So Metroid Prime 4 finally drops after what feels like seven decades of waiting, and instead of this massive, triumphant return, it just left me sitting there thinking, “That’s it?” I don’t know if my expectations were cooked or if the game actually fumbled the bag this hard, but wow, it’s not what I hoped for. When you wait this long for something, you expect to feel something. Excitement, relief, nostalgia. Literally anything other than mild confusion.
Prime has always been about atmosphere. That quiet, isolated tension where the silence does more storytelling than any dialogue ever could. You walk into a room, hear some weird alien hum, and immediately your brain starts piecing together the lore without needing to be told anything. Prime 4 kind of remembers that visually, but then constantly interrupts itself with characters talking at you, nudging you toward objectives, or throwing in some joke that ruins the mood. It feels like the game is terrified you will get bored if it stays quiet for more than fifteen seconds. That is the opposite of what made Metroid Prime special. And as usual, when a franchise tries to modernize, they never modernize the right parts. They modernize the parts nobody asked for.
But honestly, the atmosphere issue is only the start. The bigger problem is how strangely empty the world feels, even though it is technically bigger. The whole map looks like it desperately wants to copy Breath of the Wild’s sense of mystery but instead ends up feeling like an off brand imitation. The areas are large. You can run around. None of that matters when the world does nothing with all that space. Half the time it feels like they stretched the map out to meet some open world quota, yet the openness adds nothing meaningful. It is just space. Like walking through a gorgeous parking lot.
And because of that, the pacing tanks. Older Prime games made every hallway and tiny room feel intentional. Prime 4 throws you into long pathways that look like they are building toward something, and then nothing happens. You loop back around or end up scanning some random geological formation that means absolutely nothing. Scanning used to be this subtle, atmospheric bit of worldbuilding. Now it feels like full on busywork. Why am I scanning so many random objects that add nothing to the experience.
People online are split between “it is fine, stop overreacting” and “yeah, this is not it.” Someone described it as “Prime 1 but flattened and stretched like pizza dough.” Honestly, that might be the closest description I have seen. It looks like Metroid. It does not feel like Metroid. There is no punch, no confidence, no real sense of discovery. The game genuinely seems to believe that bigger maps automatically equal better design. Bigger is not better when you spend most of your time wandering through empty scenery.
What makes this worse is that the game is not even bad. If it were awful, at least there would be something to talk about. But it is not broken or unplayable. It is just painfully mid, sitting in a franchise that used to be anything but mid. And every once in a while, you see a glimpse of what it could have been. The lighting hits perfectly, the music swells, the atmosphere almost clicks. Then someone starts talking again, or you get sent across another lifeless biome to scan a door panel. Whatever momentum it builds just dies instantly.
Maybe the delays cursed it. Maybe the project changed direction too many times. Maybe Nintendo wanted a bit of that Breath of the Wild magic and forgot that Metroid never needed that type of magic in the first place. I might be wrong, but Prime 4 really feels like a game that was restarted so many times it lost the core of what made it matter.