- Star Fox
- Star Fox 2
- Star Fox Adventures
- Star Fox: Assault
About two years after Star Fox Adventures, the GameCube got a “real” Star Fox entry, subtitled Assault. Around this time, Nintendo was occasionally working on their properties with third party developers, like when they hired Sega to create F-Zero GX. Star Fox: Assault was initially meant to be developed by the Ace Combat team at Namco, which proved to be an exciting concept. It must’ve run into some type of development issues, though, because ultimately the responsibility was handed off to the team that created the Klonoa games. The result is a game that isn’t completely terrible, but also not really what anyone wanted.
The first level gives a very good initial impression. Star Fox is back! The cutscenes are slightly expanded, with more dialogue. The frame rate is a buttery smooth 60 FPS (with only minor hitches), and it looks and feels fantastic, especially compared to the rather dated N64 game. The music mostly consists of arrangements from Star Fox 64, but redone with a full orchestra, and they sound amazing. Peppy has even retired back to the base, giving Krystal a place on the Star Fox team as the squad telepath, weaving Adventures into the canon so the game doesn’t feel like a weird fever dream.
Assault is filled with fan service, recalling dialogue and characters from Star Fox 64. For example, the first stage focuses on chasing down Andrew Oikonny, Andross’ nephew and (now former) member of Star Wolf, who proclaims to fight for the glory of his empire before going down in flames, revealing a new enemy: the robotic insect-like Aparoids. Dinosaur Planet even returns as a stage, though now given the proper name of Sauria.
And then everything goes downhill from there. The second level has Fox jumping out of his Arwing to attack an enemy base on foot. The goal here is to run around and destroy all of the highlighted enemies on the radar. Destroy all of them and more pop up. This goes for a few cycles until the boss spawns. Partway through the level, the Landmaster tank spawns, which you can hop into and drive around, giving you extra firepower at the expense of mobility. Many subsequent levels are similar, with a few having you switch between ground combat and hopping into the Arwing to take to the skies and defend your friends. These parts play out similarly to the All-Range mode conflicts in Star Fox 64.
It wasn’t entirely clear at this point in the franchise’s history, but Nintendo didn’t seem to like the idea of Star Fox being a rail shooter. This explains why it had no problem sticking Fox into Dinosaur Planet. Accordingly, the rail-shooter scenes of Assault take a back seat to the on-foot battles. Out of the game’s 10 stages, only three of them are on-rails (with a fourth being an All-Range battle). This leaves the rest of the levels to focus on melee combat.
Conceptually, this isn’t necessarily a bad change… except the design and the control of these stages are pretty bad. By default, the left analog stick moves Fox forward and backward, and makes him turn left or right. In order to strafe, you need to hold down the L trigger, which also makes him do a roll, while the C-stick is used to change weapons. This is like something out of an early 3D game on the N64 or PlayStation. You can switch to more standard dual analog controls, but nothing about the way Fox or the camera moves feels right. Everything is just way too fast, and there’s no way to adjust it, either. Your default blaster weapon takes a second or so to charge, too, and it’s a pain to hit anything with it. Other weapons, like missile launchers, machine guns, and sniper rifles are more useful, but many are awkward in their own ways, and also governed by limited ammo.
Piloting the Landmaster is even more sluggish, especially when you need to use its limited hovering ability to do anything. On foot, you can at least run quickly and dodge enemy fire. In spite of the tank also having a roll ability, though, it’s just way too large to be effective. To top it off, the “hunt the red dots” design of these stages just isn’t very interesting. They also get particularly confusing when an enemy is on a different elevation, or hidden inside a building. The only standout parts of these levels are the sections where you hop on the wing of a spaceship, piloted by someone else, and then shoot down enemies from there. These are also a downgrade from a technical standpoint, considering that they only run at 30 FPS compared to the 60 FPS of the pure flying stages.
The advantages to these segments only really appear in the multiplayer mode, which is Star Fox Assault’s biggest strength. Though the control problems remain, it’s a lot more fun to play against other players, especially when hopping in and out of vehicles, rather than bumbling around looking for targets. There are a whole bunch of different modes here among the 16 stages (four times the amount in Star Fox 64, and with many areas not featured in the single-player game), including ones that only give players sniper rifles or missile launchers (but with unlimited ammo), or grant your characters jet packs. There’s also a “Crown Capture” mode where you attempt to take a crown from your opponent and hold it as long as possible. The five main members of Star Fox are playable, along with Wolf O’Donnell, each having different characteristics and special effects. The downside to this is that most of its features are locked, requiring either beating the main game (not a huge hassle for the most part, except when getting all of the medals to unlock Wolf) or playing X number of Versus Mode matches, with over 260 (!) required to get everything.
It’s hard to tell exactly what issues plagued Star Fox Assault’s development. Around the same time, Nintendo announced an arcade game for the franchise, also by Namco, but it was never seen or heard from again. It almost seems like the multiplayer mode was the core focus of the game, but at some point they needed a stronger single-player mode, so they did what they could to make some regular missions out of what they had and tacked on a few classic Arwing stages.
Even taking into account the sloppy ground stages, there’s plenty about Star Fox Assault that just feels off. There’s no branching at all in any of the stages, with the only reason to replay being to gain medals. The Arwing stages feel good at first, but there are some minor issues – your ship only fires one laser at once instead of three, and many of the enemies take several hits, so the emphasis seems to be on using the charge shot. The enemy cadence just isn’t as satisfying, either, and the levels are on the longer side (probably to make up for their relatively small number).
The voice acting is also noticeably worse than either Star Fox 64 or Star Fox Adventures (save Slippy). It’s cool to see the story expanded a bit, especially by bringing back Star Wolf as sort of a “frenemy”, though Pigma is still a foe (he was a traitor to the original Star Fox team after all), with a new character named Panther taking his place in the squad. The design of the Aparoids is cool, but they’re kind of boring compared to the cheesy Andross foes. The cutscene character models are also a substantial step down from Adventures – it appears Rare didn’t share their technology with Namco. What’s odd is that the character animations are much more expressive in the Japanese version, making the English release seem stiffer by comparison.
There are a couple of unlockables beyond multiplayer stuff. For starters, in the American and European releases, you can earn the NES version of Xevious. In the Japanese version, you can also unlock two other Namco Famicom games, Battle City (a simple but fun overhead multiplayer blast-em-up with tanks that was later revamped into an arcade game called Tank Force) and Star Luster (a first-person spaceship simulator heavily inspired by Atari’s Star Raiders). Neither of these were originally released outside of the country, but they don’t have any real language barrier either, so it’s annoying that they were deleted from the overseas release.
In short, any time you’re in the Arwing in Assault, it’s pretty darn good. These parts look and feel great, and while the design isn’t quite up to Star Fox 64’s level, it’s still really well done. The on-foot parts are far less enjoyable, though. It’s such an inconsistent experience that it’s hard to recommend for any reason outside of the multiplayer mode and the fantastic soundtrack.
