Metroid Prime 4 - Beyond
Thoughts
While I think that it’s generally a good thing that game development studios try new things with existing IPs, there’s some risk involved as Prime 4 shows. Overall, I think it’s a very weak game in general, and by far my least favorite Metroid game. When considering just the Prime series games, this is the only one that I can easily say I’ll never play again now that I’ve finished it. If I weren’t a little finicky about selling physical copies of games that I own, I wouldn’t hold on to my copy of Prime 4 — very disappointing.
The Story
I felt like the story of the game was pretty underwhelming. The worldbuilding thoughts below expand on this a bit, but it seemed to me that everything that Samus, the player, experiences exists solely to cart you along to the next checkpoint of the story — there isn’t any immersion in what’s going on. At first, it felt like the game was going the route of Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2 - Echoes with exploration of ancient alien ruins; typical, but great stuff nonetheless.
Once the goal of getting teleporter keys became known, I thought maybe they, the designers, were leaning more into Metroid Prime 3 - Corruption’s style of traveling between planets for whatever the next goal would be. After a fairly short time, there’s some exposition from one or more of the Federation soldiers that implies the aim of the keys is just to get off the planet.
Meanwhile, Sylux, the generic and boring antagonist you meet during the first half-hour of the game, is occasionally thrown at you to remind you that he exists. His boss fights throughout the game force you to use some of the abilities that you acquire along the way, so they’re vaguely reminiscent of boss enemies of old, but in this case he’s a boring opponent. I also don’t like his theme song at all, but that’s subjective.
Towards the latter part of the game, you’re told that your Federation team members have all gathered at the mine for some reason. The mine was never mentioned in my play-through, the characters certainly never talked about it, but they decided to check it out all together while I was out collecting Green Energy crystals so I was able to power up the Memory Seed in the Lamorn ruins.
During the now-group mission into the mine, you’re given a series of back-to-back dramatic sacrifices by your team so that you can keep going deeper into the depths. Once you’ve defeated the Omega Griever and acquired the last key, it turns out that everyone’s fine, so no worries, I guess! There would have been some real emotional weight here if not everyone was magically fine in the end, but they didn’t want to go that route. Instead, they decided to completely cheapen it with the ending later.
The next task is to finish building the mech such that you and the team can get into Chrono Tower. There are no obstacles between here and the top, so up you go. You find the master teleporter, insert the keys, and start powering it up…but what’s this?? Why, it’s Sylux again — that goober has been running the show the whole time (somehow).
“Nanomachines, son!”
He disrupts the teleporter, kicking off the final boss fight. It would actually be a pretty cool battle if not for having to babysit your teammates the whole time.
Finally, after defeating Sylux, you get the teleporter running again. In a repetition of a few moments ago, before you and co. can bounce from Viewros, Sylux (somehow) returns. Your team hold him back while you’re given a fake decision point of letting the teleporter burn out, or firing it off, saving yourself by teleporting away. You can only pick the latter option to finish the game, so that’s that, I guess. If you decided to stay, well, guess what? You’re just going to have to do the boss fight again so that you can think about how wrong you were to not teleport away the first time.
After “picking” the correct ending, the final cutscene shows you planting the Memory Seed in the ground on the unknown planet you’re marooned at. I actually liked this part quite a bit, if only for the nice cinematic.
To me, the story was weakest of the Prime games by far.
The Worldbuilding
The Lamorn & Grievers
While I quite liked the design of the Lamorn and the whole psychic culture angle, I strongly disliked the grievers. Not only did they make up the bulk of enemy designs in the game, they just weren’t interesting to me.
I was really disappointed that apparently 100% of the Lamorn/griever cryo-pods ended up failing upon the heat coming back on in Ice Belt. The lore from scans implies that the Lamorn hoped someone in the future might be able to finish their work to restore the grievers back to Lamorn, hence the cryo-pods full of grievers and the research databank. Upon getting the power generator working in the research facility, the independently-powered cryo-pods and the long-term storage databank simultaneously fail. This is because the story says so — best not to dwell on it, I suppose.
I’m also curious what happened to the twelve Lamorn priests that left to find help and/or the “Chosen One.”
The Enemies
Besides the aforementioned grievers, there are a handful of other enemies, and in terms of pure numbers Prime 4 is probably on par with past games, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. It would have been cool to see some space pirates show up that had gotten teleported to Viewros, too.
Oh, and maybe a Metroid or two — ideally not one that is reportedly fused with other enemies according to scan data.
The Locations
I really don’t understand the naming conventions that the designers were going for with the world locations. Fury Green, Volt Forge, Flare Pool, Ice Belt, Chrono Tower, and Sol Valley all sound like internal development names for each area. Why wouldn’t the major locations have in-world Lamorn names? It comes across as very half-baked to me, much like the rest of the game.
Why in the world is there a mega-factory endlessly pumping out psychic motorcycles? Clearly the Lamorn’s societal needs were entirely satisfied by these bikes.
The Green Energy
Yet another odd naming example is Green Energy. What kind of energy is it? Green — it’s just green. This stuff exists only to explain the transformation of the Lamorn in “The Great Tragedy.” The only other things it does is occasionally juice up enemies in the world and gate the end of the game behind the Memory Seed.
Sylux
Who even is Sylux? He appeared in Federation Force? Oh.
The Gameplay
While Prime 4 has the same bones as the older games in terms of movement and shooting mechanics, the rest of the game haunts your enjoyment of said mechanics the entire time.
The “open world” hub area of Sol Valley is an amazing waste of time. There’s no reason for it to exist besides being half-hearted attempt to bring the larger scale of games like Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey into the Metroid games.
Scanning, a mechanic deeply ingrained into the Prime games’ core gameplay loop, is somehow also less fun in this entry. The things you scan are both too numerous and too bland. I felt like the majority of them were just duplicates or very slightly changed descriptions from nearby ones. In Metroid Prime 2 - Echoes, for example, if you scan a non-logbook object, it would fade to a different color when looking around the world so you knew that you had scanned it already. This is also present here, but Echoes had another QOL feature: nearby scannable objects with the same description would also fade, allowing you to skip those and not waste your time.
Why would I want to aimlessly drive around an empty desert looking for green crystals to collect?
Why are the characters randomly chiming in telling me exactly where to go and what to do, especially when I just left a previous area?
Why are the shrines all the most barebones version of a single shrine from Breath of the Wild? Why are there shrines at all??
Conclusion
If you’ve read any of my other game logs’ “Thoughts” sections, it’s probably evident that I put a lot more time into this one then I usually do. I think it’s because Prime 4 doesn’t live up to the last three games — not even close — and I find that very disappointing. Prime 3 came out ages ago, and this is what what delivered for a successor.
While I occasionally will do a play-through of the earlier Primes, especially in cases like Metroid Prime Remastered where a new version of the games are made, I have zero interest in doing the same for Prime 4. This game somehow felt too long and too short.
Given how troubled the development process seemed to be, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that it has major problems. Oh well, maybe Prime 5 will be better off? One can only hope.
Progress
Main Story: Complete
Scans: 92%
Items: 84%
Play-through Log
2026 - March 14 - Saturday:
I’m now through the Great Mines area, and need to find the rest of mech parts. I was expecting to lose at least one of the team members along the way, but they all seem to have survived the seemingly relentless grievers without issue.
I finished the game; I’m not super impressed, to be honest. I would have liked to be able to save the Federation team members, and Sylux was still a boring and underdeveloped antagonist. I didn’t get the 100% ending, but I was just trying to push through to the finale in the last chapter of the game. The ending cinematic was pretty cool, though.
2026 - March 12 - Thursday:
I’ve completed the volcano section, and now I’m roaming around using my new gear/abilities to access previously inaccessible areas. In other Metroid games, this would happen pretty naturally, but in Prime 4, the NPCs even tell you that this is the time to do so.
I will say that the non-Sylux boss fights are pretty cool. Sylux himself is exceedingly boring as an antagonist, though. He reminds me of the villain from Batman - Arkham Knight, except maybe even worse.
At this point, I’m definitely putting Prime 4 at the bottom of the Prime tier list. However, I’m hoping that it somehow comes back a little bit as I get further into the story — we’ll see!
2026 - March 9 - Monday:
I’ve gotten through the Ice Belt now, and I’m starting on the volcano section. I was having more fun with this game earlier, but some of the issues I have with it are starting to become more grating (spoiler warning):
- I don’t love the bike, “Vi-O-La”, as I feel like it’s an excuse to bolt on the open world aspect of the game.
- Having to go back to the Volt Forge to get an upgrade for the suit so it can hover over lava is a fetch quest, which isn’t a huge deal, but having to fight another Flight Drone MCU on the way back out for no reason is even worse.
- The scannable objects are too numerous and not interesting enough. Many of them are just something like “Terminal A: Does a thing” and “Terminal B: Does a thing”.
- Some of the fight sections feel lazy to me, especially anything to do with the Psy-bots or grievers.
It’s becoming apparent to me that this game feels like the designers had the puzzle pieces from the first Prime games, but didn’t properly understand how they fit together. I’m hoping that it gets better!