I've been a Metroid fan since childhood and I'd known Prime 1 was consistently ranked as the best or second best of the franchise, alternating with Super Metroid. Since I never had a GameCube, I relished the opportunity to finally get to play this. It's obviously good - it wouldn't have been remastered if it wasn't - but I have to admit it left me disappointed in several aspects that I wasn't expecting.

For context, the last Metroidvania I played before this was Metroid Dread, and I loved it. It felt like a refreshingly modern take on the classic 2D style with excellent boss fights and most of the level backtracking only coming into play with finding optional bonuses and secrets. In stark contrast, Prime is built entirely on the concept of backtracking. The core goal of finding the 12 chozo artifacts is married to the design philosophy of the player coming across something gated behind a lock that can only be unlocked with an ability that will be gained later. As a result, you're destined to have to retread the exact same rooms, obstacles, and enemies dozens of times before finally getting what you're looking for. I know the whole series is built on that design philosophy, but this game pushes it to the extreme.

My other major complaint is that the enemy respawn system is gratuitous. You'll enter a room, kill all the enemies in it, move to the next room, realize you took the wrong exit after a few moments, return to the prior room, and all the enemies will have already respawned. This got so tiresome that I started simply running through rooms ignoring enemies in the later parts of my playthrough. Regarding bosses, they're okay for the additional challenge they present, but on Normal difficulty they feel like they have way too much HP. Fights went on for so long that I grew bored before they ended.

I'm still glad I got to play this piece of gaming history, especially as a die-hard Metroid fan, but this is my least favorite of the ones I've played. A good game that may have been a masterpiece when it first came out, but by the newer standards both of its own series and others, it's still somewhat dated.

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.

It's nice to finally play one of the most famous games in one of my favorite franchises.

I've been a huge fan of 2D Metroid ever since I first played Metroid Zero Mission back in 2012. I love almost all of them, and each one has a distinct rhythm to it that never fails to captivate me. I think a large part of it is due to Samus' kit being so iconic and fun to use. Power ups like the shine spark, screw attack, and morph ball all make it so that the act of controlling Samus never gets old.

When starting Prime I was really worried about how that flow would be affected in a 3D space. A Metroid game being good to me relies on 2 key factors, control and pacing. So seeing that the control was completely changed to be a first person shooter, I was nervous that the feeling of Samus would not be as solid as the 2D games. I was super wrong though.

Samus controls like an absolute dream in this game, and the added duel stick option in the Remastered easily makes this the definitive way to play the game. The new camera shift actually makes combat a lot of fun to engage with in this game, which the developers clearly knew because this Metroid game has a larger focus on combat. There are multiple different beam types that you can swap on the fly, which create a great sense of flow that you dont typically see from a Metroid game.

The main downside to this camera angle is that it doesn't really allow for some of my favorite upgrades like the speed booster or screw-attack to exist, but I was honestly ok with it for this game. Areas feel a lot less platforming heavy, and the added boost ball ability still made moving through areas a breeze. It had a bit of a learning curve, but by the end of the game the boost ball had joined the ranks of one of my favorite abilities in the series.

Moving on to that second criteria for a good Metroid game for me, the pacing of this game is utterly fantastic. The balance between finding new areas and backtracking to old ones is a very tricky one, and I think Prime mostly nails it. By the end of the game I knew each area like the back of my hand, and I never really tired of backtracking to them (until I attempted 100% but we'll get to that.)

The atmosphere and music are incredible too, which isnt a surprise since its fucking Metroid Prime. However, the part that surprised me the most was the story. I actually found myself really engaged with it, and the way it was told diagetically through using the scan visor was really damn smart. It brought me back to my first time exploring and scanning text on planets in Outer Wilds, which made me realize that the translator in that game was probably heavily inspired by Metroid Prime (same with the parallels between the Phazon and Ghost Matter tbh).

My only real complaint with the game came from a lack of QOL features with its map. Modern Metroid does a really good job of allowing you to mark areas on your map that you want to return to, and also showing you how many items are left in each area, which makes backtracking easier. Prime doesnt have anything like this, which makes the endgame grind for 100% extremely tedious and boring. The pacing of the game got completely destroyed in the last 2 hours of my session, mainly because I kept wandering around in circles looking for the last 5% of items.

Overall, there is a reason that Metroid Prime is an absolute classic and seen as the epitome of the series. While I don't enjoy it as much as some of my favorite 2D outings (Dread and Zero Mission), I do think it has quickly risen to being one of my favorite Metroidvanias of all time.

....I just really don't like what the Remastered did to Samus' face. It's in that state of the uncanny valley that I REALLY hate.

Okay so I reviewed this only a bit in because it kind of made me realize I didn't really enjoy my first playthrough of this game as much as I thought I did. But I think it was unfair to leave it off at Phendrana Drifts. I liked the start of the game a lot so like Phendrana Drifts had to have just been a fluke and I was misremembering because of how much I despise that level. But no the entire game is just that afterwards.

This game fails fundamentally as a Metroid game, it doesn't look like one, it doesn't feel like one, and it doesn't play like one. Metroid Primes big powerups, the ones that really open up the world aren't even movement powerups, they are just beams that all need to be switched too it's really annoying, and when they are they are really boring and slow like the spider ball.
A metroidvania is meant to be a platformer action exploration game. Platforming is a huge part of it, so movement upgrades are the ones that stick out to you, not bloated weapon systems. Primes weapon systems are honestly more annoying than any of the 2D games because you switch in it so much more often. Every single door in this game wants you to use a different beam, go through an ice door, now there's a plasma door. Facing off against a wave Space Pirate, gotta switch to ice beam to open the door. This beam system also goes against one of the most fun things about the 2D Metroids, once you unlock all those beams they all become one extremely powerful beam that usually one shot everything and go througg walls. And when they don't the screw attack does it for you!

I genuinely think that Metroid Primes biggest issue is the fact it wanted to be a first person shooter. It forces combat on you, and it makes the weapons the big upgrades with all of them having side upgrades to them. I find FPS combat, incredibly boring, and the enemies in this game go from very quick to kill to complete damage sponges as soon as space pirates are introduced, and they keep adding to them, metroids also start showing up a lot and some of them are very tanky and split into 2 more of the same metroid to fight but you need to switch beams for both of them. It gets annoying the fun really just ends at Phedrana Drifts.

It sucks Prime would be an amazing exploration game if it didn't do this annoying stuff. It has such a great atmosphere, and if it was just like a peaceful, sometimes you have to shoot a couple of enemies around you kind of exploration game like the 2D ones it would have been really good.
But instead it has to stop you every 5 rooms to fight all the Space Pirates and unlock the doors, god its so annoying.

Im kind of sad that replaying this game only annoyed me, I want to like this game, I adore Metroid, it's my favorite series by Nitnedo. Super Metroid is still one of my top 5 games no question. So it sucks that this game, thats is considered one of the absolute greatest in the franchise, in the genre in general, is just a boring FPS disguised as an exploration game.

This game is peak Metroid. It's got all the great things about the 2D games but now in 3D remastered beautifully
on the switch.

It's open ended and has tons of fun items, enemies, upgrades, and locations to explore. The game has spectacular atmosphere and drives home the feeling of being alone on an unknown planet.

My main problems are it's a little too long and I've got a little bit of a problem with these types of games in general. I love exploring and getting upgrades but I absolutely hate getting lost and I did get lost a couple of times while playing. Also I feel like the combat is a little undercooked. It's just an endurance war between you and the enemy most of the time.

Overall a great game I've just got a couple personal problems with it.

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.

It’s a good game, for sure.
But there are some enemies that annoys me so much that I want to quit the game.
I also think it’s a little too hard to find your own way and progress. I also don’t like how the story is told by the scan.
Despite those things that I don’t like there are so many things that I love. The scenarios are awesome, the suits and weapons are AMAZING, the mood of every “world” is fantastic and the bosses are well designed.
The graphics are PERFECT. It is a hell of a remaster