Oh, Star Fox, what have they done to you?
• Touch screen controls fit the game well
• Lots of different enemies
• Multiple endings and many paths through the game
• Being able to play as almost every Star Fox character is pretty cool
Cons:
• Teeters wildly between too frustrating and too easy
• Missile slipstream sections are irritating
• Some ships are no fun to use
• Palette-swap levels and no rail-shooting segments
• Erratic draw distance
• Lack of variety gets boring
Cue the scratchy, melancholy violin.
Oh, Star Fox, what have they done to you? Has the glory of your Nintendo 64 ancestor been forgotten? Relegated to lackluster on-foot combat, will you ever break the chains of gravity with aplomb ever again?
Melodramatic topping aside, those are all legitimate questions for anxious fans of the stuttering Star Fox space combat series, and Star Fox Command tries very hard to answer them in favorable light. However, its efforts in reversing the trend mean that Command plays very different from the Star Fox we all fell in love with years ago. But is this a good or bad thing?
Star Fox Command goes about its agenda by making several changes to the classic formula, one of which is the addition of a strategy-lite layer on top of the twitch-combat, and another the removal of the tedious ground-shooting levels of Assault. The biggest alteration is the axing of the classic on-rails segments that have featured in each game so far.
In their place, it now features two-part 'turn based' battles. At the start of a level you have several turns, each of which consist of a strategy segment and then some combat. The strategy comes in the form of a touch-screen map of the level, where enemy ships, your own squad, your Great Fox mothership, and various cities and power-ups are displayed. Levels are defeated by capturing all enemy bases, and lost if all of your ships or the Great Fox are destroyed, or if all turns are used up and victory is not achieved. Using the stylus, players draw a path for their squad-members to take, clear away fog of war, or use the Great Fox to fire collected missiles at enemies. Once the action part of the turn is begun, the map moves to the upper screen and the ships follow their given course. If a ship's path crosses an enemy vessel or base, an icon of that battle is moved to the touch screen, and there can be many fights queued up for players to shoot through in whatever order they feel like, which is a nice touch. Planning a route is actually consistently fun – sadly, this is the only consistently fun thing to be found.
Tapping an icon drops the player in control of whichever friendly ship is to be used there, and then the fighting kicks in. Depending on the location of the battle on the map, the terrain differs in appearance. There might be rolling hills, city buildings, jagged rifts, or plains, which is a cool change of pace, even though it doesn't have that much of an effect on gameplay. The stylus controls maneuvering very well, making dodges a piece of cake to perform. Firing can be done with any other button on the DS, so combat is fairly simple, and all special maneuvers like boost and U-turns can be done easily on the touch screen, which holds a radar display of the current arena. Bombs can be dragged and dropped at any point onto any place showed on radar, which makes it very easy to line them up in order to cause some serious chaos to the enemy ranks. Winning brings a time bonus or possibly items, and if it happens to be a decisive fight to retake a city, you earn another two turns to play with – it's very rare to fail a mission due to lack of turns. Losing a battle due to being shot down or exceeding the time limit means that the baddies will continue their relentless flight towards the Great Fox.
While the first impression may seem odd, the graphics do help it quite a bit. Aside from an unsteady draw distance, the visuals are like a cross between the SNES game and the classic N64 title, with sharp polygons and capable textures. Unfortunately, some of them are really grainy, and because the engine never can make up its mind at what distance things ought to appear, pop-up abounds. Having a massive, screen-filling boss enemy fade into the mist far away and then suddenly appear just in front of the ship is a little nerve wracking. Some things even randomly blink in and out even while being shot at, which looks pretty weird. Fortunately, the bottom-screen radar keeps this from becoming dangerous, and it's even possible to fly looking at it alone, rather like the course map in Mario Kart DS. But aside from the wonky draw distance, the only things that stand out as truly ugly are the character pictures during between-level cutscenes. They're blobby, stiff, weirdly proportioned, and actually painful to look at, with absolutely no expressions. Imagine The World Ends With You's great scenes, except with only one picture for each character, drawn using the artistic talents of a sixth-grade anime fangirl who spends more time drawing flower and hearts. It's that bad.
There is a strange absence of both laser upgrades and gold rings; and while there are plenty of health-restoring and time-extension items to be had from shooting baddies and flying through hoops, the laser power-ups and max-health boosting gold rings are sorely missed, especially in the face of a surprise boss fight. Depending on the ship being controlled for the fight, you'll have access to different weapons, more speed boost time, or more bombs. The ship belonging to Slippy Toad, for example, has a very powerful no-lock plasma shot and a short boost; while Falco's has a single laser with multi-lock, capable of striking multiple enemies; and a much longer boost. Most ships are balanced, but some, like the Cornerian Fighter, aren't much use for anything. Laser upgrades would have been a welcomed addition, because a twin-laser is fairly lame when it has no lock and can't hit anything.
Battles play out like the "all-range" sections of Star Fox 64, and have a time limit which varies depending on the level. A battle is won by defeating a certain number of a certain type of enemy in order to make them drop items called "cores". Only the given kind of enemy will release a core when defeated, but most stages have multitudes of other types of baddy sitting around. It's a shame the time limit tends to restrict just to going after the required enemies, because it's a good lot of fun to blow up all the diverse nasties sitting around.
And my, are there lots of them. Many draw inspiration from earlier Star Fox enemies, but some are brand-new, and all of them are fun to fight against. Some are ground-based robots, others are fast-firing turrets, some stay in little 'herds' bunched up in trenches, and yet others are dangerous enemy flying aces who take you on one-to-one. And, depending on what type of terrain the dogfight takes place on, enemies differ. Each path through the game (more on that later) features different levels, and hence an ever-wider array of baddies, and you'll want to go after all the timer-extension 'fuel cells' in sight just for the sake of exterminating the opposition with extreme prejudice.
Sadly, the game doesn't seem to understand that killing tons of enemies at once while narrowly dodging lasers and missile fire is the best part of the game, and that the time limit is seriously irksome. Without it the game would be too easy, but that would be preferable rather than having to pass up getting a 'perfect' rating just for the sake of keeping within the stringent time limit. It might be more tolerable were it to reset back to its maximum from one level to the next, but as it is, it's one of the most painful and frustrating Command shortcomings.
With the ease out on the table, I'll bring up the game's often-infuriating attempts at upping difficulty. In two words: missile interception. These irritating segments occur when enemy bases launch missiles in a bid to destroy the Great Fox command ship. Losing it results in instant game over, so this practically forces you to keep a ship behind as an anti-missile guard while the others go off to complete the mission. Cruise missile segments involve flying behind the missile through hoops like N64 Superman, accelerating wildly as you go, and then hopefully managing to destroy it once it comes in range before the speed becomes too great for your ship to handle, and you miss a hoop. This results in losing the missile, and it is allowed to go its merry way with an added boost of distance. Early in the game these segments are horribly frustrating simply because of the fact that once the missile is in range, the hoops come too quickly to meet them consistently, and you don't have a ship powerful enough to efficiently destroy the missile. So even if the missile does explode, you might have missed the last hoop as it did so – whoops, too slow! There goes the Great Fox!
There are a few boss battles that can be really cheap as well, such as one in which lots of metal bars are flung towards you and you must hope that the engine renders them quickly enough for you to see the hole and slip through. Oh, you happen to be flying a ship with too large a wingspan? Too bad for you.
Fortunately, each level has tasks that one member of your team can carry out with aplomb, so after failing a few times you'll quickly get a hold of who needs to do what in order to succeed. If the pilot with the wide-lock that can hit everything on the screen doesn't have the concentrated power to destroy a cruise missile, the pilot with the powerful cannon is perfect for the job. And vice versa, the cannon pilot isn't accurate enough for that boss, but the wide-lock pilot can easily hit all of its weak points in one go. The sheer number of characters, some of whom show up just when a mission is grossly against you in order to save the day, is perhaps the best feature of Star Fox Command. And the fact that each one has their own vessel. Flying Falco in a quick and responsive "Sky Claw" feels totally different from Fox's dependable but boring Arwing II, and completely opposite from Slippy's clumsy but powerful rapid-fire "Bullfrog".
Each route through the game is very short, but running through once unlocks the branching paths, which then can branch again, and even if you arrive on a level you've been to already on a previous play-through, it most likely will have different enemies, scenario, and characters for you to dink around with. The problem with this is that the plot is at an all-time low, even by Star Fox standards. We're introduced to a new villain, the Anglar, capable of overcoming the incompetent Cornerian military, and Team Star Fox shows up to save the universe. There's no emotional bond whatsoever, the Anglar are even less convincing enemies than Star Fox Assault's derivative Aparoids, and the ugly comic-like cutscenes sport awkward and irritating dialogue, leaving several series mainstays grossly out of character. Since when was kind-hearted Krystal an egotistical shrew? Why is once-cocky Falco so compassionately boring? Has Wolf finally decided to stay British or not?
Command is really about exploring what-ifs, as none of the nine endings, nicely-drawn as they are, really bring much closure – some are frankly very abrupt and jarring. But they're still the only real incentive for struggling through a level. While a few of them also suffer from awkward art, some are pretty interesting, and make one wonder where the series will be turning next. Also, since practically every Star Fox character ever made along with a good cast of newcomers makes an appearance, the game is something worth considering for a fan, though it's definitely a rent-first-before-buying.
What's frustrating most about Star Fox Command is that it fluctuates so wildly between horrible and amazing. One minute it's an exciting and nostalgic rush of action, and the next a painful grind. Command is like a friend you haven't seen in years – you look forward to seeing them until you find out how much they've changed. The game has its highs and lows, and die-hard fans probably will be able to forgive most of its faults, if the inconsistency doesn't make them cry out of grief first. For anyone else, though, it's a mediocre episode in a series that's seen far, far better days.