Along with today’s Overview Trailer, the gaming press have shared their impressions of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond after having the chance to play over an hour of it at events last week. They played on Nintendo Switch 2. The segment they played represents the first 90 minutes of the game, after Samus arrives in the Fury Green jungle area of Viewros. She encounters a nervous Federation specialist, Myles MacKenzie, who she has to defend from a group of vicious creatures, and acquires the Psychic Glove ability.

You have to shoot down the vines holding up the ship MacKenzie’s standing on top of to rescue him. For saving MacKenzie, he rewards you with the Missile upgrade. IGN‘s Logan Plant had concerns about MacKenzie becoming a tagalong companion, which would break from the isolation we expect from Metroid. MacKenzie seems to have something to say about everything when you’re with him, which Logan found annoying. If a soldier is downed in battle, you need to use your Psychic abilities to heal them, or else it’s a Game Over. You can reload from your last save or checkpoint.

Once you acquire the Control Beam, you don’t have to escort MacKenzie anymore. The demo ended with the fight against Carvex, which rewards the Bomb. You can use your Psychic Abilities to turn Bombs into Psychic Motes for use in puzzles. Samus will need five Master Teleporter Keys to escape Viewros, the first of which is rewarded shortly after. MacKenzie restores communications and asks Samus to return to base camp, where he tells her that Viewros is an uncharted planet that could be anywhere.

Logan was impressed by the visuals and gameplay. He noted that Nintendo didn’t give them the chance to try Vi-O-La, the new bike that some fans have expressed consternation over. Logan was less taken by the Psychic puzzles and animations, at least from what he played, though he expected they would be more engaging as the game went on. There’s another glimpse of the crawling worm creature seen in the Survive trailer, who some fans thought could be Kanden, but this footage disproves that. It’s simply another creature.

According to Nintendo Life‘s Alex Olney, Samus will lose her abilities at the start of Beyond, because  of course she will. You can’t hurt MacKenzie either, and Alex tried. From their footage, we can see that the in-game Inventory includes your item percentage and elapsed in-game time. That’ll be useful for  speedrunners. He praised the graphics, and was also annoyed by MacKenzie, but praised Samus for not responding to his annoying quips at all apart from a single nod.

This is a developing story…