Star Fox

What a game! I just finished medaling the Expert campaign, and this is how you do a remake.

• Great gameplay with good quality-of-life upgrades: I’m particularly liking the “mouse” controls – makes flying and dodging a lot more visceral-feeling, and the first-person view feels a lot better than it did in the original Star Fox 64.
• Really excellent writing & voice acting. Taking a game with (at best) cardboard cutouts of characters and extremely minimal storytelling and modernizing it is a big challenge – one this game handily surmounts. Each different route you can take has different emotional beats, and doing “worse” on a level still rewards you with a unique scene.

The cutscenes & radio messages around Titania are particularly well-done – you can really see the bond between the team members. Slippy overall was a delight – the animators did a really stellar job of capturing his reactions to the variouis little scenes, like when General Pepper says that Solar is too hot to get close too and Slippy acts shocked and starts madly typing away.

The only question that remains is, “can Nintendo make a good Star Fox game that isn’t Star Fox 64?” In the past, the unfortunate answer has been “no.”¹ After the stellar performance on display here, my hopes are officially high.

Footnotes

1. Every other StarFox game suffers at least one fatal flaw. Even the SNES games, which are pretty good, are hopelessly held back by the limited technical capabilities of the time. ↩