Metroid Prime is the vital “mood” game. The atmosphere is what sells it, shootin’ shit is just a plus.

Straight out of the gate, boom, detailed planet in the distance whilst in the middle of space. It hooks you in with its stellar visuals and killer soundtracks, and keeps you sucked in with its atmospheric world building.

Curling up into a ball and rolling or bouncing around might be the absolute most fun thing in any game ever. Because, sure, it’s not the only game to ever have a playable ball, but it is the only one that looks, sounds, and feels like this while also racking up alien K/Ds. Bouncing off of morph ball bombs through the air, using the spider power up to roll around ceilings and walls, twisted columns, it’s so surreal.

Metroid coined the term “metroidvania,” and Metroid Prime 15 years later certainly shows why. Yep, there certainly is a whole lot of backtracking here. It’s not terrible since the goal is just collecting artifacts and the maps are extremely detailed. Colored
doors guide your way to understand the best path to advance from elevator to elevator.

Where Metroid Prime fails, though, is its endgame. Petrasyls may be my least favorite game enemy of all time. They are not fair and challenging, they are not a scary design, they are not cool to look at. They take way too many shots, and latch onto your face constantly for no other reason than to slow you down. So, when they start coming my way by the dozens after the Phazon Suit is acquired, I want to die. Especially when the final boss throws 2-4 of them at once, so you’re just scrambling to try and get them off of you.

There’s not a whole lot bosses here, since the focus is the vibe, but when you do come across a boss, it is very fun. I just kind of wish they’d had been more balanced out throughout the whole game, rather than really spread out.

Metroid Prime Remastered takes the cake of an already amazing game, and adds some icing to really boost its replay-ability. This is one of the best looking games on the Switch, the source material was already there. Thanks Reggie, you did it this time. 8/10

When I was a kid, Metroid Prime was the game that made me love video games. It made me understand what this medium could really be. When the Trilogy release came out for the Wii, I began a tradition of playing all three games every year. This continued until the release of the Nintendo Switch, where I put my Wii and Wii U down for good and vowed to return to the games only when Nintendo released them for the new platform. It took a long while, but in 2023 it finally happened, and Prime was better than I remembered. We're still waiting on the other two, but for now, I can see no reason not to resume the tradition with this incredible remaster. For the first time, in at least 7 full playthroughs of Metroid Prime, I put the game on Hard Mode. I figured it would be annoying and spongey, but that it would be an interesting new way to experience the game. I also went with the classic Gamecube control scheme this time, playing the game as it was meant to be played for the first time in almost 20 years.

I am beyond thrilled to report that Metroid Prime not only holds up, it holds up better than it ever has. Really, I think this was the most I've ever enjoyed Metroid Prime. As I've gotten older, and as I've experienced many many more video games and watched video essays and GDC talks, even worked on designing my own video games, I've become much more intimately familiar with game design as an art. The way a game guides you, the way a game paces itself, plays upon your expectations, challenges the skillsets you've been taught. It really cannot be overstated how unbelievably well designed Metroid Prime is. Its map is tighter than it seems, and it dots its objectives so smartly the player doesn't even realize how good the trick is. The illusion of an open confusing map, when in reality the player is almost always being led to the right place without even knowing it. It's really something else. This gets stretched quite a bit in the endgame, as now the entire map is yours to explore. The endgame gauntlet as you descend through the Phazon Mines to get the Power Bombs, then climb back out in order to get the Grapple Hook, X-Ray Visor, and Plasma Beam... they really send you back across pretty much the entire map. I've seen complaints about the backtracking, specifically about how every area doesn't connect to every area, causing a longer than desired detour in order to venture to some of the more out of the way destinations. Hell, I even picked some of those same nits myself when I last played the game. My eyes are open now, though. The game sends you all that way so you can pick up the Artifacts, grab all the collectibles, visit those final rooms in Chozo Ruins and Phendrana Drifts that you couldn't yet reach. I knew this during my last playthrough of course, it's a pretty obvious move. But somehow I didn't fully grasp the genius of it - how subtly and smartly these necessary powerup destinations cross paths with the Artifacts you need. By the time I got back to the Mines with all the abilities I needed to take on the Omega Pirate, I had already picked up every Artifact besides the one you need the Phazon Suit for - an Artifact handily located on your trip back up through the Mine, ripe for the picking. The game design is perfect. Just perfect.

Just as notable as the game design (and the incredible soundtrack, sound design, visuals both in 2002 and 2024, etc) is how obviously influential the game has clearly been, and how its effects still ripple through the industry to this day. Exploring this abandoned civilization, only getting to read vague descriptions as lore and otherwise using the world design and environmental cues of this decaying world to tell a story. That's all an apt description of Metroid Prime, but it's also an equally apt description of Dark Souls and the many games that would follow in its wake. I'm not arguing that Metroid Prime was the chief inspiration for Dark Souls - it's more likely that Ocarina of Time was more significant - but it certainly stood out to me on this playthrough just how many cues modern games take from Metroid Prime's storytelling. Little things like all the doors in Tallon IV having been installed by the Space Pirates, with the different beam doors correlating to 'Security Clearance Levels' for their troops. The whole 'Metroid Prime' thing itself famously falls apart under intense scrutiny, but I'm willing to ignore that in the face of how much the game gets right here, especially for 2002. When games were only just beginning to excel at telling stories with sound and visuals over text descriptions, Metroid Prime wordlessly manages to combine both to build an untouchable atmosphere and create a unique game world codex all its own.

Please port the other two games Nintendo I am begging you. Shocking as this sounds after this review, the last time I played the Trilogy back in 2016 I considered Metroid Prime my least favorite of the three games. I'm fiending for a chance to see how the others stack up. Let me at 'em.

I definitely gotta play more metroidvanias going forward. Metroid Prime is very good but I did have a lot of small grievances with it, the backtracking and the boss fights being the worst of it. When I say backtracking I'm not referring to revisiting areas, I'm talking about having to traverse the same pathways over and over again to get to and from a specific area. My problem with the boss fights comes from how long they take and how they aren't involved enough to remain interesting for the whole duration. None of my complaints are major enough to ruin the game or anything but they're enough for me to dock it a few points.