While it seems a bit silly in hindsight, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond looks great on the Nintendo Switch 2. That much should be apparent in basically all the footage anyone sees, but playing it in person is an entirely different beast. Despite the brief amount of time I was able to spend with it, my initial impression that carried on throughout was: "Wow, all right, they mean business this time."
That's not to say Nintendo hasn't meant business previously, or that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is particularly straining the hardware, but it's a surprisingly smooth experience that feels responsive and looks gorgeous. I kept wondering, and in fact am still wondering, how the regular Nintendo Switch version will compare. I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Switch 2 version has spoiled me and anything else will pale in comparison.
For Nintendo's part, it's explicitly noted that the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond comes with "enhanced visuals and performance." There's options for Quality Mode and Performance Mode (though both support HDR) too, which means the upcoming Switch 2 game can do 4K at 60fps or full HD at 120fps. In short, Metroid Prime 4 is going to be a looker when it launches later this year.
A prime example
Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch
Release date: TBC 2025
Outside of the performance and graphics, my short demo for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was more or less a tutorial of sorts to introduce the basic mechanics. Lock onto enemies, morph into a ball in order to move through small spaces, charge up your shots, fire missiles. All of this should be familiar to anyone who's played a Metroid Prime game before, and none of the new powers made any kind of appearance – though I suspect they were teased in the end thanks to a plot device.
Easily the most surprising part of playing Metroid Prime 4: Beyond on the Nintendo Switch 2 is how well the Joy-Con 2 actually works as a mouse. It's both shockingly responsive and not as annoying to use as it might seem in videos. The little attachment that lets you scroll the Joy-Con 2 around vertically actually makes for a pretty smooth draw and drag, allowing for precision aiming.
Best of all, however, is that in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (for the Nintendo Switch 2, that is) you can seamlessly transition between using the Joy-Cons as standard controllers and instead use the right one as a mouse. There's no menu juggling involved at all; you move the Joy-Con 2 into position to use it as a mouse and it is a mouse. You move it back, and it's a traditional Joy-Con 2 controller.
It's a bit messy to mentally juggle at first, but once you train yourself to understand what buttons are where in what configuration, and what all they actually make Samus do, it's invaluable. "But why would you swap on the fly like this in the first place?" Let's take the boss at the end of a demo as a prime example.
Without spoiling too much, the brief demo concludes with a boss fight against an enemy that presents several different weak points. They are relatively small, and spread out on the boss' body in such a way that traditional shots can bounce off if not aimed incredibly carefully. All this while said boss tosses shots your way and generally is a nuisance, forcing you to jump or morph into a ball.
Could you hit those weak points with regular shots, using the Joy-Con 2 controllers in a more traditional manner? Sure, almost certainly. People are going to have to be able to do it on the Nintendo Switch, right? But swapping to mouse mode made it a much simpler affair; while I struggled to perfectly land my shots initially, I made most of them once I embraced the mouse functionality.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is set to launch for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 in 2025, although there's no firm release date set just yet. Either way, there's still a lot more for Retro Studios to showcase ahead of the long-awaited return of the Metroid Prime series, but everything I've played of it so far indicates that it's going to have been worth the wait.
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