Star Fox Assault is such a painful experience, you’ll be glad it only lasted for a short time.
As the game starts you’ll find yourself in the fallout of Star Fox 64, including cleaning up the remnants of Andross’ forces in the Lylat system. It’s a nice touch to people who have finished the previous game. In the Arwing, you’ll fly the first mission both in space and on planet-surface with more rich graphics and sound. At first it looks and feels like your typical Star Fox game, but you’ll quickly realize that the voice acting is the worst voiceover quality you could get. At points the voices and dialogue feel straight out of a soap opera. With key phrases such as “Don’t worry, I’m protected by your warm feelings.” You’ll quickly wish you didn’t have ears. On top of that, the focus of the story is abruptly changed in the middle of what feels like a game unto itself. As you are defeating Oikonny, Andross’ nephew, an Aparoid appears and suddenly the Lylat system is invaded.
Worse yet, the story behind the Aparoids is never well defined and they constantly feel like an imagined race rather than a species that has always existed in the background during other games in the series. So the game feels based entirely on an imagined storyline with a race that was never established in previous titles.
Throughout the game you’ll have to get out of the Arwing or Landmaster and run around shooting things on foot. Actually, that’s what you’ll be doing the entire game. It doesn’t even feel like a decent third person shooter either, the camera is annoying and the aiming is akin to Jet Force Gemini. Out of 10 missions, only 3-4 are actually true Arwing missions leaving the rest as ground missions or missions with ground and air action where you’ll have to jump between the Landmaster and Arwing constantly. The only issue with the entire mechanic behind these varying missions is that it feels incredibly sloppy when you change vehicles. Simply walk up to the Arwing or Landmaster and press ‘Z’ to get in, seems too simple. Also there is no penalty for having one of your vehicles destroyed since Peppy will just beam down another, and since they seem to be made out of tin foil, you’ll be glad they did this. There is no penalty for having them destroyed and you will get an infinite number of replacements. The beam system is in conflict with another aspect of the previous titles. In Star Fox 64 the Arwings or Landmaster had to be deployed out of the Great Fox directly instead and had to be picked up again by physical means with none of this fancy beaming up and down akin to Star Trek.
This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg with this title. The music was another one of those numbers that was about 20 seconds long and looped over and over again for the entire mission (thank God there were only 10). The length of the missions, and the incredibly limited number of them bodes well because you won’t want to play that many to begin with.
Star Fox Assault is such a painful experience, you’ll be glad it only lasted for a short time. If I had to complement it, I’d say that the Arwing missions are very well done and feel just like Star Fox 64 in design. That makes it even more of a pity that they chose to stray from such a great formula. It’s a huge disappointment to me as a big fan of the series to see it take such a bad turn and I hope that things will be rectified when the next title rolls around.