Review: Metroid Prime 4 Is Unfortunately Defined by Its Lack of Cohesion
January 31, 2026
Metroid Prime 4 had an opportunity to be a statement game for Nintendo. Metroid Dread was received incredibly well by critics, and a new 3D game in the series seemed like a perfect follow-up. Several years of delays surely meant that Prime 4 would feel extra polished. In reality, however, Metroid Prime 4 is a very clear victim of misdirection. 6+ years of development have created an incredibly beautiful title, but it lacks the quality vision and design that Nintendo games are known for.
Enjoyability: 8/12 — Core Features That Make Poor Building Blocks
Metroid games are generally really satisfying to play through, but Metroid Prime 4 unfortunately doesn’t live up to that standard. It’s not that the game struggles to ever really capture player interest, it’s more so that Prime 4 unnecessarily kills retention with some incredibly poor design decisions.
The game’s dungeons are pretty captivating experiences in a vacuum, but Sol Valley, Metroid Prime 4’s desert hub overworld, makes its presence felt way too pervasively throughout the game. Traversing Sol Valley in Metroid Prime 4 is time-consuming, unfulfilling, and, worst of all, incredibly mandatory. Unfortunately, this unnecessary wasting of time isn’t isolated just to the overworld exploration.
Scanning and the use of psychic powers are meant to add more flavor to Metroid Prime 4, but they truthfully only serve to slow down a game that already feels too sluggish. So while the main areas do deliver both exciting action and stimulating puzzle design, they are also bogged down by a misguided design philosophy. Metroid Prime 4 overall feels more tedious than it has any right to be. The game is great when the ball is fully rolling, but that pace gets interrupted too often.
Gameplay: 9/12 — Safe, But Plenty Serviceable
Metroid Prime 4 serves as a great demonstration of how useful the Nintendo Switch 2’s offering of mouse controls are. Though it does feel a bit awkward at first, Prime 4 unmistakably appreciates the more precise shooting. It’s actually pretty hard to properly grade out the gameplay, because your experience can vary a lot depending on how you choose to play it.
Personally, I would err on the side of saying that the game demands a little too much precision than what is feasible on normal controls. This is only really a concern in boss fights, though. The combat is generally more concerned with how you react in battles rather than how well you can land your hits. Evading is just as important as damage dealing, and Metroid Prime 4 does a good job of stressing that in the majority of its big fights. Of course, it only feels nice, because the game gives you the proper means of doing so in battle.
From there, everything else feels relatively solid. The elemental shots in Metroid Prime 4 are a nice addition, allowing you to disrupt enemies in different ways. The Control Beam is also quite the useful skill; though, the game weirdly stops pushing it as a major option after the first few hours. Samus’ other tools aren’t too inventive, but there’s nothing wrong with them either. Being functional is enough of a positive.
Atmosphere: 10/12 — Super Crisp
As of right now, Metroid Prime 4 is one of the best looking games that Nintendo has ever released. Visually, the game is stunning. Its realism isn’t its main appeal, though. What makes Prime 4 really stand out is its vibrancy. Metroid Prime 4 is full of life and color. This holds true for the audio just as much as the visuals. Both of these things come together to deliver memorable moments through Samus’ journey.
Unfortunately, there’s no escaping the reality that Sol Valley is a major momentum killer for Prime 4. Its inclusion is truly a disservice to every other aspect of the world design. Going from intense ending sequences back to the mostly empty valley is just too grating. I apologize for mentioning Sol Valley this much, but it simply makes that much of a negative impact on the game.
Design: 9/12 — Little Mystique
Metroid Prime 4 isn’t particularly innovative in its design. But even if you look at it on an individual level, the game is a bit bland in its approach to progression. What’s mainly at fault here is that there’s little mystique to what Samus is doing. It is too unashamedly a Point A to Point B kind of adventure. Several item unlocks happen just because the game couldn’t come up with a way for players to discover them naturally.
What seems to be a pattern for Metroid Prime 4 is that the dungeon areas feel mostly free of the game’s problems elsewhere. They have much more coherent identities. Enemy encounters feel more focused, puzzles make smarter use out of Samus’ new abilities, and the environments actually impact the exploration in interesting ways.
The dungeon bosses are just about the only thing that fail to impress, in my opinion. You might feel different about them if you really like the gameplay, but I just don’t think they cap off the dungeons all that well. Only taking damage from certain well-placed hits makes them relatively slow to kill. This doesn’t build any tension. It just makes most of those fights annoying. Encounters with Sylux are incredibly refreshing, because they don’t follow those rules. Those fights, in turn, actually feel nicely paced.
Direction: 8/12 — Missing The Point
It’s pretty standard to get lost in Metroid games, but it’s rarely ever frustrating. There’s a certain thrill to finding new areas from pure trial and error. Because Metroid Prime 4 is so unnecessarily big, that doesn’t really happen here. In Prime 4, it can be easy to lose track of the main objective, and chasing it down on your own is anything but satisfying. The game simply tries your patience too often, resulting in little desire to invest time into pointless searches. So much ground needing to be covered isn’t exactly inviting either.
On a narrative level, Metroid Prime 4 is even less uplifting. There is no point in the story that will legitimately capture players’ interest, except for maybe the ending. The main issue is that the story feels almost insulting. The game is filled with elementary and clichéd writing. Metroid Prime 4, in general, feels like a game that compromises its vision just to better appease a broader audience. Unfortunately, Prime 4 sacrifices a lot for little return.
