In video games, outer space is home to countless extraordinary worlds, so it's a shame we don't get to see them through Samus Aran's eyes more often—the original Metroid Prime trilogy wrapped up in 2007. With Metroid Prime 4: Beyond ($69.99), developer Retro Studios makes the long wait more than worthwhile. Beyond stands out as a masterclass in game design—a richly detailed, immersive maze that rewards exploration at every turn. It’s a thrilling and intricate shooter, combining intellectual challenges with high-octane action, all wrapped in stunning visual artistry, powered by the Nintendo Switch 2 (also available on Nintendo Switch). Simply put, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is easily one of 2025's best releases, my personal favorite game of the year, and a rare five-star, Editors' Choice award recipient. 

Story: An Excellent Space Opera Entry Point

Don't let the number in the title deter you from playing. Although Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has narrative deep cuts for franchise fans, including major plot points taken from obscure handheld spin-offs, it's ultimately a standalone adventure. Even the titular Metroid monsters aren't that prominent outside of boss fights. All you need to know is that Samus Aran is the baddest bounty hunter in the galaxy, a fact that the game constantly reminds you of as it continuously frames the battle-tested heroine in effortlessly cool poses. 

Beyond's main plot sees Samus teleported and stranded on a remote alien planet. Although it has occasional cut scenes and conversations, you discover the bulk of the story by manually scanning objects. You learn many details about the world, including its flora and fauna, as well as the rise and fall of a once-proud and now mournful civilization. Metroid has always been influenced by the Alien franchise; after all, its top villain is named Ridley. In Beyond, Metroid leans into Prometheus energy via failed attempts at engineering new life forms through weird goo.

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Beyond also taps into James Cameron's Aliens by featuring a plucky crew of space marines who are likewise stranded on the planet. At worst, these characters are somewhat stock, providing a contrast against a singularly awe-inspiring figure like Samus. For example, there's a chatty nerd and an old, gruff general. They leave you alone for long stretches of the journey, so when they're deployed, it's with purpose.

Initially, your comrades explain tutorials at base camp. Later, they pop up for set-piece moments that advance the story and diversify the gameplay. In a nice touch, soldiers aid you in battle if you can protect them, and a hulking robot companion clears paths blocked by debris. There are some neat hints of worldbuilding as one teammate explains his spiritual beliefs, which sets up a lovely payoff. These supporting characters are Beyond's weakest element, but they're inoffensive and serve their purpose well. As always, Metroid's real story is between you and the planet.

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Graphics: Artful Worlds That Encourage Exploration

Samus is a bounty hunter, but she doesn't enjoy killing. She's not Doom Guy, who lives to slaughter demons. Samus's violence is self-defense, a necessary part of the job while exploring a hostile alien land. Understanding and interacting with the environment is the goal, which is engrossing in an interstellar way, not unlike No Man's Sky. That sense of discovery is what Beyond passionately stirs in you while playing. People insisting that the Prime titles aren't mere first-person shooters but first-person adventures was always a bit of a pretentious statement. However, it's an accurate way to convey what the series wants you to care about: the meaningful gameplay variety that's more than blasting aliens.

It starts with the artwork. Beyond's canvas takes gaming mainstays like "ice level" and "fire level" and renders them into incredibly lush, dense, and immersive 3D spaces. The world features beautifully ethereal landscapes as well as industrial facilities that feel functional and fully realized despite their alien natures. Familiar details (an altar, an elevator) ground you as your senses absorb it all. And at the center of the world is a looming, ancient, and unknowable ivory tower that beckons further adventure. 

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The visuals are elevated by aesthetic choices that lean into the awesomeness of, say, a prog rock album cover without tipping over into cheesy parody. Samus gets struck by lightning inside a biomechanical motorcycle factory in the eye of a storm ripped from an H.R. Giger painting. She fights a pack of ice wolves before crossing perilous frozen rope bridges into hidden glacier labs. All the while, the music wails, whether it's from guitars or synths or haunting inhuman chanting.

On Nintendo Switch 2, Beyond's enhanced performance, either 4K/60fps (my preferred detailed presentation on TV) or 1080p/120fps (it's one of the rare games to fully support the handheld screen's smoother refresh rate), presents everything at blisteringly high fidelity. I didn't have the chance to play the game on the original Switch. 

The art deftly brings these areas to life in tandem with gameplay that mines the concept's creative potential. Beyond rivals the finest Zelda dungeons with its ability to present you with a litany of ingenious puzzles to solve and levels to navigate, micro tasks to complete, and macro goals to accomplish. Likewise, the increasingly clever keys and locks are visually communicated through design. Lava isn't a barrier, but an ocean waiting to be crossed. If you can energize a broken machine, what will it do? This game trains you to see an alien assembly line sorting garbage and realize that it's not just a nifty background detail; it's a crucial escape hatch, if you can figure it out. 

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Beyond is an adventure that's so much more than defeating enemies with a gun; it's about becoming in tune with the world. This classic Metroid idea is even more explicit in Beyond, as Samus gains psychic abilities that expand her mind to better adapt to the setting. Psychedelic communions with extraterrestrial ghosts drive home that knowledge. A world this complex requires an open-minded arsenal to match.

Gameplay: Put Your Mind and Trigger to the Test

This quest for enlightenment about your environment, represented by a map that gradually fills as you play, defines the Metroid formula. In fact, the formula is so established that a genre (Metroidvania) is named after the series. It's an investigative formula that must be supported by diverse abilities, sparking your imagination for novel potential interactions. It's about seeing a massive rock early on and knowing you'll eventually obtain the bomb that can break it. Beyond’s power-ups, generously spread across its 15-hour run time, don't disappoint.

Many abilities returning from prior games, like Samus’s compact Morph Ball form or the grapple beam, are tweaked by the new psychic powers conceit. More than just a glowing purple visual effect, the psychic powers emphasize uncovering hidden platforms and manipulating invisible forces. Again and again, you’re encouraged to open your third eye and view your surroundings in new ways as you figuratively and literally spend mental energy. One of my favorite recurring multi-step solutions, cleverly combining new and old mechanics, requires you to infuse a Morph Ball bomb with psychic power so you can manually fling the upcoming explosion to a distant trigger.

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Even as it shares the spotlight with other tools, Samus's trusty arm cannon remains a reliable weapon. It, too, gets a psychic boost as Samus can slow down time and guide charged shots to specific targets with her mind. Along with solving puzzles, this is a useful strategic skill during the dynamic and surprisingly challenging combat encounters with bosses and regular enemies. I took cover and shot tough enemies from behind by guiding blasts like boomerangs. Other projectile powers satisfy in and out of combat, like the ice shot that extinguishes fires and freezes foes in their tracks. 

Even without gimmicks, shooting never feels like an afterthought, with tense firefights punctuating methodical exploration. One spectacular sequence, a descent into caves, punishes you for using your stronger but louder armaments, like missiles, by summoning more enemies. On Switch 2, you can choose between dual-stick, motion, and mouse controls. Although the lock-on targeting is serviceable, the extra accuracy from the more precise input options is put to effective use against trickier targets.

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Metroid Prime 4: Beyond reminds me of Metroid Dread, a game that followed a remake (Metroid: Samus Returns) with a slick and assured approach to updating classic 2D Metroid play. With Beyond, you can feel how Retro Studios' remaster of the first Metroid Prime, itself a masterpiece, got the creative juices flowing. One big difference, though, is that the video game industry is awash in new terrific 2D Metroidvanias, including Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and several indie hits. But aside from Batman: Arkham City and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, 3D blockbusters Metroidvanias are far more rare. That makes Beyond's evolution of the form all the more impressive, even if it's not the most radical change.

It’s a delicate dance. Giving Zelda an open-world scope did wonders for Breath of the Wild, but it's a style like that could easily break the Metroid series. After all, the intoxicating Metroidvania formula relies on your curiosity naturally uncovering a planned route. However, Beyond's vision is so thoughtful and deliberate that it keeps you engaged on a room-to-room basis while never feeling obviously and artificially guided. 

The shooter has a confident, bespoke variety of excellent scripted campaigns in classics like Half-Life 2, Resident Evil 4, and Titanfall 2. It also has the empowering self-motivation that comes from nonlinear, criss-crossing treks between biomes in search of the path forward. Got the fire shot? Time to go back and melt walls in the ice lab. The world's big, and you can get lost, but it's not so overwhelming that you can't handle the mental stack.

Still, Beyond manages to modestly and intelligently expand its scope with the Sol Valley, an entirely new zone type for a Metroid Prime game. This large desert isn't an open world, but an overworld that connects other areas. Think of Wind Waker's Great Sea. It's just big enough to have meaningful things to find, like enemies to fight or self-contained challenges with optional upgrades. However, it's not so large that it becomes empty and tedious. Crucially, it doesn't break the Metroid structure with bloat and doesn't distract from the crafted locales that actually matter, which you always see off in the distance. 

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The desert is also where you'll make the most out of another Beyond selling point. Although you can travel on foot, you can reach destinations much faster on Samus's space motorcycle, the Vi-O-La. Having a stylish ride adds to her cool factor and acts as a useful puzzle-solving tool. But mostly, I sped across the lonely, quiet expanse, a graveyard buried under harsh sand and sun. It’s a new twist on the purposefully boring isolation Metroid thrives on for mood and atmosphere. Without compromising game design, the desert helps sell the idea that this was a planet where beings once lived. More games can benefit from being big without toppling under their own weight.