Metroid Prime is often heralded as one of the best games of all time – for many people, the impressive environmental design, masterful soundtrack, and the successful translation of classic Metroid gameplay to 3D all coalesces into a perfect experience. I, too, felt this way for the first few hours of playing – at the start, the game truly makes you feel isolated on a remote planet and slowly becoming more and more powerful is viscerally satisfying. But after this honeymoon period, I started realizing the biggest flaw in the game – the combat is supremely uninteresting.

I can’t accurately comment on the difficulty – I played on keyboard + mouse via Primehack and on casual mode (not intentionally, casual mode was renamed as normal mode for some godforsaken reason for the Metroid Prime Trilogy rerelease on Wii) so nothing in the game felt threatening. But my problem with the combat is how boring every enemy is – it all becomes incredibly rote by the end: shoot the yellow enemies with the power beam, shoot the purple enemies with the wave beam, shoot the Metroids with an ice beam and then a missile. This problem is further exacerbated by how much health everything has – everything is easy to beat, but it takes a long time, especially compared to 2D Metroid games and other, more recent Metroidvanias. It becomes even worse with the bosses, who are easy in theory, but take so long to take down and have so many phases where they’re invincible that you’ll often make mistakes because you’re zoning out. They are not battles of skill, but rather battles of attrition.

This crappy combat intrudes on the fun part of the game – exploring the world and living and breathing in its pretty environments. Metroid Prime looked stunning on its initial release and still looks incredible now, even with massive technological advancements over the past couple decades. These exploration sections are why the game is remembered so fondly today, and while they aren’t perfect – the map doesn’t show all the obstructions and leads to some wasted time and the camera is sometimes wonky – I still thoroughly enjoyed my first time through most of the areas of Tallon IV.

Notice I said first time – if you’re at all familiar with the genre, you’ll know Metroidvanias have lots of backtracking, and Metroid Prime is no exception. And going back through these areas feels like a colossal waste of time – there is no faster way to get around the map besides just slowly trudging through it all (the grappling hook doesn’t count, it saves maybe a few seconds per room). Additionally, the game will sometimes send you to an area and then make you walk a long, long way to another area to get a power-up to be able to traverse the area instead of just having the power-up be in the area – the Phazon Mines are notorious for this. Like it or not, you will be slowly walking back and forth a lot across this world.

Speaking of the Phazon Mines, I legitimately think the game is not worth playing after this point – as this is a late game area, the developers needed to find a way to make it challenging, but since no enemy poses a real threat or is interesting to fight, they had the brilliant idea of making you fight a lot of them in a row without save rooms nearby. A while after this, you have to hunt down 12 artifacts, presumably tying up any loose ends from past exploration along the way. This isn’t terrible in concept, but some of the locations are really stupid – x-ray a random wall in a tower you’ve been in once, go in this random lake, shoot a random stalactite off the ceiling. The biggest problem is that 12 just seems like too many – for every fun “eureka” moment you have after discovering what a mysterious object was for, there’s two moments of exasperation after giving up and looking up a guide and finding out what the solution was. Plus, this artifact hunt is really, really arduous because of how slow it is to get anywhere and kills any endgame momentum and motivation the player has. Though, if the artifact hunt didn’t do it, the last two bosses would’ve, as both take five times longer to defeat than they should and are dreadfully boring after you figure out their gimmicks. This last 4-5 hour stretch isn’t all awful though – Omega Pirate is the best boss fight in the game, since he’s fun to fight and doesn’t take a few business days to defeat, and endgame Metroidvania item hunting is always enjoyable enough, even if you have to do an excruciatingly dull, required easter egg hunt on the side.

Is it worth playing Metroid Prime today? Sure, it’s historically significant and really, really good at creating atmosphere through audiovisual design. But playing it in 2025 reveals flaws that are a direct result of its 2002 Gamecube origins that are core to its character and maybe part of its charm to some, but flaws that are nevertheless still unavoidably there and impossible to ignore in reviewing the game. It’s for this reason that I can’t give the game a “good” review score, but all review scores are arbitrary and you should always form your own opinion – both Metroid Prime Remastered on Switch and Primehack on PC are great ways to experience this gaming classic.