Complete? “Mission complete”? NO! Mission not complete! The hell was that ending?! Send me back, dammit!
Anyway, now that I’ve unlocked everything in the gallery, thoughts on the game. I have some mixed feelings admittedly, but first, the good:
- Everything that isn’t Sol Valley. When you’re in first person, it just feels like Metroid Prime, and I say this having played Prime Remastered, so it’s not just my memory stewing in 15 years of nostalgia. The environments, the music, the controls, all of it is on point.
- On the subject of controls, special mention to the fact that pointer controls now have a dedicated recenter command. It’s such a minor thing to implement, but the QoL improvement is phenomenal. Seriously, my right joycon has major drift, which made pointer controls absolutely unplayable in Prime Remastered. So being able to reset the pointer at will is a godsend. Sure, I could have used twin stick controls instead like a heathen, but why would I do that?
- The GalFed characters. I wasn’t expecting to, but I actually liked their inclusion. Yeah, having other people ruins the whole isolation thing, but Prime 3 already put a hole in that anyway. On normal difficulty, they were actually useful in fights, able to dispatch enemies while I drew aggro. The beefier enemies in hard difficulty made that less viable, but I usually still didn’t need to babysit them too much.
But now, the bad:
- Sol Valley. Look, I like open world games, okay? I like BotW, which was an excellent open world adventure (as a Zelda game though, it was garbage), I liked the Mad Max game, I’ve played most of the mainline AssCreed games through Syndicate. So the fact that they stuck a huge open world hub into the game is not the issue. But the key to a good open world is that it’s full of stuff. Items to find, activities to do, people to interact with (whether friendly NPCs or not). Sol Valley… doesn’t. It’s almost entirely sand dunes and green crystals, which is just boring. And since you have to crisscross the region multiple times over the course of the game, you’ll get slapped with that bland sameness over and over, especially since there’s no fast travel.
All in all, if I were being completely objective I’d put this at maybe 60/100, but on account of being Metroid I bump that up to 75/100.
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Nice work. I didn’t get 100% yet. I went back to play the first Prime. I’m with you opinion-wise.
I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I’m putting this down and probably not picking it back up.
Music is great. Environments great. Love Samus the character.
UX is terrible. I could write an essay about it, there is no redeeming element. There is no chance anyone with a good taste for UX and influence over the direction of the game actually touched this at any point during development.
Game formula is dated and anti-fun, I was ok with this major progression tied behind upgrades playing Super Metroid, but useless power-ups dangling behind obvious missing upgrades in your face multiple times during every linear mission is not it in 2026. Combat is boring, IDK who they are trying to appeal to here other than super fans of the Prime series. Maybe the harder difficulty would improve that but I doubt it, and I’ll never find out because you can’t play the harder difficulty before beating the game. Maybe they are appealing to super casuals, it definitely isn’t appealing to kids despite that being the difficulty level of the various gameplay and combat elements.
The “open world” sand zone is unredeemable. The bike is unredeemable. The fact that we have to suffer through both for so much back tracking is one of the most depressing experiences I’ve had in gaming in 30 years.
The extra characters only detract from the game, especially the technician guy. If you are intending to play this game despite what you’ve read so far, I suggest you immediately turn the sound level down for voices.
Ugh
