Beyond’ thrillingly brings the series into the modern era

Earlier this year, I played metroid prime For the first time in at least a decade. In 2023, Nintendo released a remastered version of the 2002 classic for the Switch, and I felt like I was going to whip it out as soon as we finally found out. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Will arrive this year after nearly a decade of development. Original metroid prime That’s surprisingly good for a 23-year-old game, but there were times when it showed its age. The platforming often feels overly clunky, as precise control over Samus Aran is not the game’s strong suit. Similarly, due to the lack of accuracy, dealing with large hordes of energy-sucking Metroids can be quite frustrating.

But the main feeling I came away from the game with was excitement for a completely modern Metroid Prime experience. I’m interested to see what lush alien worlds, monstrous enemies, and first-person combat would look like on a current console built with today’s technology and the many improvements to game design since 2002. Eventually I got a chance to play for about 90 minutes. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond This past week and what I haven’t seen have dampened my enthusiasm for the series being brought into the current decade – even if the game felt almost too familiar at times.

I played two volumes of this Metroid Prime 4: BeyondThe first is an opening sequence that Nintendo made available for people to try out in Switch 2 demo experiences earlier this year before the console launched, while the second is a longer piece that takes place on a beautiful alien planet where it looks like the bulk of the game is likely to take place, That first section is the classic “introduce the player to the controls” level where Samus flies to help defend the base under attack, Since I played the Switch version of it metroid prime Recently, I felt right at home with the controls, despite some buttons being remapped. All the classic Metroid moves are intact here, including the charge blast, morph ball, missile cannon, scanning visor, and more, and I quickly fell back into the routine of scanning enemies for weak points and destroying them.

Right from the jump, the game looks fantastic. There’s an extensive cutscene (at least for a Metroid game) that shows Samus flying through a war-torn base to save the day, and everything from the fireball explosions to the small details on Samus’s ship feature a level of detail we haven’t seen in a Metroid game before.

I was playing the game on the Switch 2, both in handheld mode and connected to a TV and it looked great either way. The aforementioned explosions popped nicely in HDR and the frame rate never slowed down the way I picked it up. As always, Nintendo’s art direction is top notch, but this is the first Metroid Prime game made on a console with some power behind it (remember, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption The original came out on the Wii). This game isn’t exactly aiming for photorealistic graphics, but it comes closer than almost any other Nintendo game I can think of. The combination of impeccable style and modern resolution that finally allows the Metroid world to shine is thrilling, and I can’t wait to see more diversity in the worlds Samus explores.

It has a lot more voice-overs than the original Metroid Prime. As you take off defending the base under attack, plenty of other soldiers recognize Samus, asking for help, telling her where to go and generally praising her for being badass. It’s got a lot more voice work than the Metroid games, and it goes a long way toward making the journey feel less isolating.

The second area I got a chance to explore looks even better than the general base where the game starts. It’s a classic Metroid world that combines natural beauty with a mysterious, alien culture. And, of course, a large part of nature wants to kill you for invading its territory (or possibly because it is being controlled by outside forces). The demo’s big boss was cut from this cloth: a giant tentacle plant throwing its huge fanged arms at you and shooting out poisonous flowers. A classic Metroid fight if there ever was one, even if it doesn’t feel all that different from some of the boss battles. metroid primeThat said, the scope of the battle felt large, due to the size of the field and how the tentacles of the plant made it a challenge to maneuver and land clear shots, While the boss clearly had a central body right in the middle of the room, the tentacles made it feel like it was all around me at all times,

This boss felt like an enhanced but familiar version of the previous games, and it was far from the only thing that felt familiar. For example, the game still uses save stations scattered throughout the map to save your progress instead of autosaving at key points. This is an old event that I didn’t miss at all and didn’t expect to see in 2025. A lot of the musical cues and sound effects felt like they could have been lifted straight from other Metroid Prime games, and the basic move set and weapons that Samus has at the beginning of the game are almost identical to how you start. metroid primeNaturally, something happens where she loses most of those abilities and has to regain them in order to progress – in the demo, I had to find the Morph Ball power up to progress, as you do in almost every Metroid game before,

At times, it felt like the game was leaning too heavily on established frameworks rather than trying something new. But given that I was early in the game, I’m allowing for a lot of unexpected changes. And I got a chance to try out the biggest gameplay change Nintendo has teased so far (no, not the motorcycle): new psychic abilities.

These powers, at least in the demo, are primarily used for solving environmental puzzles, as they provide a new way to interact with various objects and structures. But there is also a combat component that I had to use to defeat the aforementioned boss. You can charge and fire a kind of psychic beam – once it leaves your blaster, time almost slows down and you can control its direction with the analog stick. When fighting the boss, I had to guide the beam around several obstacles to hit each of the three traps; Once I did this, the monster became weakened and I could then attack it and blast it with my conventional weapons. You can see some examples of this power in the video below.

I wish I had the chance to see how these powers would develop throughout the game, and I’m certainly curious to see how they manage to vary the gameplay. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Aspects of it feel like merely an updated version of what came before. And honestly, I’m not hurt that the game feels familiar. Many people haven’t experienced the Metroid Prime series before or haven’t played it in over a decade, and many of the familiar aspects felt like a perfect example of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. And it won’t be long before we all find out Metroid Prime 4: Beyond After this time it really finds a way to stand out from its predecessors. The game will arrive on December 5th for Switch and Switch 2.