Slip Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Review

TL;DR: In case your not interested in the bulk of the review, first, my overall recommendation of this game. I DO recommend it, despite its many, many flaws. If you like science fiction as a genre, Metroidvania games, classic pre-Breath of the Wild 3D Zelda games, games that have exploration, first-person shooters or possibly all of the above, then I think you'd really enjoy this game. IMPORTANT NOTE: In my personal opinion, review scores are meaningless and should be done away with for the good of the games industry. Only the content of the review matters and you should never trust a review that lists loads of faults, then gives a perfect score. I only gave a score at all because Opencritic requires one. Key for review: Quality - Refers to the quality of the individual elements. 1 is an atrocity and affront to video games and fictional media in general. 5 is mid, neither good nor bad. 10 is perfection, Mana from heaven. All quality ratings made taking into account the limits of the hardware and technical capabilities. A score of 10 in graphics, for example, is perfection for Switch 2, not modern gaming as a whole. Frequency - How often the element appears. 1 is a one-off, it only happens once in the entire game. 2 is almost never. 5 is neither frequent nor infrequent, it happens from time to time. 9 is extremely frequent, there is almost never a moment when this element isn't present to the player. 10 is continuous/ever pervasive, the element is ever-present in the game and can not be avoided, potentially having the game be built around it. Review: I have been waiting for this game for considerably longer than most people. Almost 20 years, actually, ever since I beat Metroid Prime 3 back in the Wii era. I am a lifelong, die-hard Metroid fan. Samus Aran is my favorite game character of all time, the Metroid Prime series is my favorite game series of all time and the original Metroid Prime is my all-time favorite video game. I have been looking forward to this game for a long time and I'm sad to say that this game is deeply flawed and quite disappointing. But not because it didn't live up to expectations mind you, no, instead because of some truly baffling and terrible design decisions that are inherently and obviously antagonistic with the Metroid series and sometimes Metroidvanias in general, that no Metroid fan would ever want and which actively make this game less fun. And yet, despite it's many flaws, I still feel that the game's positives outweigh its negatives, if not by a lot and it is most definitely worth buying and playing. If you like science fiction as a genre, Metroidvania games, classic pre-Breath of the Wild 3D Zelda games, games that have exploration, first-person shooters or possibly all of the above, then I think you'd really enjoy this game, despite its many, many flaws. This game is fun and a good time overall and I do recommend it, just know that out of all four Metroid Prime games, this is probably the weakest entry and the least 'Metroid' of the four games by far. If you want the best game in the Prime series, then it's still the original Metroid Prime (with Prime 2 being a close second), but I personally would recommend the incredible remastered version on the Nintendo Switch, not the GameCube original, despite how nostalgic I might be for that version. Pros: 1. Graphics - Quality = 10, Frequency = 10 I genuinely didn't think that games could look this good on Switch 2. I knew that the Switch 2 supposedly had graphical capabilities on par with a PS4 Pro, but still! Seeing it is different, the game is drop dead gorgeous in almost every single frame. Just looking out across the view of Fury Green jungle made my jaw drop and close up visuals look just as good. Plus, 4K resolutions let you appreciate those good looks even more. 2. HDR - (Caveat, bad HDR on both my televisions, they're old. Plus, I'm not an expert on HDR, so it's hard for me to tell for sure) Quality = 8(?), Frequency = 10 On an older SAMSUNG TV with bad HDR, that's set-up as best as it's possible to set up a TV without professional calibration and with Game mode and HGiG enabled and HDR for the console calibrated as best as can possibly be done... The HDR looked damned good to me! Dark parts of the screen looked dark, bright parts looked bright, and comparing dark areas of the game with HDR turned on and HDR turned off, I could always see more easily with HDR turned on, but it never looked washed-out or too bright. 3. Performance - Quality = 9, Frequency = 10 In quality mode, during my entire 15+ hour playthrough I didn't notice any frame-rate drops, significant or otherwise (though to be fair, I'm not really a frame-rate snob) and only noticed a single, very minor, one-off instance of pop-in in the desert, which I couldn't recreate. 4. Gameplay - Quality = 10, Frequency = 7 The moment-to-moment gameplay in this game is incredible. Whether it's movement, combat, puzzles, or whatever, it just feels SO good and fun to play. Controlling Samus has never felt this good. I cannot overstate how good the gameplay is. You are, however, often interrupted from playing the game for many different reasons. Such as constant cutscenes, which seem to happen a lot more often than they did in previous games and last a lot longer and constant hand-holding statements on where you need to go next or what you need to do next, which belittle and insult your intelligence (in the previous games, you'd just get a message from your suit/ship AI every 20-30 minutes, real-time, telling you where you needed to go, but not how to get there, which you could ignore if you wanted). 5. Music/Ambient sound - Quality = 8, Frequency = 10 The music may not be the best the series has ever had, but it's still damned good. It has mostly decent tracks, with a good number of great tracks and few fantastic tracks. Sylux's boss music, for example, would be one of the fantastic tracks. Other tracks in the game, such as the background music for the Fury Green jungle and Magma Pool, contain callbacks and references to the music from previous games, namely Tallon Overworld and Magmoor Caverns, in these two cases (it's not one-to-one, they're new tracks, they're just musically similar). Cons: 1. This game is NOT, repeat NOT a Metroidvania like Prime 1 and 2 or the rest of the Metroid series, it is actually a 'Classic' 3D Zelda-Like. Specifically it's an Ocarina of Time-Like, with Metroid Prime's moment-to-moment gameplay - Quality = N/A, Frequency = 10 A Metroidvania is something very specific. A large game-world broken up in to different, yet fully interconnected and criss-crossing, regions. Each region contains several bosses and mini-bosses. You start in one region of the game and when you start, you have very few traversal or combat abilities. As you progress, you see obstacles you can't destroy and places you can't reach, yet. You explore the region, gathering new weapons, moves and traversal abilities that let you explore further. The game design funnels you in a direction and eventually you open up paths to different regions, you explore them, repeating this process, opening further branching, interconnected paths between regions and use your new-found abilities to open up and reach the areas you couldn't reach before until you've fully explored the entire game-world and you're armed to the teeth with a powerful arsenal of abilties and your ready to face the final boss. A Zelda-like, on the other hand, particularly an OoT-like has a single, sparse overworld in the center of the map to which are connected the game's different 'village' areas, to which, in turn, are connected the game's dungeons - self contained, explorable locations filled with enemy encounters, 1 or 2 mini-bosses from whom you get a new weapon/item to use within that dungeon and beyond, and puzzles to solve, all culminating in a boss fight with that particular dungeon's boss. Beating the dungeon boss gets you one of the game's McGuffins, needed to defeat the ultimate evil, or whatever. Finally, once you've beaten all the dungeons the game has, you travel to the location of the final dungeon, where you fight the final boss. This second kind of game is Metroid Prime 4. Prime 4's different regions are just the game's dungeons (there actually aren't even 'village' areas), the central Sol Valley is just Hyrule Field and the different regions are not interconnected to each other in any way, there are no elevators/fast-travel systems/doorways connecting them to one another like there is in a Metroidvania game. You have to leave Kokiri Forest (Fury Green) and cross Hyrule Field (Sol Valley) to get to Death Mountain (Magma Pool). While I love Zelda (it's my second favourite series after Metroid Prime), this is of course extremely disappointing. I play Metroid to play a Metroidvania, not a Zelda-like. 2. Mandatory, tedious grinding of collectible resource - Quality = 3, Frequency = 7 One of the primary goals of the game is to preserve the history and legacy of the Lamorn, the native race of Viewros, the planet you get sent to. The Lamorn died out in a tragedy millennia ago, but they were psionic, so saw in a prophetic vision that Samus would show up one day. Knowing that she was a good person and would help them if they asked, they set up recordings explaining things to Samus and everything that she would need to take a complete record of their people and planet's history out into the rest of the universe so their people's spirit would be preserved. Because of that, one of the game's most important McGuffins is the 'Memory Fruit', the complete record of the entire Lamorn civilisation contained in a single piece of psionic biotech fruit grown by their Sacred Tree in the jungle of Fury Green. All fine so far, but in order to grow this McGuffin, you need to gather Green Energy crystals (yes, it's actually just called 'Green Energy', no cool name like 'Phazon') and you need A LOT of them. There's a finite number of crystals in the game, enough to fill the energy container you need to fill for the fruit to 200%, and you only need 100% to grow it, with each 25% up to 100% giving you a different upgrade to some of your abilities. This should sound really cool, but the way you get Green crystals is driving around in the boring empty void of Sol Valley, for up to 2 hours per playthrough, smashing clusters of crystals with your bike. It's exactly as boring as it sounds. You could ignore doing this until the very end of the game when getting crystals becomes much easier thanks to the Power Bomb weapon, but then you won't get any of the upgrades (including upgraded damage and rate of fire for your standard beam) until the game's basically over. Plus, how would you know that on your first playthrough? 3. Sol Valley (central desert area) - Quality = 3, Frequency = 8 It's big, It's empty, It's boring and its near-constant, repeated traversal is freaking mandatory baby! 4. Vi-O-La (the motorbike) and the Vi-O-La suit (the cool shiny-red and matte-black one) - Quality = 5, Frequency = 7 The bike exists for the sole purpose of making it quicker to cross Sol Valley. That's it. There are other times when it's used in the game, but it's clearly a case of 'we came up with something to fix a stupid problem that we created for ourselves and then quickly had to come up with some other times you could use it to cover up that fact as best as we could'. They failed. Looks damned cool, though! As for the suit, I could be wrong about this, but I don't think it makes you more resistant to damage like suit upgrades did in previous games. As far as I can tell, the suit only has 2 abilities. Number 1, looking extremely cool and number 2, the power of vehicle registration. I'm not joking, that's the actual in-game description for the suit. The exact model of Vi-O-La that you get is the latest one that the Lamorn developed, called the Mark VII, which has the ability to be assigned for use to a single rider and instantly summoned to that rider, on command, in any location that the bike can reach, but the vehicle registration and summoning only work if your wearing the Vi-O-La suit. That's it, that's all the new suit is, it's literally just a sci-fi version of the hot, leather biker jumpsuit Trinity wears in The Matrix movies combined with the incredible futuristic power of the Department of Motor Vehicles! You spend the entirety of the Volt Forge dungeon reactivating the forge so that you can get these things... This isn't even bad, it's just dumb! 5. The Galactic Federation NPCs - Quality = 1, Frequency = 9 Yeah, this is the big one. I have now played the game in it's entirety to 100% and thus, I am now fully qualified to comment on this. No, they are not a small part of the game. No, they are not non-intrusive. No, it is not possible to just ignore them. Yes, they are extremely annoying. Yes, they do constantly interrupt the gameplay, even when they're not around, using the comms system. Yes, they do constantly follow you around making comments on everything that happens and everything that you do. Yes, they do constantly hold your hand and tell you how to best handle a particular situation, robbing you of the chance to figure it out on your own. Yes, they're AI is useless, constantly putting them in harm's way and getting them killed, especially in the final boss fight, whom they insist on helping you fight and whom they are physically incapable of damaging and whom is so big, with such fast, wide-range attacks that 'drawing aggro' for you is ineffective. Yes, if they die, you do get a game over. Yes, you do have to constantly babysit them in tedious escort missions. Yes, they are in almost every single part of the game, each area (with the exception of Volt Forge, but don't worry! MacKenzie keeps you company on the radio aaaaall dungeon long!) has one or two of them (and in the last dungeon, the Great Mines, ALL 6 at once) that follow you around contributing nothing but irritation and breaking your immersion on your first run-through (the most important run-through) of the area. Yes, they do destroy the immersion and atmosphere by completely obliterating your sense of isolation. Yes, atmosphere is one of the core components and draws of the Metroid series. Yes, that atmosphere is primarily created by your total or near-total isolation on an inhospitable, uninhabited alien world where everything wants to kill you. Yes, they are completely superfluous and contribute nothing positive to the game and actively make the game far worse as an experience. Yes, the game would absolutely work without them, every single thing that the NPCs do for you as their 'special skill' there is already a system that exists in Metroid that could have done the same job just as easily. As an example MacKenzie, the engineer, helps by deciphering the Lamorn language and tech. The only problem, Samus is an actual genius raised by one of the most scientifically advanced species in the cosmos, the Chozo and by this point in the game the Lamorn have already given Samus the full database on their language, told her what's going on, what they need from her, given her the master key to all of their technology and it’s actually Samus that helps MacKenzie decipher the language by giving him a chip with the database on it, probably to make it so that he feels like he's contributing. After he 'deciphers' the language, he then interrupts gameplay with a cutscene, in which he 'reveals' to you everything that you've already found out on your own and Samus just stands there politely and quietly nodding along to make him feel like he's useful. Additionally, Samus' ultra-advanced, alien Chozo Power Suit is a malleable suit of power armor with shape-shifting abilities that has the canonical ability to analyze, absorb and fully incorporate any and all technology, alien or otherwise, that Samus, or the suit itself, deem beneficial that they come across and yet, in this game, you arbitrarily can't use the fire, ice and thunder beams until you have, quote: "a Galactic Federation engineer of level 4 or higher", end quote, install them for you. I'm not joking. Yes, turning speech volume to 0 does help. No, it does not fix the problem, the problem is that these NPCs exist in the first place. Yes, it genuinely seems like Retro Studios believe that these characters are a good thing and that they're genuinely proud of these characters' inclusion. Yes, it genuinely seems like Retro Studios want us to, and believe that we will, like these characters and get attached to them despite how vomit and hate inducingly atrocious they are. No, Retro Studios are clearly NOT in their right minds. No, this is NOT Metroid. No, this is NOT OK. These characters are, without a doubt, the worst part of this game and turned many a part of this game that should have felt unbelievably fun into a serious slog and occasional misery.