I played Metroid Prime 4: I did not enjoy Metroid Prime 4
What does Metroid have to offer in this day and age? The genre of games it helped create have become so common that there's no shortage of games to play if you want that specific kind of exploratory play. What, exactly, does Metroid do that any other game in this space can't do better? Apart from having the budget and prestige of being a Nintendo property, I can't think of anything. I've been thinking about this a lot while playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond because this game doesn't paint a great picture.
Metroid Prime 4's biggest issue is that it is tedious to play. Combat is a chore as you regularly fight waves of the same small stable of foes, boss fights especially with each phase taking too long on top of the fights themselves being boring. Even backtracking, one of the key points to nail, lacks any kind of joy. Finding upgrades rarely ever felt worth the long treks across the desert and through the corridors to the specific point of each zone holding whatever missile or shot upgrade waiting for me.
Each area being it's own self-contained level hurts the overall structure greatly. Metroid always works on the basis of navigating a sprawling map that sees you returning to or cutting through previous zones as you move deeper because that's good and interesting world design. Five distinct zones that are effectively corridors leave zero motivation to poke around and explore, let alone return for upgrades you can't access on your first pass. Placing a large, literal desert between them only makes matters worse because you're still doing the work of manually traveling to each area, only you're doing so in the blandest, most lifeless way possible: crossing a literal empty field devoid of level design.
When I played Metroid Prime for the first time a couple years ago, I was impressed by how much it captured the wonder of metroidvania world design in a 3D space. Traipsing back and forth across the intricate world, understanding the space and finding little shortcuts to get where you wanted faster, is one of the core appeals of these sorts of games and that first Metroid Prime captured it well. Prime 4 by comparison is game that made me long for fast travel because of how much cruft exists between points of interest. If you can't make traversing the world enjoyable and something worth engaging with for its own sake, you've screwed up.
The only interesting part of Metroid Prime 4 is how you can tell the development was rough. So much of the final version feels like the product of stitching together bits and pieces of what they had into something coherent. A lot of decisions make sense in that context. It doesn't change that the game ultimately is mediocre, but it would explain how it got here.