Let's Talk About Metroid Prime 4

I have been a fan of the Metroid series for my entire life. Honestly, saying that is an understatement. I used to write Samus fanfic. On any given day, my favorite Nintendo franchise is either Metroid or Pikmin, which frankly means that on any given day, my favorite franchise of all time is Metroid. I own every single game (except Federation Force, cause why would I), and replay them constantly. And it all started when, as a little child, I played Metroid Prime for the first time.

The Prime games are some of the best that the Metroid series has to offer, if not THE best. My personal favorite is Prime 2, and while I wasn’t as big a fan of Prime 3, I’ve nonetheless been extremely excited for Prime 4. I tried to temper my expectations, but I could not beat down that little girl in me, so excited to finally play a new Metroid Prime game. Because y’all, the last time a Prime game came out was 18 years ago. Prime 3 can vote. But that length of time should also send a shiver down your spine, because a lot happens in 18 years.

Hello, I’m Lizstar, a humongous Metroid fan, and this is my review of Metroid Prime 4. What will follow is a very indepth review, giving some spoilers of things in the game, so if you don’t want to hear that, this is my pithy little statement about the score: In the first two hours, I was excited for more but there were a few things that bugged me. 8/10. I started the stream back up the following day, and after 3 more hours, ended at a 7.5. Started stream back up two days later, and a few hours later, it was a 7/10… and finally, by the end of a huge ten hour stream, it had reached a 6/10. It was sliding. I could not ignore the problems after 15+ hours.

Also before I get into this review, warning that I am an annoying feminist, and it WILL come up.

But what problems could those be? Well, to set the scene, let’s talk about the development of Metroid Prime 4, which is fucking nuts. The game was first teased by Kensuke Tanabe in 2015, who had produced the previous games, with him saying that the game would possibly be made for the NX, which is 2015 talk for the Nintendo Switch. When it was finally announced, two years later at E3 2017, we were all super excited. But there was a murmur underneath. Prime 4 was being made not by Retro Studios, but by Bandai Namco, mainly their Singapore branch. Different, but interesting! Aaaand that was all we heard, for two years.

In 2019, Nintendo announced that Prime 4 was cancelled. Kind of. Apparently Bamco had not “met their standards”, and the entire thing was scrapped, and then given back to Retro, who got to work. But hey, Retro were the original devs, so if anyone could do it, it’s them, right? :D Well, 2019 Retro was a very different company from 2000s Retro, and honestly it’d only change more. I’ve looked into some of the people who came and went during this period from Retro, including someone named Megan Fausti who worked as a writer for a time on it (they are non-binary and pro-trans Samus, so GOD I wish they had stuck around), but EVENTUALLY we can narrow down the team that worked on this to a lot of people who worked at another company.

343 Industries was a Microsoft-owned development team mostly known for making the Halo games. God. Remember when Halo and Metroid were compared a bunch in the mid 2000s?? I haven’t thought of that in YEARS, but it’s going to come up a LOT today, so buckle the fuck up. A lot of the people working at 343 left to join Retro and work on Metroid. So as I enter into this review proper, and compare things to Halo, know that’s not a mistake. A LOT of Halo people made this. Of course, it might be important to ask, do I like Halo?

Not really, no! I played Halo 2 back in the day, read some books, and watched people play the other games. And my take on the game is the same take I have on every rah rah military shooter from the 2000s, like COD or Gears of War, which is that they really do not think hard enough about anything, because that’s not the point. Halo is a story about a Human military that got to where it is by creating child soldier projects that killed a LOT of children and sending them against farmers who wanted to be paid more, and that’s all in the lore, but the games are only RAH RAH MILITARY GOOD. It’s very post 9/11 to me, where the obvious atrocities of an American-inspired military are front and center, but never addressed because what REALLY matters is killing some people who don’t look like us. Gears of War does the same thing, where the whole plot is that the humans are colonizing another planet for its oil and polluting the aliens who were already on it. But that’s not what anyone who plays the games knows it for. Instead they know it for RAH RAH MARINES KILL THINGS WITH CHAINSAWS.

So yeah, I was a bit worried about Halo people working on Metroid. And I was probably right to be, because there’s a lot of Halo in this. There’s a LOT to cover, so let’s get started by splitting it down into smaller chunks… starting with maybe the BIG one most people are complaining about.

CHARACTERS AND WRITING

About a month before the game came out, early reviews were pouring in, and one caught everyone’s attention. While almost every review went “it’s good”, one review focused ENTIRELY on a new character for this game, that it called Samus’ comic relief sidekick, Miles McKenzie. He’s a dorky Galfed engineer who won’t shut the fuck up. He’s an anxious nervous wreck. Honestly, same. A LOT of people went “oh no Prime 4 is going to suck”, but I decided to wait to play it… and my conclusion is, McKenzie is the 2nd best character in the entire game.

That is not a great thing.

Yes, when he’s following you, McKenzie is kind of obnoxious. “Hey, we should check that out, Samus” kinda stuff. Which obviously isn’t great. And even after he leaves your party, yes there’s a party system in this game, he’s your base command and gives you suggestions on where to go next. But it is, at worst, just the same thing as the computer from Prime 1 and 2 telling you “there are abnormal readings here”, pointing at the next items to obtain on your map. It’s handholdy, but Prime has always been like that. It is, however, a LOT more annoying here because the game is so fucking linear. We’ll get to that.

McKenzie isn’t nearly the worst character part of this game. Let’s introduce the entire cast. Samus gets stranded on this planet due to an alien teleporter gone awry, along with five other Galfed people, and Sylux, who’s the big bad of this game. Sylux was always built up as Retro’s cool OC they wanted to be the big bad. I’d have preferred Trace TBH. I just don’t find him very interesting. Anyways, you have five Galfeds. You’ve got the dorky engineer McKenzie, the rah rah no nonsense sargeant Ezra Duke, his subordinate private Nora Armstrong, a badass loner sniper Reger Tokabi, and a big android robot named VUE-995. You find them all in the different areas and after you’re done in each of their areas they go back to base camp. And may I say, I AM annoyed that they introduce five new characters, and four are men and one is a woman. Even the robot is given he/him pronouns.

For a series that is well known for having the most famous heroine in video games, Metroid is fucking awful with how it handles gender. My friend counted up the amount of named characters in Metroid, which frankly most of them are very minor, but 8 are women. 40+ are men. And we don’t need to get into how anti-feminist Metroid Other: M is again, we are all WELL aware of that. This game is not much better. But it doesn’t feel intentional or anything, it just feels… uninspired and like no thought went into it.

Of all the characters, my favorite is Armstrong, but there’s a lot of caveats here. When she’s introduced, she’s basically a squeeing fangirl for Samus, and it takes her grumpy superior to stop her from gushing about all the Reader x Samus fanfiction she’s clearly written. I like that. But this character of hers is toned down when she and Duke accompany you in the fifth area of the game, the mines. Let’s talk about this part, because it really exemplifies what I think the problem is with the writing in this game.

Duke and Armstrong go with you into the mines to find the fifth teleporter key that will let you leave the planet. The mine is swarming with Grievers, which are the alien inhabitants of this planet, mutated into basically living zombies. These grievers live in the caves, so they’re blind but can dig through rock and are attracted to loud sounds, so a lot of the puzzles in the mines involve making a loud sound using missles or things, and then fending off a horde that pour out of the floor. Good enough concept.

You have to hold off a horde while a drill mines through the floor to allow you access. You do it easily cause you’re Samus Fucking Aran and they all die to one charge shot. Then you and Armstrong drop down, and Duke goes “CHANGE OF PLANS” and uses the drill to block the path forward, going “IT’S UP TO YOU NOW, SAMUS”. His comms then go silent as he’s torn apart by zombies.

Now, you may notice that this gutrending sacrifice is fucking stupid, because THESE THINGS DIG THROUGH ROCK. YOU’RE NOT BLOCKING JACK SHIT. Also I didn’t like Duke that much anyway, so it just feels more stupid than emotional, like they intended. But it gets so much worse. Fangirl Armstrong, destraught over her superior’s death, becomes despondant and morose, until finally she has her OWN heroic sacrifice, using a digging machine to cause a cave in to block the Grievers from reaching Samus, giving a “it has been an honor to serve with you” speech before you hear her scream in pain on the other side as she’s eaten alive.

WHAT THE FUCK?

The robot comes down after this too, and he has his own sacrifice, but I didn’t mind that as much, because that one involves him literally not being able to get across a giant chasm as some Grievers approach, so he tosses you to the other side as he’s taken down. That’s fine. But Armstrong and Duke’s heroic sacrifices have all the emotional weight of… well, Halo 5’s writing, frankly. And then, guess what?

They’re actually fine.

On your way out of the mines after getting the keys, you get to the elevator and Duke and Armstrong are there like “Hey what took you”. They then go “what, you didn’t think those things could take us down, could you? ;)” and then that’s it, that’s all the explanation we get. Straight from the Anthony Higgs school of survival. YES, YOU CAN TELL I’M A METROID FAN BECAUSE I REMEMBER “REMEMBER ME’S” ACTUAL FUCKING NAME.

What the fuck was the point of this entire situation if A) the entire thing was a waste of time cause they weren’t blocking shit with their sacrifices and B) it just didn’t happen in the first place? It legit angered me. And that, dear reader, is the thesis of what is wrong with this writing.

They don’t fucking think anything through.

This isn’t even the worst story thing, though. The worst part legit made me ANGRY, and maybe even more clearly shows that they don’t actually think hard enough about what they’re doing and saying.

Samus enters the ice area, going towards a frozen research center. She walks out onto the ice as a storm awakens. Deep in the storm, ice wolves begin to stalk her, circling around her, and occasionally coming out of the wind and pack to attack. It’s actually a kind of cool scene, nice set piece. They die to one fire shot, and I had 50 ammo, so I killed them, easily. And then I killed more. And more.

They occasionally drop ammo too, so SIXTY WOLVES LATER they were still coming, more and more aggressive, until I finally fell… but I didn’t die. Forced death! That’s a thing in Metroid games but uh, usually its the final battle, not the start of the 3rd area in the game. I digress… the cutscene starts up, and a turret spins up from the facility, and shoots at the wolf pack. Two wolves die, and the rest freak out and run away. When we reach the facility we find that our hero who rescued us was a cool badass loner sniper type character.

IT SURE IS GOOD THAT A BIG STRONG MAN WAS AROUND TO SAVE SAMUS ARAN, WOMEN CAN’T DO ANYTHING.

Obviously they didn’t intend it that way, but DUDE. Even if it was another woman who saved her and we were completely ignoring gender dynamics, it’s STILL BAD, because I KILLED SIXTY OF THESE FUCKING THINGS. Its like the wolves were trying to wingman for this guy and make him look good.

So yeah, your hanger-on characters aren’t anything special, they’re kinda cookie cutter Halo soldiers, except for Armstrong who I’m gonna commission art of Samus fingerbanging. How about the villain? The villain in this game is Sylux, who was Retro’s poster child baby for a long-ass time. He was introduced in Prime Hunters as Samus’ rival, and then they weren’t allowed to use him in a game as the bad guy until finally just now. We’ve been waiting for 20 fucking years for this guy to be the big bad, and after all that build up, he kinda fucking sucks.

His backstory is he was a galfed soldier who ignored orders and got his entire squad killed. Samus showed up and offered him a hand, and he slapped it away. He now hates Samus and the Galfed with a burning passion. This is a bad and stupid backstory for your big bad villain. Ridley just wanting to kill things is more engaging.

Anyways, Sylux has taken over a group of Space Pirates and is raiding the Galactic Federation, who are researching an alien artifact they found. Sylux has cloned some Metroids and is using them to mind control people. This barely comes up at all. Most of the bosses are metroid mind control’d, but we find out at the end Sylux has actually not actually been around, he’s been in a vat of psychic liquid the entire game, so I guess the metroids just did that for fun. Anyways, Sylux shoots the artifact like an idiot, it overloads, and everyone is teleported to a planet. Samus is then told by the psychic ghost of an alien she’s the chosen one, his entire race is dead, turned into those zombies I mentioned earlier, and he wants her to grow a Memory Fruit from a sacred tree, which contains the memories and history of his people. That plot point is kinda cool I guess, though we never learn what causes the zombification, and we do not fix it, so that feels like a story deadend there.

The ending straight up sucks, though. After a two phase boss fight with Sylux in teleporter space, Sylux is defeated and falls down. Samus goes back to her friends and starts up the teleporter, but oh no Sylux comes back. They can’t stop him AND use the teleporter, it’ll short circuit! So all her friends sacrifice themselves to hold Sylux back so she can leave.

This is straight up a Halo ending. You lead a group of plucky soldiers, and they all sacrifice themselves so Master Chief can Finish the Fight. It sucks. This is not what Metroid is, or should be.

But all this pales in what might be the worst writing in this game, the worst character of them all… SAMUS HERSELF.

Samus as a character is something we take for granted. She almost never speaks, she usually doesn’t interract with others, and she just goes in, kills things, blows up planets, and then leaves. She’s a cool quiet badass. And that’s fine. But the people around her ARE characters who DO speak. So they’re speaking to Samus, and then it shows Samus’s reaction, which is always… nothing. Just standing there like a brick fucking wall. No thumbs ups, no body language, no ball curled into a fist as people die around her. Nothing.

There are TWO good character moments, and of course they’re both with Armstrong. When Armstrong first nerds out over her, she kinda moves away slightly like “woah, what the fuck” and then later when she defeats Sylux and comes out of the portal dimension, she hugs her and Samus just awkwardly pats her on the back. That’s fine! Samus being an awkward dunno how to interract with people character is fine, but it’s not even that for 90% of the game.

It also doesn’t help that McKenzie’s job makes Samus even less of a character. Allow me to explain. You find chips that give you shot upgrades. But unlike every other item, it’s not just integrated into your suit, it needs to be put in “by a Galfed engineer level 4 or higher”. That’s Miles. You go aaalll the way back to base camp, he nerds out over the chip, puts it in your suit, and you move on.

Samus can’t work on her own fucking suit? If we NEEDED this kinda thing, I think Samus could fucking do it herself. Show her out of her suit, grease on her face, as she works with the internals of her suit. You KNOW people would go fucking feral.

All in all, the writing and character in this game is just straight up bad. I ONLY liked Armstrong, and that’s because like sees like. And I know a lot of people will react to this like “well of course, Metroid shouldn’t ever have any writing. There should be no characters, no writing. Metroid should be a game where a silent badass bounty hunter goes to a planet, kills people, then blows it up”. But I disagree. Metroid COULD do writing well. Case in point, Dread. Dread had some writing in it. And added two new characters. AND those characters are BOTH MEN, so I should HATE it, right? But no, I didn’t. I thought Dread’s story was actually handled fantastically. I love Bird Daddy, as I call him, as a villain. Samus fighting her father figure is cool, and the Chozo are awesome. So it obviously CAN BE DONE. It just hasn’t been.

LEVEL DESIGN

Oh my fucking god.

This is the worst part. Honestly, if the only flaw was the writing, I’d barely care. But no, it’s not, not by a long shot. Allow me to set the picture. This game has five areas, each of them seperated by a giant circular desert, so it’s kind of open world. Lots of people have complained about the open worldness of it already. The desert is large and not very interesting to navigate. Music for the desert is hidden behind amiibo, which is fucking nuts. It’d be like if you had to buy DLC for the ocean music in Windwaker.

Out in the desert, there are a few little mini dungeons with one or two puzzles in them to explore. Six over all. There are a few upgrades littered around. And there’s a lot of green energy. I’ll get to that later. I’ve seen a LOT of complaints about the desert. And you know what? It’d not terrible. Not great, but like, I don’t care. The enemies that attack you suck ass though. They’re boring and spawn over and over. It’s not nearly the worst part of the design, though.

Here, let me show you a map of the first area. Maybe you can tell me the problem.

Getting the picture yet? Here’s another area.

How about now?

That’s right. EVERY FUCKING AREA IN THIS GAME IS A CORRIDOR.

This is not a metroidvania. This is a fucking low effort FPS. There’s no exploration. THough there IS a lot of fucking backtracking. In that last one, the volt forge, you can’t go to the very bottom of that middle tower until later in the game, so you gotta come back to back track. This isn’t like a “where do I do” kinda thing cause it’s hidden behind an obvious upgrade, just come back once you get the upgrade.

Compare that first map I showed you to the first real area in Prime 1. You’ll see the difference IMMEDIATELY. Lots of loops, lots of exploration. Metroid Prime 4 is like you’re playing Metroid Prime, but every single area in the game is Magmoor Caverns.

All the actual rooms and puzzles are good, though. That’s the worst part. It still plays okay and is fun that way, but it’s just NOT engaging or interesting. Oh, and the enemies suck-ass too. Like, imagine Prime 2. You’ve got only 3 areas, but each area has unique monsters and enemies. AND that game has the dark world, so there’s new enemy types there too, even if they’re similar to the light variants. In this game, there ARE some unique monsters… like, maybe 1 for each area. But every area instead uses the same 4 drone and 2 tank enemy designs, over, and over, and over. It’d be like if you were playing Metroid Prime 1, but 90% of the enemies in EVERY area were Space Pirates. It’s extremely fucking boring.

I cannot stress enough that all this is SO much worse than the story and writing being bad. Metroid has never been about the writing. It’s about the vibes and the level design. Our vibes are hurting, and our level design is dead. I was NOT surprised to hear that the Halo team worked on this, because it really does feel like Halo 6. It’s a corridor shooter, but occasionally you scan things and do a Metroid puzzle.

Oh, all the items are kinda uninspired too. It’s all your typical MEtroid Prime upgrades, but with “Psychic” tacked onto it. The ONLY new item is basically the Stinger Missiles from Metal Gear Solid, and they’re there for me to constantly forget that I can use them. This isn’t like, a BAD thing. The Metroid collectables are all good. Though for most of the game, missiles are useless, so there’s no real excitement from getting missile packs, cause you can’t just spam them like in Prime 1.

Let’s talk about one more bad thing about the game design. So, remember how in all the Prime games, you get all the items, complete the areas, and then you need to collect some items in order to get to the final boss? Well, that’s here too. There’s a kind of energy here called uh… green energy. Creative. It’s in the form of green crystals scattered around the desert. There’s also some in the mini dungeons, and some in rocks you can power bomb. You need to get at least half in order to beat the game. I was collecting crystals the entire game. The ENTIRE time I was in the desert, I was driving over green crystals, as I went from one spot to the next. I did everything in the game, until I got to the point where I needed the crystals. And I had less than 25% of what was required. It took me two hours of driving around specifically to harvest crystals to get what I needed.

This sucks ass. I know a lot of people dislike the Prime 1 and 2 artifacts, but uh, they’re not NEARLY this bad. It was annoying and boring, in the worst way. At least with Prime 1 and 2, it involved exploration. There was no strategy or excitement here.

ART AND STYLE

We’ve been doing a LOT of negatives, let’s talk about a positive. This game looks great. Samus’ suit is gorgeous, especially the new suit designs. Some of the background art is a little… Avatar, but it still looks good. The music is quite good too, when it plays (GREAT DESERT, HELLO). Though the vibe isn’t quite there, since the game is so chatty and so Halo, it really doesn’t feel like Metroid.

Though a lot of it is very uh, well it lends itself to Metroids of the past. I got into a fight once where the Prime 1 theme started playing. No real reason for it, but my brain lit up cause I like that song.

Also, there’s a bike! I haven’t mentioned it yet cause it really isn’t a big thing. It’s there to get you across the desert faster. But there are a few bosses with it as the primary weapon. It’s cool. Giving Samus a lesbian bike is a good idea. Though I imagined it’d grow from her suit. Instead, it… appears. Alright.

Oh right, on more thing. This is a door in the game. Does this remind you of anything?

This is maybe the most yonic Nintendo game I’ve ever played. All the doors are like this. And some of them require you to play with a fucking circle at the top of it to open it, I am NOT fucking kidding. I can tell that the people in charge of this game were straight cis men, but I can also REALLY tell that there were some lesbians working on this and sneaking things in cause fucking look at this.

….Don’t have much more to add. It’s good.

Gameplay

It’s pretty much just Metroid Prime! Gameplay is good! It’s fun to kill and dodge things, and the bosses are nicely designed. I will note, this game changes the gameplay ever so slightly. You can aim while being locked on, moving the aim around while just the camera follows the thing you’re locked on. A lot of the bosses are basically this: They have a big glowing weak point, and you can’t lock on it, instead you have to aim a bit more to hit it while locking on the center of the monster. This is technically more complex and interesting but I kinda find it more annoying, cause I am bad at aiming.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Prime 4 gets like, a 6/10. And I am being very, very generous. Gameplay wise it really is fine, but every other thing about it… it’s barely a Metroid game, honestly. And you can tell, the Development Hell it was in REALLY did a number on it. Going through multiple teams, an entire remake, I’m frankly stunned it exists at all. But I’m worried.

Metroid exists in a very nebulous spot in the Nintendo arsenal. Nintendo has never liked Metroid, and have basically only been making the games out of spite for a very long time. They’ve tried to kill the series multiple times, only to stop when fans yelled (rest in peace Chibi Robo, which was not saved by fans). And any time a Metroid game comes out, I PRAY for it to be good even more than any other game, because if it’s NOT good, that might be the last fucking Metroid game I EVER play.

This was not very good. But it also was barely a Metroid game. Metroidvanias aren’t easy to design of course, and especially 3D ones, but you can clearly do it. Prime 1 and 2 are some of the best games ever made. I’m not saying do those again, of course. But you can create a really cool metroivania work to explore in a 3D space.And even the story can be done well, I’m sure! Like I said, I think writing and character and story is a thing Metroid could do, and do well.

You just need to hire women.

Once again, my annoying feminism rears its ugly head, but really, if you gave Samus to the lesbians, we would write the best fucking thing ever.

While I do hope we get more Metroid Prime, if it’s from this team, I might sit it out, honestly. Games are expensive. This cost me 70 dollars. I bought a Switch 2 for this game, so that’s even more on top of that (though obviously I use the Switch 2 for more than just this). I dunno if I can justify 70 dollars for more 6/10 Metroids. No one else is making Prime clones, sadly… but maybe we’ll get that eventually.

Thanks for reading my LONG-ASS review of this. I had a lot of thoughts. And I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about it. For the day after that fucking wolf thing, I was that one grumpy Homer in bed meme. I might play some Prime 2 to cheer myself up. At least we’ll always have that.