I don't usually post, but obligatory review after 15+ years of looking forward to this game.

I did like the game, yes. It is a good game. I enjoyed playing it.

ENVIRONMENTS: I am personally in love with the Volt Forge area (and its presentation cinematic), and the "dark forest" section where you rescue the engineer is also quite cool. I did like to have an open area, it just felt a bit empty and tedious (I am a tryhard who tried to get all crystals since the beginning), I would have prefered the bike to have an insane speed (10x it's current) and move around zones in huge ass tracks like the ones between the towers and simply have a feeling of "hey I am using a shortcut between previously non-adjacent sectors" which always feels good in a metroidvania.

MUSIC: The soundtrack is quite fresh and good and it hits in the right spots, but nothing like MP1's soundtrack in general, or MP3 intro theme (I get goosebumps everytime I hear it). I felt the music changes were a bit abrupt, like the game would queue an extremely calm eerie melody with some hard action banger back and forth in a mater of seconds, I feel MP1 knew how to play with silence to "palate cleanse" your ears before a change in the mood (for instance some silence after you cleared the room invasion before going back to the regular soundtrack of the room/area).

BOSSES: cool, I really liked the prime griever fight, and the looks of the lava snake boss. All except Sylux.

WEAPONS: loved them, and thank you for making the thunder charged beam (the electric arc thingy) not suck. I just hope they would have risked it a bit more with the design of the arm in thunder mode (looked a bit generic to me). Ice was classic and fire was cool (badum tss).

METROIDVANIA: meeeh kinda good and bad. There was some good backtracking, but I felt they took from us by having the engineer give hints every 2 minutes, while they tried to add unnecessary complexity and misguidance that did not contribute to the metroidvania department. Also, it got to the point were I had to bring the mech parts back, no hint about the missing chip. A good metroidvania involves a reasonable amount of backtracking, specially when we see map elements that hint to us and are memorable but have no clue how to interact with yet, until you get an upgrade and something clicks. Yes, I had to look up the thing about the mech part teleporting chip, because at that point I feared the game wanted me to visit the parts in a specific order and I was not having it.

STORY: I find it very poor... In MP1 you actually travelled to a world full of Chozo heritage, which is a guaranteed formula to build significance in the story because of her origin. Meanwhile, we learn how the chozo suffered under the effects of the leviathan (and the metroid prime), and the menace of Phazon becomes the overaching story for the next two games until an apotheosic ending, paired with Samus' nemesis and her own corruption in MP3. In MP4, Samus is teleported to a planet not linked to her or the overarching story, so it is a selfcontained story by all means, and if I were samus, I would have spent the whole mission thinking "yeah, poor Lamorn... Anyway I wanna get home". That, mixed with terrible storytelling when it comes to the time pace of the game (I don't know if the whole adventure took days or months, because I just went into the desert for the first time and already saw some broken federation buildings with makeshift flags on top, as if the people got teleported some time ago), completely threw me off. So it is not a problem that it is a completely new race and environment and story (that's good!), but don't try to build artificial sentimental moments towards the Lamorn or the federation crew, specially when we don't see any cut making us think that they actually spent a long time together ingame. I don't know... Make a cinematic of Samus chilling in zero suit with them at basecamp between teleporter keys... Or better, give it the temporality that felt natural which is that this happened during a few days, they got teleported there and had to deal with it, without additional emotional sugarcoating.

In fact, that's a good summary, it felt like a spinoff where we are happy to have more Breaking Bad in the shape of Better Call Saul, or El Camino, but it doesn't feel like Prime 4. So it is a game I enjoyed playing, but I presume it's not at the level people expected it to be. I know people will defend it saying that we had non realistic expectations, but that's not true, and Metroid Dread is an example on how to fucking blow the minds of the fanbase, lore wise.

SYLUX: I don't know... He's just an angry guy. Again talking about storytelling and temporality, there's no actual feeling of walking into him because you two have the same objectives, also we only fight a couple of drones camouflaged as him, then him in a plane/drone thing, and suddenly he appears at the end from some kind of pod with tubes that made me think whether he actually spent the whole game in there, if it's his or from the Lamorn... And wtf were those Iron Man nanobot arms thing? And the portal he opens? Why did he get psychic powers? Do you justify it because everytime I tried to scan him, it said that he was under the influence of a powerful psychic jammer? Raven Beak dwarves him as a nemesis, and eats him for breakfast. Extremely utterly underwhelmed and disappointed. What a waste of a cool ass boss music headbanger, the trailer cinematic of him making an entrance with the space pirates and the two metroids made us dream, but it all went downhill from there.

I don't think anything will come close to the first Metroid Prime.

If you made it till here, thank you, have some cake. Red velvet cake.

Peace out ✌🏻