're probably thinking to yourself "Wow, Nina, you really hate this game, huh?" and the thing is, like, no? But also yes. But also it's just fine. But also it sucks. Aargh! I don't want to dislike this game, I love the previous games in the series and I want to believe that Nintendo can turn this franchise around, but it's so hard when this game is full of so many boneheaded moves. I really truly wish I could've been more positive on this game, but that's not the world we're living in. As a fan it hurts to be strung along for eight years expecting another well-plated professionally cooked meal only to be served a dish of mostly reheated leftovers with a side of pig slop, a small slice of genuinely fresh meat, and a light coating of a "Green Sauce" that they won't give a proper name to. Sure, reheated leftovers of a great meal are still good, but with how long this was in the oven I was expecting something totally fresh. You are now allowed to take me out back and shoot me for using a food metaphor in my review.
If I had to give it a score, it's a quantum 2/10 and 8/10. So I guess that evens out to 5. IDK. I don't think a score really helps to describe this game anyways. Thanks for reading, if you're on the fence about the game I say give it a try, but only if you're fine with spending 60 dollars on something that will frustrate you at times. I probably will not ever write something like this again but you never know LOL.
...WAIT I JUST REALIZED I TYPED A WHOLE 3500 WORD REVIEW OF A METROID GAME WITHOUT EVEN MENTIONING METROIDS. This game basically doesn't have them, it's mentioned that Sylux has like a new type of Metroid that fuses with things and so each boss has weak points that look vaguely like the blue and red Metroid core but they don't do anything troid-like at all and you never see the Metroids themselves outside of one cutscene in the opening. You could take out the couple mentions of them and literally nothing would be lost gameplay or story-wise. You could probably find some sorta poetic meaning in that if you want, but yeah. The Metroid game with no Metroids.