Star Fox is the Switch 2’s most impressive visual showcase yet

The biggest Switch 2 exclusives so far have largely been about scale. Mario Kart World introduced a wide open continent to race across, Donkey Kong Bananza let you smash basically everything around you, and Pokopia brought an expansive Minecraft-style creative experience to the Pokémon universe. Star Fox is different. A remake of a Nintendo 64 game, Star Fox is an on-rails shooter, with tightly choreographed action and spectacular set-pieces. This more linear structure has let the game’s designers craft what is perhaps the best-looking game yet for the Switch 2. Considering that Star Fox is at its best when it makes you feel like you’re right in the middle of a gorgeous sci-fi movie, those visual flourishes make a big difference.

Star Fox follows the same basic blueprint of the game it’s based on, Star Fox 64. The game has you taking control of an anthropomorphic fox pilot named Fox McCloud (fresh off a surprise appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie), who leads a squadron of mercenaries that fight for good, but also money. The story is pretty barebones, but it has Fox and friends taking on a series of missions across the galaxy in an attempt to defeat an evil scientist named Andross. The general storyline, the overall structure of the game, and even the layout of the levels remain largely unchanged from the N64 version.

But even if you’ve played the original, the differences between the two are apparent right away. Star Fox’s missions are all accompanied by voiced cutscenes that flesh out the story and give you better reasons for why you’re heading out on a particular mission. They also let you spend a lot more time with the characters outside of their ships. I never knew I wanted to see Fox sipping an energy drink in between battles, but it turns out I do.

This all makes the game feel more cinematic, much like a modern action game, and the feeling extends seamlessly into the action itself. It simply looks incredible: ships flying across an ocean, leaving trails in the water; gigantic enemies that take up the whole screen, while waves of lava crash down around them; and all kinds of firefights amidst huge swaths of debris floating in space. If you take out the talking animals and delightfully cheesy dialogue, you could mistake the game for other space epics like Star Wars or No Man’s Sky.

The visuals and cutscenes go a long way to making the nearly three decade-old Star Fox 64 look and feel modern. So do the controls, which seem much more responsive to me (though maybe that’s just because I’m not being forced to use an N64 controller this time around). For an example of how different the game can look, here’s a glimpse at one of its most iconic scenes from early on, compared across the Switch 2 and the N64 version available through a Switch Online subscription.

But there’s also a lot about Star Fox that shows its age. This is an old-school, arcade-style space shooter, which means that it’s a game built around repetition. The initial path through the game only takes around an hour, but to see everything it has to offer, you have to replay levels to find new paths that open up additional missions and, ultimately, the true ending. That takes a lot of time, particularly as some of the levels remain pretty difficult. I love the idea of the train mission where you pilot a tank, but after a few hours of struggling through it, I definitely don’t want to try and shoot all of the necessary targets ever again.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this structure, and I do occasionally enjoy going back and trying for a high score. But it can also feel incongruous with the modern presentation, which suggests you’re experiencing a movie-like story. The barebones narrative feels even more lacking now given how epic the visuals make everything feel, and while the cutscenes look great, the set-up means you’ll see them many, many times. They’re impressive at first, but eventually you’ll be making liberal use of the skip button.

Star Fox features a handful of other additions. A new challenge mode gives you more goals to achieve in each level; an expanded multiplayer includes online play; and there are some wacky virtual avatars that I wasn’t able to test. These are all nice to have, though the meat of the experience remains the campaign and all of its various unlockable missions.

The game is launching at a time when remakes are among the most popular single-player titles out there. Major franchises like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest have all turned remakes into tentpole releases, while some of the most anticipated upcoming games — including Halo: Campaign Evolved and Nintendo’s own mysterious Ocarina of Time remake — are updates to classic titles.

Star Fox is illustrative of both the good and bad of this trend. In many ways, the visual overhaul benefits the experience, making it feel even more like a sci-fi movie you can play. But it also shows how awkward it can be when old-school gameplay meets modern graphics. In this case, the balance mostly works out in Star Fox’s favor. But it also has me more curious than ever to see how Nintendo remakes one of the most iconic and influential Zelda games.

Star Fox launches on the Nintendo Switch 2 on June 25th.

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• Andrew Webster
• Entertainment
• Games Review
• Gaming
• Nintendo