Opening thoughts: a weirdly loud release
After waiting seemingly forever for Metroid Prime 4, actually finishing it felt strange — not because the game is broken, but because the internet had already decided what it was before I could form an opinion. The first few hours had me hooked, but the constant chorus of hot takes and post-mortems made me question whether I was enjoying the same game everyone else was ranting about.
Playing it without the commentary (almost)
There’s nothing quite like trying to vibe with a game while a thousand algorithm-driven videos shout at you about how it failed. I kept catching myself pausing, mentally tallying up flaws I hadn’t noticed and wondering if I’d missed something obvious. That background noise turned casual curiosity into a weird audit of my own fun.
What actually lands well
Let’s give credit where it’s due: Prime 4 nails a lot of the stuff fans want. The controls feel buttery, the environments look great, and the exploration hooks — scanning things, hunting secrets, sneaking into tight corridors — are satisfying. Boss fights land with proper heft, and the game’s pacing often tempts you to just keep playing “one more room.”
Even the much-mocked desert hub — the place people call empty or half-done — mostly works if you treat it like a playground between the tense dungeon runs. It’s a roomy stretch designed for zipping around on a bike, finding a few collectibles, and letting the scenery breathe between set-piece moments.
Where the game trips up
Prime 4’s attempts to tell a more character-driven story sometimes stumble. The series has historically thrived on loneliness and atmosphere, and when the game leans into chatty companions and obvious character beats, the vibe snaps. Some sequences feel oddly like a conventional, dialogue-heavy shooter — and that can clash with what many people expect from Metroid.
These tonal shifts pulled me out of the experience more than once. It’s not that the ideas are bad; they just don’t always fit the franchise’s groove, and the execution occasionally feels clumsy enough to break immersion.
The expectations problem: why ‘good’ felt insufficient
Here’s the catch: Prime 4 wasn’t just being judged on whether it was fun. It also had to justify its existence as the heir to a near-mythic trilogy. Fans wanted a reinvention, a career-defining masterpiece, or at least something that felt like a triumphant return. Anything short of that became fodder for disappointment, even when the game was solid on its own terms.
Being competent — even often great — wasn’t enough. The game carried the baggage of decades of hype, and that made “good but not legendary” read as a failure to a lot of people.
Final take: maybe kinder with time
Strip away the hype machine and you’ve got a game that’s more hits than misses. It’s one of those titles that kept pulling me back longer than I intended, and I had a lot of genuinely fun moments. It’s imperfect, sure, but not catastrophic. I wouldn’t be shocked if, with a bit of distance, more players remember Prime 4 more fondly than the initial internet uproar suggested.
If you haven’t played it yet and can ignore the drama, go in with an open mind — it might surprise you, especially when you stop listening to the comment feeds and just play.
