Star Fox Adventures Review

Oddly enough, the best thing about SFA’s gameplay is the minigames. As I mentioned before, each new planet must be flown to and this is accompanied by a shooter segment reminiscent of Starfox 64. These segments are quite fun and really makes me long for Namco’s upcoming Starfox game. At several points, the player ditches their space ship in favor of a flying pterodactyl and these points manage to capture the Panzer Dragoon feel quite nicely. Finally, there are several points in the game where the player races on a speeder bike, similar to the kind in Return of the Jedi. While these races are rather simply, they manage to be a whole lot of fun and welcome change from all the item hunting.

Graphically, SFA is one of the prettiest games around. The environments are stunning, with sharp textures and dozens of little details like leaves falling from the trees or Fox’s reflection in the water. Characters are quite impressive as well, all containing quite high polygon counts and excellent animation. Perhaps the most touted aspect of SFA’s graphics is the fur effects that cover each of the game’s fuzzy characters. Simply put, this effect looks great and I spent my fair share of time simply gazing at the characters. In fact, I spent a lot of time simply staring at SFA’s beautiful graphics. I’m ashamed to admit that a large part of the reason I keep SFA is because it’s one of the best games to show off the GC’s power.

The sound may not be quite as amazing but it’s still fairly strong. The voice acting is generally good with many characters talking in their own languages. The music fits most of the locations nicely and there are a few nice tunes in there. It may not be the type of game where you run out and buy the soundtrack but it’s very solid to say the least.

SFA’s story is adequate though nothing special. Eight years after Starfox 64, Fox and Co. come across a world called Dinosaur Planet that is being run by a tyrant named General Scales. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before but it’s involving enough to keep the players interested.

SFA will run you 10-20 hours depending how good you are at puzzle solving. There are a couple mini-quests scattered about but nothing that will take you very long. For some odd reason, the game also does not let you leave the final area. In other words, if you decide to beat the game, you won’t be able to go back and do any miniquests unless you have a second memory card and make a copy.

SFA is a lot like the movie Hannibal. Hannibal had a great cast, strong sound track, and an excellent director (Ridley Scott) who made sure the film looked gorgeous. Unfortunately, the script was lousy and the film, while entertaining, was a disappointment. SFA certainly has a lot of polish to it. It looks, sounds, and controls great. Unfortunately, like Hannibal, it simply isn’t satisfying. In the end, it’s kind of fitting that Starfox Adventures turned out how it did. I, along with many other Nintendo fans, was so worried about a game being “epic” and not “kiddy” that I totally forgot what’s important to a game. Now that Zelda: WW has been released, it’s even more clear why SFA falls short.