Metroid Prime 4 may not have been the successful return to the Prime series that many were hoping for, but judging by critics and fan reactions, it's still a pretty decent game. If you can overcome some pretty risky decisions, like locking the desert music to expensive amiibo and filling the game with chatty companion characters, it looks like there's still a lot of fun to be had.
However, there is one aspect of the game that many players will enjoy that seems to be hindering the fun for many, and it all involves some very classic Metroid Prime features that have proven to be a bit more disappointing this time around.
Metroid Prime 4 fans are frustrated by long scan times.
Anyone who has played a Metroid Prime game knows how important it is to scan enemies and the environment. You're typically isolated in a hostile and unknown environment, so gathering information is obviously essential to increasing Samus' chances of survival. Metroid Prime 4 seems to have made the whole process a little more tedious, increasing the time it takes for Samus to successfully scan an enemy item. To say it irritates a lot of people would be an understatement.
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In a post on the Metroid subreddit earlier this week, a user named Rube complained about the game's scans, claiming they “take too long” and wishing they had taken a second or two to make it feel more realistic. Rube's post served as a sort of lightning rod for other disgruntled scanners, who began voicing their complaints about the feature.
Another user named Paradox52525 claims that there are too many items to scan in the game and many of them are not very useful or helpful. They suggest that important things to scan, like new enemies, should be highlighted in a different color and take longer to scan, while simple scans like crates or vehicles should be much faster.
Surprisingly, one of my other big complaints about scanning is color. Unlike the first three Metroid Prime games, which highlighted scans in blue and red, Metroid chose to make unscanned objects green and scanned objects grey, which drove players like VaatiReborn away. Even people who think their scan times are okay are baffled by the color changes.
Almost every reply in the thread is complaining about scanning in some way, and many people have admitted that as they get deeper into the game, they've stopped scanning almost anything because they're exhausted by the whole process or sick of not being rewarded with new information or knowledge. It seems like a feature that needs work, so let's hope Nintendo is working on tweaks as we speak.

- released
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December 4, 2025
- ESRB
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Teen/Animation Blood, Violence
- developer
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retro studio
- publisher
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nintendo
