Star Fox Command
Lylat wars, Corneria, Fox and James McCloud, the struggle against Andross. If none of this is ringing a bell, then you’re in for a treat with Star Fox Command. For those people, however, who have played the N64 classic Lylat Wars [or its equally revered SNES predecessor] from which this DS title is descended, prepare for yet another disappointment.
In spite of strong appearances in the Smash Bros series, the Star Fox series of games for which Fox McCloud was originally known has long been in decline. The Gamecube saw two additions to the series. Star Fox Adventures was the first and caused some debate - while the series had traditionally focused on fixed-rail space combat with the player piloting an Arwing [the similarity in name to the X and Y-wings of Star Wars is by no means a coincidence…], Adventures all but abandoned this approach in favour of by the numbers action-adventure gaming. Think any Zelda game with less polish, fewer side quests, questionable plotline and a furry mammal in place of Link and you’ve got the idea. It was the last game Rare developed for the Gamecube and the reason for the drastic change in series direction was simply that the game became a Star Fox title very late in its life, having originally been developed as Dinosaur Planet. No great surprise, then, that fans of earlier instalments were not best pleased, although as an adventure game, it has to be said, Star Fox Adventures was far from awful.
The next Gamecube entry in the series was Star Fox Assault. Early screens of the game suggested a return to the on rails combat and dog fighting mixture of years gone by and the final game did indeed supply these elements. Not only this, but they were pretty damn good. Unfortunately, however, a significant chunk of the game’s single player adventure took place on foot and not in the form of the inoffensive adventuring of the previous game, but horribly sluggish third person shooting instead. This totally broke the nostalgia value for the diehards and just resulted in a pretty crummy game for everybody else. Rejoice, then, that this latest edition in the series, Star Fox Command, cuts out all of this on foot and adventure based nonsense in favour of pure, good old fashioned Star Fox shootery.
Uhh, not quite. Lylat Wars but bigger, brighter and better, it seems, is too much to ask. Instead Star Fox Command is another edit of the original formula of the series. There are no missions on rails; the single player game is instead based entirely on dog fighting [much like the All Range Mode battles from Lylat Wars, for those of you who have played it]. These fights can be extremely short, so to pad them out a new strategy element has been introduced. You are still charged with defending the various planets of the Lylat system, this time from the forces of the newly introduced Anglar aliens as opposed to Andross, but rather than immediately entering battle upon arrival at a planet, your ship is placed on a 2D world map. On this map can be seen the location of clusters of enemy ships and bases which you have a set number of turns to take out. Your turn consists of you drawing the path your ship will take, ideally such that it overlaps with the path of enemy ships or takes you closer to a base.
Not only must you defeat the enemies on screen, but you must also defend the Great Fox, the large ship which accompanies Fox on his missions. You can fire missiles directly at Enemies from the Great Fox in your turn but the ship’s missile supply is limited. This introduces a hint of complexity to what is otherwise a pretty rudimentary strategy component: you must at times prioritise finding new missiles on the world map over entering dogfights, so as to ensure the Great Fox is not destroyed. As the game progresses, there will be occasions when you have more than one ship at your disposal [two of Fox’s original team mates, Falco and Slippy, come under your command as do the Star Wolf gang and Fox’s love interest Krystal], adding a few further possibilities: you might keep Slippy back to defend the Great Fox, make straight for an enemy base with Fox and gather missiles and other items with Falco, for instance. All of this, although it fleshes out gaps between battles, is never a great challenge or particularly fulfilling largely because the maps feel almost randomised and the task required of you is always so similar. Best move on to the dog fighting itself then.
Ah, much better. Star Fox fans will feel immediately at home here, in spite of the all new stylus controls, while these very stylus controls make sure that new comers quickly get the hang of the experience. In each dog fight a task is set of you. It invariably consists of destroying certain enemy ships and picking up the tokens they leave behind or destroying certain enemy ships and picking up the tokens they leave behind…then destroying the mothership. Gripping stuff. Good thing, then, that the controls work so well as to mask the astonishingly uninventive missions [honestly, those are the only two things you will do]. The DS’s top screen displays the action which is controlled via the stylus. Drag the stylus left and right to move your ship horizontally and up and down for vertical movement [you can turn inverse look on if that’s your preference]. Loop the loops and u-turns are activated by touch screen buttons, barrel rolls for dodging enemy fire are activated by rapidly swiping the screen either up or down or left and right, while a boost requires a double tap on the top half of the screen and braking requires the same but on the bottom. Any of the DS face or shoulder buttons can be used to fire. It’s a solid and, importantly, fun system: flying through open areas feels very natural, you can choose to shoot with whichever button allows you to hold the DS most comfortably and the DS always correctly interprets your input.
It’s certainly a relief that the core of the game, the flying, works so well. Star Fox Command is badly let down elsewhere though. There’s no denying that, for a DS game, it looks very good but you will very quickly have seen every model the game has to offer and the battlegrounds are extremely samey. Also, since the controls are entirely touch screen based, I found myself spending a lot more time in battle looking at the touch screen radar than the admittedly pretty 3D work going on above. While the battles ought to be great, Q-Games, who developed the title for Nintendo, imposed time limits on them. The resultant mid dog fight search for items to extend the limit distracts from the fun of simply finding and shooting enemies. In the case of mothership battles, should you defeat the required enemies in the given time you are then required to fly through a path of beacons, while barrel rolling, into the heart of the mothership. Inexplicably, though, these beacons are just 2D red square outlines, as if Q-Games never got around to replacing the placeholder image with something less, well…just awful looking.
Similarly awful is the plot. The dialogue between characters attempts to extend the already largely broken story of Fox McCloud and co, complete with romantic strife between Fox and Krystal which is, to be blunt, the most horrendously written work you will ever live to read. “Evil threatens our world” is apparently no longer sufficient premise for the existence of a Star Fox game. Command is also very short, though the game does include branching routes determined by plot choices such as “Back up Falco” or “Help save Slippy’s girlfriend” [I kid you not]. Unlike the achievement based branches of Lylat Wars, the desire to find out whether Slippy’s girlfriend got shot down horribly in battle or not is not a great incentive to play through again so the chances of anyone bothering to see all of the game’s nine endings are slim. This depends, of course, on how compelling you find the dog fighting but it would surprise me if anyone took more than five or six hours from the single player campaign, repeats included. Command does also include a multiplayer dog fighting mode and online mode, which both work along similar lines to the battles of the single player campaign. This does, of course, add some length to the game but it is far from a stellar multiplayer experience.
It strikes me that I have made it seem as if I loathe Star Fox Command, which is unfair: there is a lot to like here. It speaks volumes for the quality of the flight controls that I still consider this a game worth existing in spite of its numerous, quite drastic flaws. Part of me, though, suspects that a lot of this is just down to Lylat Wars nostalgia. The Lylat Wars soundtrack features heavily in Command and it does help to bring back that feeling of anticipation that accompanies every play through of the N64 title. This shadow of the old classic in a way curses Star Fox Command: not only do you find yourself comparing the experience to the older title, but you begin to doubt whether you are enjoying it for its own values or merely as a nostalgia trip. Booting up Lylat Wars on the Wii’s Virtual Console again quickly reminds me of my enormous preference for the N64 instalment which is why I lean tentatively towards a lower score for this game than perhaps it deserves. Safe to say, if I’d never come accross Fox McCloud before, I might actually like this game a whole lot more.
3/5
