REVIEW | Star Fox

Star Fox (or rather Fox Mccloud) has always been one of Nintendo’s coolest characters to me. I often played as him in Smash Bros, I’ve got the Amiibo, and I cheered when I saw the cameo appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. But I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the game genre he’s mostly been trapped in. I can appreciate a good on-rails shooter, but as soon as it opens up to true dogfighting (or should that be foxfighting?) gameplay where you need to be aware of every single direction around you, I feel overwhelmed.

When the remake was announced in the previous Nintendo Direct, I was curious to check it out, but have to admit my hype-level was contained for the reason above. Still, my Nintendo Switch 2 still has that new console smell on it and any excuse to give it some more love is a good one and this felt like a perfect game to play on the go.

Things I liked!

• It looks great | Star Fox is a great-looking game, especially in handheld mode, where the details and colour contrasts pop on the screen. That first level in the game with the blue ocean: divine. There’s also a level on the surface of the sun that really impressed me, but the level designs for the most part were a bit too dark & bleak for my tastes. I also noticed how the game somehow looked more impressive in handheld mode, than on the giant TV screen.

• You can play as you want | Weirdly, the game doesn’t tell you about this, but you can press “-” at any time and shift from a 3rd person camera behind the R-wing, to a cockpit view, giving you extra precision in your aim, but making it harder to avoid obstacles. I would also advise against using the signature Barrel Roll too often in first-person mode, or your R-wing needs windshield wipers on the inside… You can also make use of the Joy-Con 2’s Mouse Mode for even quicker reflexes and precision, but sadly, the ergonomics work against you here, and a regular PC mouse will be a lot more comfortable. Sadly missing are the gyro-controls. Not something I’d ever want to use myself, but my son is a huge fan of that option and always plays Mario Kart with it.

• Voice Acting | Not only is the full game voice-acted, but it’s also localised. I was shocked to see that the full game is playable in Dutch, with Dutch voice acting. That’s not something you see every day. While it’s a bit cringe, I still very much appreciate the effort, and so did my kids, who were watching me play.

• Alternative paths | Depending on how you play certain levels, you’ll have the option to pick a different level. While a default run through the story has only 7 chapters to it, there is a total of 16. Flying through a waterfall to chase an enemy, or redirecting a freight train, are just two examples of in-level options you can pursue to unlock more levels. You’ll HAVE to do these in the story mode before you can play them in the Challenge mode, however. And sadly, there are no in-game hints when hovering over a still greyed-out planet on what requirements you should try to meet.

• Multiplayer | You can play the game in multiplayer, every single mode. While I didn’t test the online multiplayer, or the weird camera feature they are promoting heavily (where you become one of the characters and they even lip-sync with you) I did test out the Battle Zone with my son, which had 3 different levels. It’s fun, but after 15-20 minutes, we felt like we had seen all it has to offer. Still, the fact that this worked via GameShare and him playing on the handheld Switch 1 was nice and an unexpected addition I can appreciate.

Mixed & disliked!

• Fantastic Mister Fox | I don’t like the visual style they went after for the characters. At all. There’s an uncanny valley level of realism they tried to achieve, but it didn’t quite hit it out of the ballpark for me. Especially Fox himself, who somehow seems less charismatic now, like I’m playing with a stuffed fox. Slippy toad sure seems slippery and Pigma even has a wet boogery nose. Thanks for that attempt at realism, but it’s appeal is lost on me.

• It’s very, very short | I first tried the multiplayer levels with my son. all three of them. 15-20 minutes later, we felt like we had seen it all. Then I went for the Story mode, and 7 levels and about 90 minutes later, I was watching the credits roll. There is a lot of replay incentive here though, don’t get me wrong. There are 16 levels in total to unlock, and challenges in all of them, but unless you’re the type who wants to replay a game over and over again for a better score, you’ll feel that the €50 price tag is a bit much for how much playtime you’ll get out of this.

• The Story is not very special | I don’t really count this against the game, as I wasn’t expecting a deep emotional narrative. But the game TRIES to insert one with Fox’s father dying at the start of the game and him filling his pawsteps. We just don’t spend enough time with the characters, and they’re all very one-dimensional, so it left no impact on me at all.

• The dog days are over| I’m not a fan of dogfights to begin with. It’s just very, very hard to keep track of where your enemies are if they could be coming from every direction. But I’ve not been as frustrated with this as I have with Star Fox. The trickier enemies, like the 4 Star Wolf fighter pilots, felt almost impossible to get within my crosshairs, and when they got behind me, it was extremely hard to flip the table on them, even with dedicated buttons to do a U-turn or a loop. Sometimes I felt like I spent a full minute repositioning without being able to shoot anything. Luckily, the on-rails levels fare a lot better.

• Bosses are weird sometimes | Most bosses have a health bar. Some don’t. Shooting them often results in hitting some kind of shield protecting them, and it’s not always clear what you should be shooting at to actually hit them. It often felt like there was some kind of visual feedback missing when I was shooting the correct parts, because the health bar wasn’t going down, or I didn’t always see parts break off that I was targeting. I say “most” and “some” because this wasn’t true for all of them, which makes it even weirder somehow that it was never consistent.

• How long did I play the review before publishing? 4-5 hours
• How long to beat the story? 1-2 hours for a single story run and watching credits roll
• How long to get 100%? | 10-15 hours if you go for all challenges
• You’ll love this game if you like these | Chorus, R-Type

Score: 70/100

The Star Fox remake gives Nintendo’s furry ace a slick new coat of paint, and some impressive (Dutch) localisation. But it’s hard to ignore how little meat there is on the bone. If you’re happy chasing high scores and unlocking every route, you’ll get more mileage out of it than I did. If you’re just here for the story, though, you’ll be (barrel) rolling credits before you’ve even had time to settle into the cockpit. A short game is nice every now and then, but maybe not at this price point.