Samus' next adventure comes to Switch 2 on Dec. 4
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Friday's Nintendo Direct may have been a celebration of Super Mario Bros.' 40th birthday, but beloved characters outside the Mushroom Kingdom still got their moment to shine. During the showcase, Nintendo shared another look at the hotly anticipated Metroid Prime 4: Beyond — and even revealed when we'll get the chance to slide back into Samus' space boots. Metroid Prime 4 will be released on Switch 2 on Dec. 4, 2025.
The trailer opens on a daunting landscape, with an ominous spike-spangled tower looming in the distance as thunder crackles. Admittedly, it doesn't tell us a whole lot about the story of Beyond, but it does reveal one huge gameplay detail. Samus has a badass motorcycle now. Get in losers, we're hunting aliens! In a sunny desert, Samus hops astride her new bike, taking out enemies with her arm cannon as she rides and power-sliding into some baddies. The trailer also revealed the release of a new art book, Metroid Prime 1-3: A Visual Retrospective, due out on Oct. 28.
Back in June 2024, Nintendo revealed the first trailer for the game, as well as the Beyond subtitle. In it, we see Samus land her ship on a dreary planet, exiting the craft with a badass forward somersault and wasting no time in blasting hordes of bitey alien baddies to bits. We also get a glimpse at one of Beyond's antagonists, a grim figure clad in a helmet bisected by a slender vertical stripe of vivid green. A pair of gooey, fanged Metroids hover over their shoulders.
It's been a long road to get to this moment. Nintendo first announced Metroid Prime 4 at E3, all the way back in 2017. After a year and a half of radio silence, Nintendo announced in 2019 that it was rebooting the project and shifting development to Retro Studios, the Prime subseries' original developer. The years since that reboot have seen the launch of two other Metroid titles: 2021's acclaimed Metroid Dread and 2023's Metroid Prime Remastered, an enhanced edition of the 2002 GameCube game that marked the series' first use of first-person perspective and 3D environments.
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will be released on Nintendo Switch 2 on Dec. 4, 2025.
