Star Fox Review

It’s nice to have the Star Fox crew back, even if it isn’t in the most ambitious of games. Nintendo’s newest entry in the series for the Switch 2, simply called Star Fox, is a relatively faithful remake of the franchise’s best entry, Star Fox 64. It does have a few accoutrements, each with varying levels of success.

The remade Star Fox 64 campaign is still the core of the experience, and it’s fantastic. The on-rails shooting feels just as good as it did in 1997, but the action is now framed around one of the prettiest games Nintendo has ever released. You are flying through colorful, vibrant planets and exhilarating space battles. The new, orchestrated soundtrack amplifies everything, making Star Fox feel more like an epic space opera than ever.

As in the original, the campaign is short but features multiple paths. You can open up routes to different missions depending on how you play. For example, you can fly through every arched rock formation during a segment of the opening level. This has you fighting a different boss at the end of the stage and unlocks the new route.

The expanded briefings and in-mission dialogue make many of these unlockable paths easier to find. They also add a lot more character and charm to the game’s story. Between each mission, you get to see the Star Fox crew interact with each other and discuss their current options. I’m not saying that the story is suddenly Shakespeare, but these moments help give the characters a bit more depth. Slippy isn’t just an obnoxious newbie. He’s an optimist who brings much needed positivity to the crew.

Some of the other new features do less to impress. Star Fox has a co-op mode where one player can control the movement of the vehicle while the other handles the aiming and shooting. It’s fine, but I bet it’s something you’ll try once and never bother with again. The same goes for the optional mouse controls. It’s kind of neat to try once, but I doubt you’ll want to make that your standard way to play. 

The challenge-based versions of the missions also don’t do a lot for me. This has you replaying levels from the campaign while trying to complete a checklist of objectives. It adds a bit of replayability, but as someone who isn’t a big achievement or trophy guy, I’ve never particularly liked playing games this way.

Speaking of challenges, you have to earn a medal on every mission in the campaign if you want to unlock expert difficulty. This means reaching a certain number of hits (which you get from taking down enemies, turrets, certain objects, and bosses) while keeping all three of your crewmembers alive. 

Getting an in-game medal for playing well is nice, but it’s annoying to have expert difficulty unlocked behind such a steep requirement. I mean, the normal difficulty is already pretty easy. I never lost more than a couple of lives, and the game throws a bunch of extra guys at you while you play. I usually finished with like 11 or more lives left.

I’d love to try the harder difficulty, but you can’t just replay the campaign versions of any mission whenever you want. You have to start a new playthrough, and getting to every level across the multiple routes means that it’s going to take a few runs.

It feels like a bit of a desperate attempt to make Star Fox a more robust experience than it is. To be clear, I don’t mind the game’s length. I always liked that Star Fox 64 was a game that you could “beat” in about an hour, with the different routes giving you a good reason to dip back in for extra sessions.

Nintendo did find a good way to add some extra value to the package, though. Star Fox 64 had a pretty basic multiplayer offering with its four-player dogfighting. The remake expands the multiplayer with 4-vs.-4 team battles. You can earn points for your team by taking down opponents, but you really win by completing objectives. One map has teams competing for a fuel cell, capture-the-flag style. Another has players fighting over energy from crashed meteors. A suit of powerups littered around the map gives you access to helpful abilities like a short-range teleport or extra firepower, so you’ll want to spend as much time hunting those down as anything else.

I’m not saying that this is going to replace the Overwatches or Splatoons of the world when it comes to team-based games, but it’s certainly more fun than I expected from multiplayer Star Fox.

I’m sure that a lot of people will look at this game’s price tag ($50 digital, $60 physical) and wonder if it’s really worth it. Maybe it’s not for you! The multiplayer and some of the other additions are neat diversions, but the campaign is still the meat of the experience. As much as I love it, it is short. Even if you play through it several times, this isn’t the kind of game that is going to take up dozens of hours of playtime.

I think that the campaign is so high quality that it’s definitely still worth it. The last time I checked, we aren’t exactly getting a lot of triple-A rail shooters these days. If, like me, you’re someone who misses that genre and Star Fox specifically, this game will put a huge smile on your face.