The first 20 minutes of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond made me think I’d put the wrong game in my Switch 2. Instead of the slow, lonely descent onto some forgotten rock, I was dropped straight into a full-on battlefield. Federation marines shouting callouts, dropships screaming overhead, Space Pirates everywhere, Metroids weaponized like guided missiles. It’s loud, chaotic, and honestly feels closer to a Halo intro than anything in the Prime trilogy.
As someone who puts Metroid Prime 1 right up there with Super Metroid on the shrine of “games that rewired my brain,” that opening had me nervous. Samus rolling in as the cavalry for a platoon of chattering soldiers is about as far from that haunting first step onto Tallon IV as you can get.
But that big set piece does its job: it onboards the new psychic mechanics, establishes Sylux as more than a fan-theory footnote, and then blows everything to hell so the game can strand you somewhere weird and quiet. Once the artifact misfires and flings Samus to the dying world of Viewros, Prime 4 finally exhales—and I did too.
From there, the game settles into something much closer to classic Prime: scanning alien ruins, poking at doors you can’t open yet, getting unceremoniously bodied by a creature you probably shouldn’t have picked a fight with. The twist is that all of this is threaded through eerie Lamorn culture, their psychic tech, and way more Federation presence than fans are used to.
I wrapped up the main story in just under 24 hours on my first run, mostly docked on my Switch 2 with a Pro Controller, swapping to Joy-Con pointer mode for precision aiming. By the time the credits rolled, I was impressed, irritated, nostalgic, and honestly a little confused—just how a game bouncing between clean callbacks and wild experiments should make you feel.
Once the dust clears from that chaotic intro, Beyond’s real heart shows up in audio logs and cracked architecture rather than your squad radio.
Viewros is dead. The Lamorn—the psychic, crystal-worshipping culture that once thrived here—has vanished. All that remains are their half-buried machines, their ritual sites, and a prophecy about a “Chosen One” who would bond with a Psychic Crystal and carry their Memory Fruit off-world. Guess who that is now? Spoiler: it’s Samus, whether she likes it or not.
On paper, it’s sci-fi MacGuffin talk, but the execution is surprisingly somber. Audio logs from doomed researchers, half-completed psychic shrines, and the Memory Fruit’s agonizingly slow progress meter all hammer home the sense of a civilization fading away. It’s more Outer Wilds melancholy than “kill the space dragon,” and I loved that angle.
After that first trailer introducing Myles MacKenzie, I braced for “Samus and Her Wacky Friends.” The truth? It’s a bit of both.
Myles tags along as an optional hint system—you can ping him on the radio for pointers. At first his nerdy VO had me rolling my eyes, but he actually saved me from a brutal backtracking session when I ignored his note about a critical upgrade. Classic stubborn gamer move right there.
Beyond MacKenzie, you meet military archetypes—the lone-wolf sniper, the gravel-voiced sergeant, the bright-eyed rookie. They’re broad brushes but competently performed, and you start to care when you see how Viewros chews them up. It’s funny, though, how all their emotional monologues bounce off Samus’s eternal mute grunts. After the fourth time some soldier buries his trauma while Samus nods and jets off, it sort of breaks the mood.
Luckily, these squad missions never outstay their welcome. Push deeper into the five Lamorn regions tracking teleport keys and the human cast recedes into comm chatter and one-off cameos. There’s a late-game firefight in the Flare Pool that nearly made me toss my controller—her allies’ deaths here hit you with instant fail states—but the core loop remains solitary exploration.
The Lamorn psychic tech is Beyond’s signature twist, from a new beam to a puzzle tool combo that feels like someone mashed the Scan Visor and Echoes grapple together.
The Control Beam is a joy. Charge a shot and steer it mid-flight with the stick or pointer, curving around corners to hit far-off switches or nail boss weak points. It scratches that missile-threading itch better than ever.
Then there’s the Psychic Bomb, which turns into a mini quick-time event: morph ball, hold a button to spawn a mote, pop back out, switch visors, and latch on. After hours you’ll do it on autopilot, but it never stopped feeling like busywork rather than elegance.
I had the same arc of frustration then acceptance with the Vi-O-La hover bike. Its stiff handling and weird turning radius made the Fury Green desert feel like a barren track at first. Around the four-hour mark, though, I was banking hairpins, using natural ramps, and threading between crystal spires at full speed. It’ll never be Wipeout, but when it clicks, it really clicks.
What never clicked was the button mapping. Summoning the Vi-O-La on the plus/Start button instead of Pause, and sticking the menu on minus/Select, makes every indoor moment a mini face-palm when you accidentally trigger “Vi-O-La unavailable.” It’s a small UX stumble, but one that undercuts immersion—and it’s a theme with most of the new toys here.
Beyond structures its world as a hub-and-spoke on a grander scale. The Fury Green desert is your central overworld, with four major Lamorn biomes radiating out and a fifth linear endgame stretch.
That desert’s a mixed bag. Trudging across sand flats—even on the Vi-O-La—can drag, especially after Nintendo’s sweeping open worlds in Tears of the Kingdom. But the emptiness sells the dying world vibe: crest a dune, spot a ruined coliseum on the horizon, and you feel the isolation in your bones.
The real magic happens in the dungeons. The Ice Belt silenced my skepticism: minimal audio, just wind and creaks, and environmental logs that transform “pretty snow level” into genuinely unsettling discovery. By contrast, the Flare Pool’s squad-heavy, lava-lit caverns spike difficulty abruptly late in the game, introducing high-stakes ally management that nearly derailed my run before the credits.
This episodic pacing—solo trek, war story, puzzle-main—brought me back to deep dives in Brinstar back in Super Metroid. It’s not seamless, but the shifting tone kept me invested even when the desert highway felt too long.
Moment to moment, Beyond nails that classic Prime brain-tickle: finally returning to a vent or pipe you noticed hours ago with the right toy, then rewarding you with a missile upgrade or lore tidbit. Scanning is more baked in than ever, using the Psychic Visor to highlight interactable crystals, hidden paths, and puzzle elements so it never feels like busywork.
But there’s a painful pitfall for completionists: the finale triggers a point of no return. Once you initiate the final mission, Beyond auto-saves and locks you in—no going back to snag missed Memory Fruit, hidden upgrades, or audio logs. Your only option is to load an earlier manual save, which you’ll want to make habitually if 100% counts. As of writing, there’s no patch or workaround beyond rigorous save-slot management.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a strange, compelling mix of the old and new—enveloping you in eerie Lamorn lore, letting you thread psychic beams through missile-tight corridors, and then nagging you with clumsy UX and regional bloat. It’s not the flawless resurrection some hoped for, but it’s still a worthy step into Samus’s world.
If you love methodical exploration and can forgive a few design stumbles, Beyond will reward your patience. Completionists, beware: lock in manual saves early or risk missing content forever.
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