The fourth Prime is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace…
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was released at last on December 4th, 2025. Members of the Shinesparkers team have once again gathered to share a group review of Samus’s latest adventure, and the next chapter in a story-arc 20 years in the making! (Warning: spoilers present)
For this review, we chose to designate topics for each team member.
Roy (Voice Acting)
I vividly remember the day Metroid Prime 4 (“MP4”) was originally announced and how loudly I screamed out my cheers. I also remember what I was doing when Nintendo announced it restarted development, and when the June 2024 trailer dropped. Needless to say, I’ve anticipated MP4 like everyone else for years, and I believe it was absolutely worth the wait. Is it the genre-defining masterpiece some of us were hoping for? No, and it may not move the needle on gameplay, but it is an absolutely solid title and return for a glorious sub-series. It certainly proves that Retro Studios can still make an incredible Metroid Prime title, eighteen years later.
For my part of this review I’d like to focus on the characters and voice acting. Nintendo clearly spent a lot of money on MP4 and that includes on the performances. While Other M’s English cast consisted of commercial voiceover actors in Seattle, MP4 uses established voice actors from prior video games for its characters. Samus’s new effort sounds are provided by Erin Yvette, who I know as Snow White from The Wolf Among Us, and finding out it was her shortly before release was awesome. Her vocals were worthy successors to those of Jennifer Hale and Vanessa Marshall in the original Metroid Prime trilogy. However, I agree with one popular criticism, which is that when the troopers speak to Samus, she never responds verbally. After the fierce backlash to Samus’s portrayal in Other M, I wondered if Nintendo has become reticent to let Samus speak as much or ever again, apart from her iconic Chozo line in Dread. I wish we could have had a jaw dropping moment where Samus says something at a pivotal moment, like promising to remember the troopers’ sacrifice as she was escaping from Viewros.
Sylux is given an intimidating voice for the first time, provided by Laith Wallschleger, best known as Rob Gronkowski’s body double and for playing him in American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. Duke is voiced by Jason Kelley, Doomguy himself. Kalani Queypo, whose performance as Tokabi conveyed cool and collected wisdom, played Klah Jackson on Fear the Walking Dead. Jennifer Sun Bell, who played the adorable and lovable Armstrong, has had roles in KPop Demon Hunters, as Poison Ivy in DC: Dark Legion, and as Moana Rich in Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
David Goldstein, who played the at first nerdy but ultimately courageous MacKenzie, is also known for his roles in Genshin Impact (as Huai’an and Herbalist Gui) and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment (as Vence). VUE-995’s voice and motion capture was provided by Richard Dorton, known for his roles in Mortal Kombat: Rebirth and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Each character grounds the narrative and gives you something to aspire to protect in addition to your ultimate goal of escaping the planet. Despite often hysterical reactions from some of the gaming press when MacKenzie was first unveiled, he and the other soldiers are not with you the entire time, and there is still plenty of isolation to enjoy.
MacKenzie has the best character development in my opinion, going from squeamish and terrified to literally taking a bullet in the back for Samus at the end. Their sacrifice deeply saddened me. I really thought that these new allies of Samus would actually survive for once. Since I’m someone who believes in the rule of “no body, no bury”, I hope that some of them survived both the explosion of the Master Teleporter, and Sylux afterwards. The characters are among the lasting impacts of MP4 for me.
Irene (Gameplay)
Broadly speaking, I think Beyond improved on the moment-to-moment gameplay as compared to the original Prime games. Samus has a few new moves, and some of her staple abilities have become more fluid! Dashing forwards and backwards are very welcome additions, and they feel quite natural to perform. I’m sure those moves also helped with designing boss attacks, now that Samus has more options to evade!
Speaking of bosses, they were great for the most part! They didn’t provide a ton of challenge, even in Hard Mode, but most of them had an enjoyable moveset to figure out. My favourite fight is probably the second fight against Sylux. There’s a lot of spectacle to it, and I loved having to use the Grapple to dodge attacks. Phenoros as a boss fight was on the weaker side personally, but even that one had some cool and memorable moments. I liked that even the Morph Ball was used to dodge moves, as seen in the Aberax battle, showing that the transition to Morph Ball is now entirely seamless.
If I were to point out anything I didn’t like, it’s that it seems as if the damage you deal is capped, and that there aren’t any cycles to skip so to speak. A promising feature, the Psychic Bomb, could potentially let you set up a big attack once the enemy is vulnerable. Unfortunately, preparing a Psychic Bomb to throw at an enemy doesn’t usually amount to much, and that’s a shame because that move in particular had a lot of potential for upgrading the combat of Prime. I really hope they increase its damage output via a patch! It’s fun to use it while fighting, but as it stands it rarely contributes to any battles since other options have a faster damage per second.
The new Control Beam was also a fantastic feature for Beyond. In the early game it has a great utility against Psy-bots and Maintenance Tanks, able to stun an entire group of them at once. You get other tools later in the game that can do a lot of damage, but the Control Beam has its uses right until the very end. It was not only viable in combat, it was also an amazing tool to use when looking for secrets. I hope it returns in some fashion, even if it was a type of Missile instead, because the Control Beam was a quite versatile and fun feature!
Another new feature for Beyond is the Vi-O-La bike. To me it always seemed like a replacement for the Gunship mechanic in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, except that you also get to steer it this time around. Unfortunately, I do think the execution was flawed this time around. It’s almost exclusively used for the desert area called ‘Sol Valley’, and there isn’t a whole lot to do in that area aside from crushing crystals, finding shrines, and checking out G.F. Debris. I wish it was utilized a bit more in the biomes surrounding Sol Valley, much like how Corruption required the Ship Missiles and Ship Grapple to let you progress further in that game.
Lastly, I think it is a bit disappointing how scans don’t carry over from a completed file. Like, this is kind of a nitpick, but with Samus acquiring psychic abilities, and her travelling through time and dimensions, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond had an unique opportunity to use this feature ludonarratively. Perhaps, instead of scanning something, the Psychic Visor could instead ‘borrow’ knowledge from the future, or perhaps from a Samus in a different dimension?
This definitely wasn’t the intention, but some scans are already written as if Samus is ‘psychic’, being able to intuit more than what the players can see themselves. My best example of this, is how the first Grievers we see are already determined to be a subspecies, a ‘Jungle variant’ of the Grievers, even though we wouldn’t have any idea if they were a stand-alone enemy or not at that point. Psychic Abilities are already used prominently in the game, but I believe we would have had a more compelling experience if scanning played into the themes of Beyond, intertwining both her Psychic Powers and time itself.
To summarize my part of this review, I think Metroid Prime 4: Beyond boasts a strong gameplay concept, and it executes most of its mechanics well. I absolutely have my fair share of disappointments still, though most of them come from the perspective of a fan seeing how an idea could go even further, ‘Beyond’ if you will! If we were to get a Metroid Prime 5, I would genuinely have no worries with how the gameplay would evolve.
Seth (Story)
The plot of Metroid Prime 4 is similar to the plot of the original Metroid Prime. Samus is called into action in response to a distress signal. On this mission, Samus encounters a familiar face; Ridley in Metroid Prime and Sylux in Prime 4. Samus is then led or transported to an unfamiliar planet with an unknown history. Samus goes on to discover the history of a mysterious, extinct race of aliens that used to inhabit this planet, which were corrupted or poisoned by a source of seemingly unlimited power.
The story is simple, also like the story of Prime 1. What’s also interesting about Prime 4 is how the main antagonist seems to take a back seat with little impact on the game’s events. Sylux spends most of the game in a healing pod in Chrono Tower, having Psy-bots attack Samus for him, much to the disappointment of many fans. However, I have reason to believe this will not be the last we see of Sylux. Like how Dark Samus made her threat known at the end of Prime 1, I believe Sylux has made us aware of his threat for a greater story, not as a rival hunter, but as the new Metroid Prime.
Remember how I said there were many similarities between Metroid Prime 1 and
4? Well recently, the World Databook for Metroid Prime 4 was published on Nintendo Today! and it provided some interesting context to the events of Prime 4. As it turns out, the planet Viewros takes place in an alternate dimension to the one Metroid games have taken place in until now. Given this context, the similarities between the Chozo in Prime 1 and the Lamorn in Prime 4 seem almost too deliberate. Green Energy in this world seems to have similar effects as Phazon in our world. Given the presence of Metroids controlled by Sylux that can fuse with hosts (which was not explored enough in Prime 4), I would not be surprised if the developers are planning to turn Sylux into a different version of a Metroid Prime.
To summarize, the main plot of Metroid Prime 4 is solid and very similar to Prime 1; and while I recognize that Sylux was under utilized in the story, these very similarities give me hope that there is more to come.
Deadweight (Level Design & World Building)
Metroid is defined by its worlds. When people revere this series for its “immersion”, “isolation” and “exploration”, they’re describing feelings instilled in them by the way the world has been constructed. The series’ most iconic moments were ultimately achieved through careful level design. Some later Metroid games may have forgone the full commitment to quiet traversal through a truly labyrinthine map, but many of them were constrained by the status of a sequel, remake, or an attempt at a new genre in the Metroid series. Such constraints were not placed on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
Beyond essentially acts as a reboot to the mainline Prime subseries, and therefore maybe it’s not a surprise to see so many locales inspired by the original 2002 entry: a lush forest; a sandy valley; an energy-processing plant in a volcano; a laboratory located in an icy tundra to tranquilise its specimens; and a penultimate mine area. The player’s objective even entails the pursuit of a Space Pirate leader, the discovery of a mutagenic substance, and the opening of a seal intended for a Chosen One to enter the final area. The planets of Viewros and Tallon IV are almost begging for comparison, even more so with Metroid Prime Remastered available on the same systems.
The adventure starts strong. Tanamaar acts as an immediately engaging tutorial, filled with scans and rich with detail. You may get to talk to a Trooper about how they swapped their shifts today, but should you fail to save them from a Space Pirate attack, you’ll instead have to watch another trooper approach their corpse with scanning technology and see their display confirm there are no signs of life. When Samus is teleported to Viewros, she has the opportunity to peer out the windows of Chrono Tower and glimpse the later locations she’ll be visiting.
Then, Fury Green’s music and visuals create a striking atmosphere; since you can see the Sacred Tree, the Temple of Memory and Chrono Tower from various cliffsides and groves, the world immediately feels large, complex and interconnected, even when almost every room consists of just one entrance and one exit. While the game does introduce one Mr. Myles MacKenzie, a rare instance of a physical companion character in a Metroid game, his exposition could be warranted for newer players and regardless, he is left behind in Fury Green as Samus ventures further into the world. The sequence where Samus is erroneously transported into the middle of Sol Valley and must trek her way to the Volt Forge will remain one of my favourite moments in a Metroid, and the Forge itself is one of the series’ most gorgeous and unique locations to date.
The Volt Forge has all the makings of a great Prime area, including some incredible and well-integrated puzzles, such as navigating the mechanical arms and lasers of the 3D printing room. However, the cracks start to show when Samus’s map forces her to see the straight line of elevators she must take to go deeper into the tower, as the camera pans to show a new door unlocking. Despite there being no other way to go, MacKenzie phones Samus to explain (if it wasn’t already clear) that her goal, of course, is to get to the end of that line; if this wasn’t enough, he also explains that to do so, she must start at the beginning of that line, which, as the map clearly shows, is behind that door that just unlocked. Once Samus has reached the end of that line at the bottom of the tower, she must retrace her path back to the top. Then she repeats a nearly identical process for the second of the Forge’s towers: she goes to the bottom of the tower, then uses the same path back up. This is now the third area whose design is pointedly linear.
Almost all Metroid games are ultimately “linear”; what makes the genre it birthed so compelling is finding the line. The heart of the series is built on the player engaging with the world presented to them to figure out the way forward. If the line is too clearly presented, then the player engages with the world less; the sense of exploration and discovery is weakened and that is what Metroid players often describe as feeling “linear”. This design is hard to get right, but it’s what keeps us coming back to this 39-year old-series. And this is where Beyond is its most confusing.
As the giant, open desert area that connects to other major areas, Sol Valley feels ripe for exploration. When Samus first receives the Vi-O-La bicycle, MacKenzie says that she can now check out all other areas as she pleases. However, after a very short time in these vast wastes, Mac changes his mind and tells you to go straight to “the volcano” instead, and sure enough, it is impossible to enter any new areas aside from Flare Pool. This is a pretty poor introduction to Sol Valley, and it needed a good first impression, because the player must cross it to enter every other area on Viewros.
Ice Belt gets the closest to the feeling that the Prime games are known for. There’s split paths and the way forward isn’t immediately obvious. The focus is on scanning and learning lore. There’s a lot of foreshadowing and environmental storytelling, showing the entire process that the storage pods are put through. As any good Prime game would have, there are some great puzzles that feel like the rooms are designed specifically around them, such as the Ice Canyon and the Power Generator. After an area that seems to pass the bar for what a Prime area should be, it is then perplexing that the game doesn’t embrace these highs for its remaining runtime. In fact, while almost every major Prime location has Logbook lore, almost all of these entries in Beyond are exclusively confined to Ice Belt, save for a couple given to Flare Pool.
Flare Pool teases Samus with a massive tower amidst an even larger volcanic cavern. Like some other areas in the series, Samus must visit some other places before she can continue past the first few rooms, giving the player time to ponder what else there may be to see in the region. I doubt many players imagined that for the rest of this map, they wouldn’t be exploring those caverns, nor the tower itself, but a small facility in front of the tower composed almost entirely of simple one-way corridors with only repeated combat encounters to their name.
As the final major area, and as an obvious parallel to the Phazon Mines, the Great Mines should be where all mechanics coalesce, using Samus’s tools in combination to navigate some of the most interesting and complex rooms the game can offer. Instead, the Mines may be the most straight-forward area of all, with all the shortcomings of the precious areas. It hardly feels like a final area, and it hardly feels like a Metroid area at all. The Great Mines could well be the worst offender of Beyond’s allergy to rooms with more than two doors, a problem that hangs over the entire adventure, made worse by a cast of characters who spend much of their dialogue telling Samus exactly where to go. It’s strange that this game boasts a new lens flare effect above each entrance for easier readability when the path to progress is often already so obvious.
And this is unfortunately the trend. Not only do the individual puzzles fail to capitalise on the breadth of creative possibilities offered by the items, but the larger puzzle of the world map fails to make you think either. The player is unlikely to feel lost with this commitment to linearity and simplicity. However, there is another factor that makes Beyond unconducive to the feeling of isolation.
Samus is told the number of areas she will have to go to in order to finish the mission. She gets the map to each area almost immediately, with the rooms named and the boss marked. You almost always know where to go next. Once Samus has beaten the boss of an area, she will have seen almost everything there is to see. Volt Forge is revisited twice, but between these two trips, the player only sees one new room. The closest to a sub-area that the player finds on a revisit is the Ancient Temple in Ice Belt, which is a far cry from the likes of the Crashed Frigate, Phendrana’s Edge, and Eastern SkyTown. Beyond’s areas are simply gorgeous, with so much talent lovingly poured into their creation, so it’s heartbreaking how little of them we get to see.
It still disappoints me that the only area on Viewros that was teased for over a year, Fury Green, was a place we would see the full extent of within the first hour of gameplay; even now, I am left longing to discover more of such a beautiful location beyond what was already shown in Beyond’s previews. Little about the world is left to the imagination. The scope of Samus’s mission ahead is always clear, too clear. With this level of predictability, the player rarely gets to wonder how big the world could be, rarely left wondering between play sessions about what they could see next. They’re not given the opportunity to think how much bigger the game could get; you can’t discover what you already know. It’s less like the player is discovering an alien planet; it’s more like a guided tour. Consequently, despite its large desert, Viewros feels very small. And furthermore, Viewros doesn’t feel like a real place.
Luckily, Metroid Prime games can help make the world feel more real through scans, an easy and cost-effective way to provide more details about the world and keep you immersed. Almost every computer in the trilogy could be scanned for deeper insight into the world. However, by contrast, almost every computer on Viewros appears to be broken. In fact, while there are a lot of scans, a frustrating amount of them reveal little information at all. Some areas’ entire lore, worldbuilding or environmental storytelling could be distilled into a couple of sentences, and some of those sentences weren’t found in the game itself, but within extraneous sources like the Nintendo Today! app.
Viewros could have also been more believable if the world was more interconnected, as previous Metroid games have been. Instead, if a player wishes to travel from Ice Belt to Fury Green, two regions that border each other, they must still go through Sol Valley and back first, in the Metroid game with some of the longest loading screens in the series. This is a frequent occurrence too, as MacKenzie resides in Fury Green and must be revisited for story progress. While this is a good excuse for the player to fully get to use the bicycle mechanics in Sol Valley, a few shortcuts between areas would hardly take away from this. There are already plenty of other reasons to revisit Sol Valley. Most of those reasons are green.
While I overall liked Beyond, ultimately, the map is quite removed from what many have come to expect from a Metroid game. Maybe some of the world design was watered down in order to appeal to new players and create new fans. Maybe the Metroid formula is seen as a relic of the past. Maybe that’s what motivated this fourth entry. However, that would make more sense to me if Metroidvanias weren’t so hot right now. Metroid Dread was a game of the year nominee. The Hollow Knight series has sold over 20 million copies. And just a few years ago, the original Metroid Prime, the game that Beyond seems to want to resemble so badly, was remastered to great critical and commercial success. It is very confusing why Metroid Prime 4: Beyond forewent the tenets of map design for which Metroid is so beloved.
Metroid fans waited eighteen years to once again get lost in the world of Metroid Prime, and I suppose we’ll be waiting for a nineteenth.
Darren (Music)
Darren
As I played through Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, I got a sense of familiarity from what I was hearing in its soundtrack. When I learned that the composers were Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, the legendary musicians responsible for the previous three Metroid Prime games, and many other Metroid titles in the series over its near forty year history, I was excited, yet surprised! I genuinely thought we had heard the last of them, after other musicians such as Daisuke Matsuoka (Samus Returns), Soshi Abe and Sayako Doi (Dread) were involved in the series, seemed to take the musical helm, while Yamamoto and Hamano appeared to take an advisory role. While it’s true that every track didn’t hit for me, I felt they both did a great job in creating a soundtrack that was deserving of a Metroid Prime title.
The first theme that comes to mind is the title theme, its choral approach reminded me of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, which was released eighteen years prior. I also really enjoyed the Ice Belt’s Power Generator theme, which kicked in upon restoring functionality to the machine. The stand out track for me however, has to be Volt Forge. Yamamoto’s signature electric guitar, alien-sounding synths, a simple yet impactful piano, and those iconic choirs. It has everything I wanted from a piece of Metroid music, and reminds me so much of Sanctuary Fortress. I may even go further and say it even surpasses that theme! As soon as I heard it for the first time in the overview trailer prior to release, I knew I would love it.
While I was disappointed that the soundtrack didn’t have the dynamic approach I was hoping for, all in all, I was satisfied with what Yamamoto and Hamano created. I truly hope this isn’t the last we have heard from them, they are a huge part of what makes Metroid special.
To all our readers: thank you so much for supporting us. We hope this review has been a satisfying read. We wish to extend our gratitude to everyone who worked on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond as well, and acknowledge that hard work and miracles are required to ship a game in the first place.
Written by:
Roy
Irene
Seth
Deadweight
Darren
Header image by: Leon