Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Hands-On: Facing 18 Years Of Expectations

Metroid fans have been waiting a long time for Metroid Prime 4. The game was announced at E3 2017 before being delayed and rebooted and delayed again, but even at the time of that reveal, it had been a decade since Metroid Prime 3: Corruption released. At one time it seemed like a game doomed by its own sky-high expectations. With the Switch 2 on the horizon, Beyond is finally real, and playable, and great. It’s too early to say if it can rise above almost two decades of anticipation, but having now played it, I don’t think it will be a victim of them.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is now part of the cross-generational push, representing both a swan song for the original Switch and a launch-window game for Switch 2. I only played the Switch 2 version, so I can’t speak to differences in performance between the platforms–but it already appears to make for a very nice Switch 2 showpiece.

To start, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond looks gorgeous, managing to be reverent of the Prime art style while also updating and modernizing it to a new platform. Yes, Samus’ face reflects in her visor when you fire a shot close to a wall, but this time she squints slightly in the direction of the light. Retro Studios is clearly exercising great care for stewarding this franchise, even down to the little touches.

The demo starts with a cinematic that echoes how the industry has matured over the last few decades. While Samus would often land her ship on an alien planet and begin exploring without much preamble, this game begins with a massive battle scene reminiscent of a blockbuster. Samus weaves through Federation ships, lending support and narrowly avoiding disaster, showcasing her skills as a crack pilot in addition to a bounty hunter. You get the sense that she’s the Federation’s most trusted ally for a reason.

What followed from there was an early-game tutorial, teaching the basics of shooting, scanning, using the morph ball and bombs, and so on. It was punctuated by cinematic moments and battles, but this was clearly aimed at teaching me the ropes. And I’m glad, because Metroid Prime 4 introduces a new approach to control schemes that will take some getting used to.

The Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii already experimented with using the Wii remote as a cursor, functionality that was echoed by one of the options in the recent Metroid Prime Remastered. Metroid Prime 4 adds the Switch 2’s mouse functionality to emulate first-person aiming on PC. You may expect that this would necessitate a menu in which you pick a control scheme, but Prime 4 takes a novel approach: What if you just had access to all the control schemes, all the time, and could switch between them on demand?

It’s complex without feeling complicated. When exploring the world you’ll mostly rely on the traditional dual-stick control scheme. When you lock-on to an enemy, your Joy-Con automatically converts to the gyro pointer mode like Prime Trilogy or Remastered. And most impressively, at any point you can simply put your Joy-Con controller down on a surface and it instantly converts to mouse mode, letting you control it that way. No menu selection or toggle required. It’s a heck of a trick.

This led to a general pattern of traditional controls for exploring and then using the pointer control to fire at legions of alien bugs. At the end of the demo, a boss creature was infected by a Metroid, leading it to develop Metroid-like pustules all over its body. Being a lifelong gamer I immediately recognized these as weak points, but I wasn’t quite getting the precision I wanted from the pointer functionality, so I put the Joy-Con down and swapped to mouse controls. It all just worked.

The switching did feel awkward sometimes. I would forget that I’m using a cursor and miss a shot, for example. But I’m not too proud to admit this seemed like a skill issue, and developing a rhythm of switching between the control schemes as the situation dictates feels like it would come with time, not in the compressed conditions of a press demo.

The only concern I have, and it’s a minor one, is that this very limited slice of the game seemed notably more action-oriented than Metroid Prime tends to be. I suspect this is simply because I was playing the beginning of the game, and the tutorial, which is engineered to both excite the player and also teach all the combat-related mechanics in a short period of time. But Metroid Prime has always been at its best when it felt serenely eerie and lonely. A massive battle full of explosions and Federation soldiers is neither. I hope after this initial burst of action the game settles into a more recognizable form.

And I expect that of Metroid Prime 4, because Retro Studios seems to understand what makes this series so special in the hearts of Metroid fans. The expanded control options are an important part of removing the barriers between you and Samus, to feel like you’re the one behind the visor. The extremely long wait may not have led to a revolutionary overhaul, but it does feel like coming home–even if that home is a strange alien planet.