Nintendo was long rumoured to have a remaster of the original Metroid Prime ready to go, and it finally decided to drop it last week – announcing and releasing it in one fell swoop onto Nintendo Switch. So, how does this gaming classic hold up?
Nintendo
Metroid Prime Remastered
Recommended
4.5/5
This is an excellent remaster that preserves a classic game and makes it highly playable by modern standards. It also confirms that Metroid Prime remains as special a title as ever.
Pros
- Great visual update
- Superb exploration
- Immediate sense of atmosphere
- New control schemes
Cons
- Shooting is occasionally imprecise
Old familiar feeling
Metroid Prime was a radical change when it arrived on the GameCube back in 2002 – a major swap in perspective for Samus Aran after years of side-scrolling Metroid games.
It’s a first-person shooter, swapping out a 2D map for sprawling arrays of interlinked 3D rooms and environments, just as labyrinthine and carefully arranged as any of Samus’ older adventures.
The story beats, though, are very similar (which isn’t an issue, it’s a Metroid thing). The game opens with a fully kitted-out Samus arriving on a space station in orbit to respond to a distress call.
She finds a series of gruesome mutation experiments gone wrong before the station explodes – with her gear stripped away in the wreckage.
The loss of powers is a series staple, but Metroid Prime is really quite open-handed in terms of how quickly you can get some of them back – within the first hour a player can sniff out enough upgrades to have the Morph Ball back along with rockets and bombs.
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With a robotic Meta Ridley flying around causing havoc, the story behind Metroid Prime’s action isn’t exactly revolutionary stuff, but it’s told with an impressively light touch.
Your suit’s visor lets you scan a range of environmental details, from plant life on the planet you’re exploring to tablets and wall scratchings, each of which can give you a much more detailed sense of what’s actually going on.
While many players won’t feel the need to read them all, they’re generally short enough to not feel like an essay, and there’s plenty of enjoyable world-building to uncover through them too.
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What Prime really nails, between these scanner results and a moody, sullen soundtrack, is the atmosphere – you feel like a lone explorer making your way through these locations, with plant and alien life that won’t always attack you, but definitely isn’t friendly.
Critical path
The levels themselves are, as we’ve mentioned, impeccably laid out, with winding paths that take you on long diversions to find upgrades and secrets.
It’s hard to put your finger on what makes these spaces so well designed, but it all clicks the second or third time you explore off the beaten track.
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That is, you think you’re exploring away from the main path, only to discover a mission-critical item awaiting you, one that will unlock a new set of paths entirely.
All of sudden, you realise that you’ve been subtly guided to the right area by visual cues and layouts – it’s enough to make you sit back and really appreciate the work that went into it all.
Along the way, you’ll find yourself facing off against a variety of threats, starting largely with flora and fauna from the local planets, but escalating in time to space pirates and other intergalactic foes.
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A new default control scheme puts the action on twin sticks like a modern shooter and works really well, but you still have a lock-on mechanic to make dodging around easier while taking fire.
For those who want an older-school feel, there are also control options to mimic both the Wii and GameCube iterations of a Metroid Prime game, and both work well given their aims.
In short, the game plays like a dream and feels tangibly tied to its older version without sacrificing much in the way of modern expectations, which is a real result.
Hey good lookin’
So the game feels good – but the real heart of a remaster like this obviously has to come down, in large, to how it looks. Thankfully, things are great there too.
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This is the sort of remaster that doesn’t pack in any surprises but quietly excels by its own standards.
That means you get consistently upgraded textures and models, along with an obviously much-improved resolution, but no substantial changes to maps or the game’s actual structure.
It looks great! This isn’t recognisably a GameCube game anymore, with nicely detailed enemies and maps that have a lovely sense of place to them, albeit a slight lack of real detail.
It can very much go toe-to-toe with a modern shooter made with the Switch specifically in mind (something like Splatoon 3, for example), and maybe even outstrip it.
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The nice little touches that were already in the original still stand out as impressive now – the way your suit changes as you find upgrades, and the careful blending of different architectural styles within locations, for example.
You’ll notice that some explosions and effects really emphasise your visor, and indeed Samus’ face on the other side of it – which can be reflected in the glass to really give you a sense of physicality and placement.
Contributing hugely to its sense of atmosphere is a great, moody soundtrack that has classic melodies but is careful in using them so as to maximise their impact.
Verdict
Metroid Prime Remastered is everything you could want from a remaster – it preserves and enhances everything that was special about Metroid Prime.
The game now looks great on modern hardware, and it plays incredibly smoothly whether you go handheld or docked, with its central atmosphere also recreated expertly.
This is no remake, so there’s not much additional content to cover beyond some concept art collections, but it’s also priced at a discount – making it a bit of a must-play on Switch, for series fans and newcomers alike.