The wait for Metroid Prime 4 is almost over, a new first person, 3D adventure for Samus for the first time in 18 years. Heck, it’s been 8 years since this game was announced, and now it’s a cross-gen release for Switch and Switch 2! Having gone hands on with a more extended portion of the game’s opening, has it been worth the wait?
The game’s opening sees Samus answer a distress call from a Galactic Federation base besieged by the Space Pirates. It’s always felt a little funny to me how sparse the Space Pirate forces were during previous games. You’d be blasting your way into their base, but only really encounter them one or two at a time, giving far less of an impression of a galaxy-spanning threat than they’re made out to be in the series’ expanding lore. Similarly, the Federation come off as utterly helpless and incompetent, outside of knowing when to call Samus for help. Metroid Prime 4’s opening finally gives a proper sense and feeling of how these two might face off, with giant, stompy mechs, Space Pirates dropping into the fray, and a desperate battle to escort a mysterious artefact to safety.
It all goes rather wrong, with a stray shot from Space Pirates leader Sylux hitting the artefact and absorbing everyone into a big glowy explosion of psychic energy – yes, they’ve finally decided to embrace new management after reanimating the skeleton of Ridley for the thirtieth time.
And that’s when things get really quite strange. Finding herself on a totally different planet known as Viewros, Samus is confronted by an alien race, the Lamorn, who have died out but wishes for their legacy to be preserved, and have tasked Samus with doing so by heading to five nearby regions and biomes.
So, Samus has been stripped of many of her abilities, but the artefact has seen fit to grant her with some new ones. Psychic ones! Samus’ visor? That’s psychic now. Her armour? It’s enhanced with a new psychic glove. Her morph ball? It lays psychic bombs. But this does all come to mean something more than just making everything purple – the most psychic of colours, as we all know. When scanning the environment, Samus can now spot things like power nodes and door locking mechanisms, reaching out to manipulate them in various ways as part of the environmental puzzling. Similarly, you quickly gain the ability to fire off a charged shot and then guide it remotely with the world in super slow motion.
Taken alongside the series staples of just shooting everything in sight with various elemental gun types, morph ball bombs, and using enhanced movement, all of this this brings a different tone to the exploration. You might need to convert morph ball bombs into psychic energy motes to charge a mechanism, a door blocked from one side might now be opened with a guided bolt, or just use telekinesis to shift some stuff around. It’s an intriguing new aspect, though I’ll admit there were a few moments where I didn’t quite put two and two together during these puzzles. There are layers of possibilities that now need to be remembered together, I feel, with the psychic abilities relying on switching to the visor view to trigger them. I’m sure this will become more natural through longer play in the full game.
The fundamentals of playing Metroid Prime 4 are slick and smooth, though. The core controls and feel are those of a modern first person shooter, though there’s also some leanings back to the older style of Metroid Prime controls as well. There’s no aiming down sights, but the left trigger will instead lock on that will snap to targets in a satisfying way, so you can just blast away. There is some motion control after touch while doing so, which did take a moment of getting used to, but allows for targeting weak spots.
Alternatively, you can switch to mouse mode, if you’re playing with Switch 2 and detached Joy-Con 2 in hand. It’s effortless to switch back and forth between console gamepad controls and mouse mode, simply by tipping your hand on its side so the mouse sensor is on a table, sofa arm or trouser leg. This immediately gives you free aim, again making it easier to quickly target weak spots.
That really comes to the fore during boss battles, the first of which sees a Metroid-enhanced Space Pirate monster covering glowing blobs on its body with forearm shields, forcing you to target the exposed area, and then later hitting tentacle weak spots on a giant carnivorous plant. Regular combat encounters have also got bigger than in classic Metroid Prime, with many more enemies and waves of them coming in from multiple angles. It can be quite frantic. Frantic enough, maybe, that Samus could maybe use some help?
This brings us to what I feel will be one of the most controversial additions to Metroid Prime 4. One of the key aspects of this series and the genre it spawned has always been the sense of isolation, while still allowing for degree of human contact for mission briefings and updates. Well, Specialist Myles MacKenzie will seriously undercut that tone.
After saving him from being stranded on a vine-ensnared transport, and then from a horde of Jungle Griever enemies, he joins Samus for the next leg of exploration, and fight alongside with his pistol. That’s fine, but…. Myles is chatty. He will tell you to consult your map, he’ll marvel at Samus’ morph ball, he’ll be all ‘quirky’ during cutscenes in that Marvel movie kind of way. I fear that he will grate in the long run, though it’s not too long before he stays behind at a control panel and lets Samus get some alone time once more.
Sadly our time with Metroid Prime 4 came to an end after exploring this first region, and before getting to hop on the new motorbike to explore the open desert area between regions. That looks like it could be a lot of fun and a real change of pace.
In general, I enjoyed my time with Samus’ latest 3D adventure. It’s long overdue, of course, and there’s a tonal shift from close to two decades difference in game design and script writing. Hopefully that doesn’t skew too heavily away from the classic isolated feel of Metroid, but I’m certainly keen to see how the full game has come together.
