Metroid Prime Remastered (2025)

When Metroid Prime originally came out in 2002, I wasn’t a big fan of Nintendo or the Metroid series. It always intrigued me when people talked about it, but the over-reliance on backtracking and obtuse map navigation always put me off on the franchise. When Prime debuted, the transitioning of 2D gameplay to 3D first person shoot was such a eye opener, but I still never dove into it. It wasn’t till years later I ended up trying it out with VR. But the VR implementation was still very clunky.

The Remaster really is the best way to enjoy the start of the Prime series, and was just an absolute joy to play. While I’ve made my disdain for the over reliance of remasters and remakes the industry has had, I can’t deny that this remaster was well done. It didn’t need it, as I think if I played the original with an upscaled resolution, I would have enjoyed it just as much. However, there is much to talk about for my first playthough of this classic series in a first person perspective.

Back in the day Metroid’s big twist was that Samus was a girl. It’s not really a big deal or talking point now, nor does it need to be. Instead this crazy rad space bounty hunter gets dropped into a derelict space station raided by space pirates. The one thing the game doesn’t do a good job of is helping the player understand what’s going on without the heavily reliance of scanning and reading. There is much more reading than I thought there was going to be. For the most part, it was welcomed, but there was various parts of the game, where I was in a big research area, and reading the massive amount of logs, and reading them out loud to the stream (using goofy voices to keep it entertaining) was a bit much.

The gameplay itself was a great mixture of classic Metroid style upgrades that were procured through exploration, and going off the beaten path and solving simple puzzles helped find ammo capacity upgrades and life bar extensions. Very familiar Metroid mechanics. With the inclusion of some new weapon types that are hot swappable mid-battle and unique charging and secondary fire as well really helped the combat stand out.

Having to swap between Power, Wave, Ice and Plasma beams that were color-coordinated to certain enemy types meant that I had to switch to the same colored beam to deal any damage to my attacker. If I didn’t switch, the projectile would simply bounce off and would only end up aggravating them further. Some enemies also had cloaking technology that required me to use different visors that were changed to thermals (or Predator Vision, as some viewers called it) or even X-Ray allowing me to see invisible enemies and platforms.

I did end up having some issues with swapping between weapons and visors mid-combat as switching visors meant having to use the D-pad instead of the control stick. Having to stop moving which is against the first rule of enemy encounters “Never Stop Moving”. Also having to hold down the bumper and press different face buttons to swap weapon types did make certain encounters more of a struggle, and especially the second to last boss fight, that had me swapping out visors and arm cannon beam types especially frustrating.

Luckily most of these issues were very small and didn’t make the experience any less enjoyable. Reading through the lore and exploring all the different “Biomes” as they are commonly known as today, was really interesting. Enemies are distinct and unique to their environments and even though they respawned after re-entering a room, I was able to either run past them or take them out quickly. Only a handful were painfully annoying to continually battle.

I’d say the only real big frustration I had during my playthrough was wandering around aimlessly when not knowing where to explore next. One of the big draws of the Metroid series (and the adopted counterpart game series Castlevania) is the emphasis on exploration. I ended up becoming lost and confused of where to go next when I would encounter a dead end. I love the fact that you have to find upgrades and new weapon types to progress, but the size of the game’s map meant traversing large swaths of the game’s levels multiple times only to be told “You don’t have this upgrade, you can not progress until you find it.”

I did like when the game gave the message so I didn’t waste my time, but I think that only happened twice. Most of the other times were relegated to just walking back and forth across all the game's levels and rooms to test if I was able to get past a door or not. Adding in the respawning enemies that just became a bigger annoyance, those were really the only times I got genuinely frustrated. (We will not be talking about the last boss fight and me getting mad when I died with like two shots left and had to redo the last 30 minutes over again)

Metroid Prime takes the 2D side scrolling puzzle exploration platformer series in a new and extremely fun direction. For its first outing in this style, it basically knocks it out of the park. I’m sure the next couple games in the series will give quality of life improvements that make exploration and combat smoother. I’m really excited to jump into Metroid Prime 2: Echoes as soon as possible to continue our Game Of The Month coverage. The reveal that Metroid Prime 4 is finally coming out this year on the Switch 2 is why I wanted to play through this series, and I am eagerly anticipating it like a Metroid latching onto MorphBall Samus and not letting go.