Back in 2015, Metroid fans were desperate for anything new. The series hadn’t seen a fresh entry since 2010’s Metroid: Other M, an attempt at a more cinematic Samus that left many players divided. During Nintendo’s digital E3 showcase that year, a brief trailer played on a 3DS — a ship racing across an icy landscape — and a logo appeared: a new Metroid Prime. For a moment it felt like the franchise had returned.
That hope didn’t last. The reveal trailer for Metroid Prime: Federation Force presented an odd cooperative spin-off built around blocky soldier designs and a puzzling ball-centric sports mode. Reaction was swift and scathing, and when the game arrived in 2016 it received some of the worst reviews in the franchise’s history. It seemed like a misstep that might consign Prime to an ignoble footnote. Yet, a decade on, Federation Force has become unexpectedly important to the saga — an essential piece for understanding Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which appears to expand on the Galactic Federation thread and follow up on the Sylux hint tucked into Federation Force’s hidden ending.
I dug my 3DS out to re-examine Federation Force as a prelude to Samus’s next chapter. Could hindsight transform a widely mocked spinoff into something insightful? Not exactly — but viewed alongside what Prime 4 promises, the game’s role in the wider narrative landscape is more intriguing than it once seemed.
According to a recently published Metroid Prime art book, Federation Force traces its origin to a rejected pitch for Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Retro Studios had envisioned a story where Samus rescues Galactic Federation personnel — a concept that was turned down, but one that sparked producer Kensuke Tanabe’s curiosity about a Metroid game where the player doesn’t inhabit Samus. That seed of an idea ultimately grew into Federation Force, so Retro’s abandoned pitch is partly responsible for the spin-off’s existence.
The premise itself isn’t bad on paper. The Galactic Federation has been a recurring institution in Metroid lore, yet we rarely see its inner workings — Samus usually handles the dirty jobs while the Federation remains background. Federation Force attempts to flip that perspective, centering on squads of four troopers completing routine but vital tasks while Samus tackles larger threats. In that respect it anticipates other cooperative, workplace-focused narratives that explore the mundane side of world-saving — and, oddly enough, some missions even recall cooperative objectives from other team-based titles that ask players to shepherd an object across a map while fending off foes.
The issue isn’t the idea; it’s the execution. The game’s generic, interchangeable troopers never become engaging characters, and missions are delivered as terse briefs that reduce the Federation to a bland force of good opposing the Space Pirates. The campaign funnels toward spectacle in predictable ways — a faceless military push toward a planet-level superweapon — without probing the Federation’s moral complexity. Later Metroid entries hint that the Galactic Federation can be ambiguous or self-interested; Federation Force largely ignores that nuance.
Federation Force is unapologetically gameplay-first — which is both its strength and its downfall. The campaign is broken into short, handheld-friendly missions that avoid overstaying their welcome and present a broad mix of objectives rather than one repeated formula. Some missions feel inventive: one task has you strip armor from a multi-segmented ice serpent to expose its weak point; another asks your squad to guard fragile pods during a small-scale incursion. There are a handful of fights that capture the spirit of the Prime series and hint at a larger, multi-front conflict the Federation wages while Samus pursues high-profile targets.
Playing those missions, however, often stumbles on practical problems. Several objectives are vague in their success conditions, leaving players guessing what “protect the pod” actually requires. Other tasks are bland or mechanically thin — like a puzzle where you must shoot balls into holes — and the controls can be awkward. Aiming with the New Nintendo 3DS’s tiny nub is imprecise, and motion-gesture aiming is an imperfect fallback. Even Metroid Prime Hunters, a DS title from earlier in the series’s history, felt more precise thanks to its stylus-driven controls.
And then there’s the presentation. Federation Force’s visuals have not aged gracefully. The art direction leans toward cartoonish proportions that make troopers look like bobbleheads, and the low-resolution textures and rough edges frequently obscure on-screen action. For a Nintendo title, the overall image quality is surprisingly poor; there are moments where earlier handheld entries outperform it visually.
Blast Ball, the game’s 3v3 micro-sport mode, proved to be another miscalculation. It attempted to graft a Rocket League-like concept onto Metroid but ended up shallow: teams fire at a large ball to move it across an arena, yet rapid-fire attacks often cancel out momentum, producing long, tedious matches with little satisfying payoff. What might have been an inventive side activity instead reads like a hollow gimmick.
Viewed in context, Federation Force is also a revealing time capsule. It arrived during a turbulent era for Nintendo: the Wii U had faltered and the company was experimenting with ways to reinvigorate big franchises. E3 2015 showcased that uncertainty — bold, oddball proposals alongside long-awaited tentpoles. Where Super Mario Maker emerged as a creative success from that period, Federation Force represents its more awkward side.
Crucially, Nintendo didn’t entirely abandon Federation Force’s narrative thread. Hidden content — a small ending that teases Sylux stealing a Metroid from the Galactic Federation — appears to have been preserved as a connective tissue into Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. That hidden beat suggests Nintendo intended Federation Force to seed a broader storytelling arc, and the company has kept that continuation intact despite the spin-off’s reputation. It’s an uncommon choice for a publisher that often sanitizes its history to highlight only beloved releases.
When Metroid Prime 4 finally releases, Federation Force will remain unavoidable — not because it’s beloved, but because it’s narratively relevant. Its notoriety ensured it wouldn’t fade entirely, though the closure of certain 3DS online services has made it harder for players to revisit. Depending on how Prime 4 resolves the threads teased by Federation Force, that once-maligned experiment could become the most consequential Metroid entry you can no longer easily play.
Source: Polygon
