Star Fox Assault review

by Piyoz on Jul 24th, 2014

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers.

>implying that people play Star Fox for the story

Star Fox Assault is like draft beer. If someone put one in front of you, you’d probably drink it. You might even enjoy it. But in the back of your mind, you can’t help thinking that there might be far better beers out there. So why are you drinking this draft?

Star Fox Assault is the fourth installment of the Star Fox series. Released in 2005 on the  Nintendo Gamecube, this third-person action game takes the series away from its family-friendly Nintendo origins and into a more epic, “hardcore” direction. How they did this makes for some questionable game design. At least the game was a financial success on the part of Nintendo (the producers) and Namco (the developer).

Star Fox Assault plays almost like Star Fox or Star Fox 64. There are linear Arwing missions zooming through outer space and planet surfaces, barrel rolls and G-diffusers intact. Everything from Smart Bombs to pilots talking in chat logs at the bottom of the screen give the player that distinct Star Fox feel. It’s a shame that the Arwing doesn’t control that well. It feels loose. Imprecise. Airy.

One improvement Namco made for the outer space stages is their layout. While Star Fox 64 is a straight line through a map (with occasional branching), Star Fox Assault twists and warps. As the player, you lose your exact sense of up and down. Because this is outer space. You shouldn’t have one. Assault feels more cosmic.

On foot combat is where Assault takes a weird direction. The only thing more awkward than the GCN controller is the play style of Fox and co. on the ground. The control stick works well enough for movement. And the auto-aim doesn’t require you to hold R to aim while standing still. However, jumping is unpredictable; weapon switching is uncertain; hit stun lasts too long; rolling and strafing are too easy to mix up; first-person aiming can’t be inverted; the grenade animation is too long. I could go on and on. All these little details that don’t feel right all add up to uncomfortable ground play.

Press Z to taunt. Yes, even in the single player.

The campaign missions on foot are basic enough to not require long explanation, yet short enough to not get tedious. Any mission just amounts to eliminating x number of aliens and destroying x number of shield generators. Then rail shoot on the wing of a Wolfen.

Yeah, there are also rail shooting sequences so that nothing gets stale. Along the way, there are plenty of comrades whining about bogies on their tails. It never ends.

For all the flaws in the game play, fewer flaws can be found in the narrative of Star Fox Assault. Dialogue flows and seems natural, even though it does repeat too much through those ground missions. Characters bounce off each other and have personality. Falco, Slippy, Krystal, and Peppy all banter very well. I found myself quoting their transmissions just as I would flying through Area 6 in Star Fox 64.

A notable feature of Star Fox Assault is an actual story that develops and pays off. It concerns the invasion of a part-insect, part-machine alien race called the “aparoids”. Team Star Fox learns that aparoids can commandeer machines. Through the course of the story, various enemies and allies become consumed by the hive minded aparoids, including Pigma Dengar and General Pepper. Aparoids invade Katina, Sauria, Corneria, and Fortuna. Fox and friends have to fight back the alien takeover and discover how the aparoids can be defeated. After Slippy’s father creates a convoluted bomb to defeat the Aparoid Queen, the Cornerian fleet sends the Great Fox to the aparoid home world for a final confrontation.

Along the way there’s some decent character work. Nothing really deep or special. It’s really just servicing the game play. The aparoids make for pretty convincing force-of-nature villains. Unlike Star Fox 64, actual exposition and team building happens between missions. And it’s kind of interesting. It should come as no surprise that interactions among Fox, Slippy, Falco, Krystal, Peppy, and Star Wolf are actually engaging when drawn out.

The last few missions really nail it, too. The drama of these pilots coming together in the face of probable extinction is palpable in the dialogue and voice acting. When Peppy crashes the Great Fox into the aparoid planet surface to make way for his team, it’s genuinely dramatic. And then when Team Star Wolf shows up beside Team Star Fox to blast their way to the Queen, there’s a very serious moment of these sworn rivals coming together to fight back against a mutual threat. Why is this so entertaining? These short cut scenes say so little but accomplish so much.

The single-player campaign manages pretty well to entertain and engage. I don’t think I could say the same for the multiplayer.

Star Fox Assault’s multiplayer is pretty barren. As much as I was excited to see Titania and Zoness again, the maps are so bland and empty that firefights on air or on foot have no real strategy. It’s two to four human players on foot in these big, vacuous maps with tiny blasters. The first person to find a Landmaster gains an unfair advantage over ambulatory foes. As soon as an Arwing is found, look out! Because the only thing that can trump it is a highly-OP Wolfen. Broken AND too simple? Assault’s multiplayer lacks the tight, third-person shooting controls of Gears of War, the natural feel of machine piloting in Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and the city exploration of Kirby Air Ride.

This game may have plagiarized, too.

That’s not all.

Prince Tricky is in this game. Rare put him in Adventures because they could. He originally comes from Diddy Kong Racing as the boss of Dino Domain. Does Rare (and by extension Microsoft) not own Tricky anymore? Is he Nintendo’s? I’m really confused right now.

For everything Assault does right, there’s something it does wrong. The game play doesn’t always feel like it should, but the missions and characters work just fine. With only ten missions, there’s not all that much to do.

3/5

Mediocre

All images were acquired from the websites Arwing Landing, YouTube, the Lylat Wiki, and the F-Zero Wiki. Although some images say JeuxFrance.com, so maybe they came from there, too. Merci bien, mes amis.

Categories: Reviews