Image: Nintendo
It’s been a long wait, but Nintendo is finally ready to unveil Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
Nintendo ended this week’s Nintendo Direct by showing off Metroid Prime 4, a game the company announced all the way back in 2017 before it restarted development in 2019. Fans have been waiting for a long time to see what the sequel looks like, and now they have an entire gameplay trailer to chew on. The game, now titled Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, launches sometime in 2025.
Here’s the trailer:
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond brings back Sylux, first-person gameplay
Nintendo has officially unveiled gameplay for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, the long-awaited sequel to 2007’s Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. The Metroid Prime series is best known for melding first-person 3D gameplay with the franchise’s staple action-adventure mechanics, which is a combination Metroid fans can’t really get anywhere else. Metroid Prime 4 was originally announced to be in development in 2017, before Nintendo rebooted development on the sequel in 2019 only to go radio silent on its progress in the years since.
Thankfully, we finally have a good look at how it’s shaping up. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’s first trailer shows off familiar first-person gameplay, starting with Samus Aran landing in the Galactic Federation Research Facility, which appears to be in the midst of an invasion. She scans the environment for more information on her surroundings and shoots down enemies left and right, before entering Morph Ball mode to tunnel further into the facility.
At the end of the trailer, she confronts Sylux and his two Metroids, following up on the ending of Metroid Prime 3. One can safely expect Metroid Prime 4 to center around Sylux and Samus, the former of which harbours a great deal of resentment for the latter. Other than that, the game looks pretty fantastic, boasting a pretty high level of graphical fidelity for a Switch game.
Granted, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is launching next year - the same year the Nintendo Switch 2 is set to be released - which might make this the first cross-gen game we know of. Nintendo has yet to confirm a specific release date for the Switch successor. This week's Nintendo Direct also gave us reveals for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Mario & Luigi: Brothership.