tldr: Metroid Prime 4 is disappointing, inconsistent, and poorly paced, but it brings a lot of the Metroid Prime you know and love. I love Metroid Prime but would not recommend it for anyone who isn't an ardent Prime fan. But, it has some of the best music from the entire Prime series. So.... Win?

vibe: I guess this is what it looks like when something manages to crawl its way out of development hell.

Metroid Prime is my favorite games,

I've played a number of games to try and scratch that "Metroid Prime" itch. Prey, Outer Wilds, Control, Manifold Garden, and Deadcore. These are all good games!

But only Metroid Prime can scratch that itch. If you're in that same boat, then you should get Metroid Prime 4. It has some good Metroid rime parts in it. But if you were in that boat, you've probably already gotten your hands on this game. I would wait for a sale, or even better, for a mod and an emulator.

It's a spectacle,: The graphics on the Switch 1 are amazing, but I'm lucky my roommate has a Switch 2 they doesn't use and an HDR-display television. Retro has, once again, helped Metroid claim the title of "Best Graphics On Its System". After Mario Kart World, I was worried HDR on the Switch 2 didn't work well, but Retro proved that wrong. HDR is used everywhere, to great effect. It's very pretty.

The soundtrack is soup for my soul: The sound and environment design are spectacular. I've spent many more hours listening to Metroid Prime music than I have playing the games, and Metroid Prime 4 genuinely makes for some of the best music the series has seen. After Dread's dreadful showing in the music department, Prime 4 is a triumphant return.

The inconsistent tone is almost hilarious: Samus watches stoically: a video feed of a Lamorn scientist. The gravity sets still the heart of one of the final denizens of a dying species, as their last light of hope is extinguished, and the portent of extinction fast approaches. The recording ends. The silence which follows is almost a lamentation unto itself.... Then the cutscene ends, and you're kicked to funky fresh funtime background music beats beckoning you to stand and dance.

The writing is also inconsistent: Games like Undertale or Tunic showcase the realization of a singular vision. There are no fissures of misunderstanding that can crop up between members of a giant team. The story is inconsistent and it really does read like "bad fanfiction" at some parts. There are tropes here I use when I write my own Peterchimarean stuff! And that's before we get into how silly it is that Samus is, once again, the Chosen One.

The characters aren't so bad: Their writing is PG but they're treated seriously. Good voice acting and motion capture make them seem less cartoonish and silly. One of them are a big fan of Samus, and that's delightful.

The boss fights: Metroid Prime 4 has the best and the worst boss fights of Metroid Prime, including spinoffs.

The desert is worse than I ever could have imagined, and it serves only to hold green crystals: I went into this game optimistic, having had been only somewhat exposed to the Gamer Seethe over Sol Valley. I hate to hand it to the Gamers, but they were right. The moment you get the bike and enter the desert, the pacing flatlines. You are treated to the least-engaging environment I have played in a videogame in a long, long time. This stretches a 6 hour game into a 12+ hour game, and makes for the worst 100% requirements the Metroid series has ever seen. The desert is littered with a low variety of enemies, with janky one-button combat.

Three fetchquests, one of which are green crystals: In order to beat the game, rather than collecting 12 temple keys or so, you need to fulfill three separate fetchquests, one of which are collecting "green crystals". (As a tip: Wait until you get the powerbombs to search for more than 50% of the collection bar. You will thank me later!)

The 100% ending requires 200% of the green crystals...: Prime 4 retains the much-hated missable scans, and adds a point of no return, and requires you collect 200% of the green crystals. These show up in large bunches you ram a motorcycle into. Most of the time, you will miss part of the crystals, since the bike is hard to aim. The result is that a teeeeensy sliver, impossible to see with the naked eye, will remain uncollected.

Driving for miles for green crystals is made worse by Myles: I'm ramming my bike into green crystals in the soulless desert, farming them, so I can unlock the next tier of the Green Crystals upgrade. Meanwhile, Myles is beckoning me - sometimes multiple times a minute - to explore somewhere with my new abilities.

Green crystals make everything worse: Half of these points are about green crystals. Green crystals make the game combinatorially worse, every bad aspect refracted and amplified through their facets. It's like the game was about to ship, and a genius saboteur was directed to find the optimal way to make the game worse. It's mind-boggling to think of this as an intentional design decision. I wonder if this was decreed from focus-group market-research to make the game appealing to a broader environment? "These will be our Minecraft Diamonds!" some executive states in glee.

At least you get a cool motorcycle. Once you learn to control the motorcycle, it's pretty fun. Mounting and dismounting is as fluid as the morph ball. But it has no reason to exist.

I miss Metroid Prime. The first Metroid Prime, and to a lesser extent Echoes, was the only game in the Prime series to take place in a cohesive world, with organic borders between areas. Prime 3 and Hunters' cordons the game off into several different planets, but that's not as bad as Prime 4. Combined with uninspired names for locations, Prime 4 makes for the most shallow world design. It's the least cohesive Metroid Prime has ever been.

Mods? I think this will be made much better with a mod that removes the desert entirely. If I were to replay the game with a quick-and-dirty "no desert" hack, I would enjoy Prime 4 far more.

VERDICT: I'm going to spend more time listening to the music than I have playing this game. 10/10 music, 8/10 for the good part of the game, 2/10 for the desert.