While the gameplay reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 was home to a few very exciting all-new experiences, for my money one of the most intriguing at the showcase was very much a known quantity: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
The demo available of Metroid Prime 4 felt even more familiar to a fan of the series such as myself than the final game is likely to, as it showcased an area of the game that is stripped pretty bare of new stuff. If I had to guess, it’s a sequence right from the top of the game, before Samus gets her power suit upgraded with those telekinetic powers.
In the brief base-under-siege style segment, Samus has access to her usual arm cannon, missiles, scanner, morph ball, and bombs – but that’s it. All of these are very much known quantities. It makes Prime 4 feel like a very simple, iterative sequel to its three predecessors – but we already know from other footage that there’s more going on here, with new abilities and mechanics abound. They just weren’t available in this Switch 2 hands-on.
It seems clear to me, though, that Nintendo and developer Retro Studios chose this segment deliberately. It’s quick and snappy to play, and by keeping things simple, one isn’t distracted from what they really wanted to showcase here – how the essentials of the Metroid Prime experience look and feel on the Switch 2 hardware.
“This is running at 120 frames per second,” the Nintendo representative manning my demo station tells me immediately as I sit down. It’s the first thing they say, in fact, which is unusual – Nintendo never typically focuses on performance metrics. But here, they do – and you can see why.
Sure enough, Metroid Prime 4 Nintendo Switch 2 edition is ultimately a Switch 2 upgrade of a game designed to work on hardware that, if you believe the slightly dubious statistics put out by Nvidia, is ten times weaker. But it is running natively at full HD resolution (4K is also available, but will be 60fps), and, yes, is absolutely silky smooth at 120fps. It also looks better than the OG Switch version, at least based on what I’ve seen on streams, as the original Switch version wasn’t there for us to see in person. The frame rate is the headline, though. Being frank, it feels like the most un-Nintendo thing ever. And then you put the controller down…
I don’t mean to stop playing, obviously. I’m talking about the mouse controls. As mentioned in my coverage of the console itself and the curious Welcome Tour mini-game collection, the biggest new built-in gimmick on the Switch 2 is the ability to place the Joy-Con side-down on a surface (this could be a surface as simple as your thighs for some games, but Metroid will require some sort of mat) and use it as a mouse, just like on PC. That lends itself well, then, to dropping mouse controls into games that suit it.
Elsewhere at the Switch 2 reveal event, there’s the obvious example of Civilization 7, which uses mouse controls exactly as the flawed-but-brilliant Civ 7 does on PC. Metroid is the other obvious example, of course – as while this is a metroidvania, or search-action, or whatever the hell you want to call it – the Prime games are also inherently first-person shooters.
The implementation of mouse controls in Metroid Prime 4 is nothing short of absolutely fascinating, however. The most genius touch is this: it’s not a toggle. That means you can hold one Joy-Con 2 in each hand normally, and use them like two halves of a regular controller. In this setup, Prime 4 plays in much the same way as the other titles in this series. But if you orient that right-hand Joy-Con into the proper position and place it onto a surface, the game automatically understands your intent and flips you over to mouselook. No menu fiddling, no faffing about – it’s just there.
You all know how mouselook should work and feel, and I’ll thereby shortcut some over-wrought explanation to say: Prime 4 feels like a proper mouselook game when played that way. It’s twitchy and responsive in all the right ways. It just works, and that’s good. But the revelation, I think, is that back-and-forth.
Admittedly, the section of Prime 4 I play is heavy on the combat and light-to-nonexistent on the puzzling Metroid is known for. But even in that segment, over the course of a half hour or so, I began to hit my stride. I got a controller swagger on. I’d hold the Joy-Con 2s like a controller when I was scanning, or doing things with the morph ball and other such traversal. I’d pop the odd enemy with Prime’s returning lock-on mechanic. But the moment combat got heated, I’d naturally slide that right joy-con down into mouse position and let my PC-playing instincts take over. It is, quite literally, the best of both worlds.
Once I hit a boss battle, the controller action ceased entirely. This hulking beast had classic pulsating and glowing weak points that were only temporarily vulnerable – and being able to use mouse controls to be deadly accurate meant I shredded the boss much more efficiently than some around me who played the game a more traditional way.
Combine this with the smooth 120fps presentation, and it all felt a bit… wrong. Honestly, it felt like what I was doing should be illegal. This is the sort of presentation and aiming efficiency that previously was only available in a Nintendo game if you were, you know, doing something illegal. It also addresses a major complaint about Switch 1 for me – which is that I think most Switch games look fine for a hybrid device, especially the first-party ones… but performance was often woeful. If Metroid Prime 4 is a picture of the future, I look forward to all those upgraded packages – and even to a slate of new games that go easy on the graphical upgrades, but maximalist on the performance boosts.
When it comes out later this year, there might be an original Switch version of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond – but if you can afford it with all the nonsense going on, there is clearly now only one place to really play it: Switch 2. Which is precisely what you want from a next-gen upgrade, really.