Under just about any other circumstance, a beloved first-party N64 game getting a snazzy 4K/60fps remake would be cause for celebration. But aside from his big Hollywood debut, the last time Fox McCloud got to go on a truly new mission was
The audiovisual upgrades in this Switch 2 release are certainly welcome and appealing, but they’re still wallpaper over the game’s true age. Here we get the same missions, the same secrets, the same story, the same stage designs from 1997. For a company so willing to drill deep on nostalgia like Nintendo, it’s bizarre just how neglected Fox and his crew have been.
Star Fox 64 has aged better than most titles from the N64 era, and adding polish and refinement to that rock-solid foundation just highlights the excellence of the original game. Still, no one should look at a game about talking animals having Star Wars-style dogfights in space and think, “We’ve seen this all before,” but that’s the thought that this Star Fox brings to mind.
Velan Studios has turned Star Fox 64 into a graphical stunner, bringing it up to code with a more photoreal art design, and top-to-bottom script rewrite for cutscenes and mid-mission banter. For the most part, these are all improvements, making Fox’s mission more meaningful, and his crew feel more, well, human. Elsewhere, though, the same 30-year-old flaws are evident, like the awkward targeting reticle that the new first-person mode barely addresses.
Star Fox also suffers from the same pattern that every title in the series can’t seem to break: a short play time that’s on par with your average indie walking sim instead of a blockbuster space shooter. The game’s longevity gets padded out somewhat with the addition of a fun, if rather sparse, multiplayer mode, but that, more than anything, maybe tells the player more about why Star Fox as a franchise hasn’t gone where no fox has gone before yet. Nintendo, perhaps, sees the series as heir apparent to a quarter-muncher like After Burner or Gradius rather than a prestige epic like Ace Combat or the X-Wing-focused Star Wars games.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Golin.
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