Metroid Prime 4: Beyond Launching December 4th

Yesterday's Nintendo Direct gave us the release date for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and it's still coming in 2025, as promised back in June last year, but barely. It's going to launch on December 4th, to be exact, and that's not the only launch shown in the latest trailer...

There were comments about how Samus's new suit looks like a sports car... and now we know that this was fully intentional: the big reveal was that Samus will be driving a long motor bike in the game. Yes, she is joining the club!

With that also comes the largest world in a Metroid so far, seemingly going more in an "open planet" direction. And unlike the Master Cycle Zero in Breath of the Wild, which got added via DLC, this game was designed around this feature, having clear sections that are meant to be traversed via the speed bike.

And this is where it's getting... bland. When you have these huge, open deserts with nothing but sand or snow, it looks very uninspired, like something from a generic JRPG that only cares for its character models. Anyway, this likely serves as a way of traveling from one area to the next, instead of using your space ship (which is gone anyway) or the usual elevators. And the idea itself is actually quite nice, it's just that the execution clashes visually with the rest of the game.

At first I also thought that this might be a different mode altogether, kind of like the boat or train rides in Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, meaning that there are separate bike sections and normal gameplay sections. But it looks like you can change to your bike whenever you want, it's just that based on the location one way of traversing will be preferred over the other.

But the second Samus hopped off her new bike and the game went back into her visor view, it looked so much better. It's like they had to tremendously scale down the details in those open areas. The rest of the trailer looked really cool, just like your typical Metroid Prime.

Now, the "bike across the planet" part is what really sets this game apart from the original Metroid Prime Trilogy, what makes this the next generation of 3D Metroid. And I can't say that I'm convinced... I just hope that it will be so much fun to play that I won't really care.