Star Fox Assault Review

The last time gamers were able to get their hands on a Star Fox game was in 2002 when Rare released an adventure game set in the Star Fox universe. While it was enough for some to quench their Star Fox thirst, for others it just wasn’t enough. For most, what they really liked about the games were the flying missions. In fact, I don’t think anyone can argue with that. Star Fox Adventures, unfortunately, didn’t feature that much of those and because of that, fans have been asking for a true sequel to Star Fox 64 since then.

A few months after SFA’s release, Nintendo revealed a new Star Fox game called Star Fox Armada and it was to feature tons of flying missions. The fact that it was being developed by Namco’s Ace Combat team suggested that it could be the best Star Fox yet as the Ace Combat games have been highly acclaimed by the gaming press since it first started on the Playstation console.

Time passed and little details were revealed about the game. When it was shown for the first time though many were let down when they learned it was to be mostly a multiplayer based game. What’s worst was that it didn’t look too good either, that the controls were extremely bad and that it wasn’t too fun to play.

A year later at E3 2004, Nintendo showed a new version and all hope that was lost of the game being good came back. Fans all over the world were excited as they were going to finally be able to get their hands on the Star Fox sequel they deserved. I was one of those fans and since I still played Star Fox 64 until last year you can imagine how much I was excited on being able to get my hands on Star Fox Assault which was now the new name for the game.

The game was released last February and I quickly got it. Being the hardcore gamer that I am I played with it like a maniac and finished it in only a few hours on the day I had bought it. Some of you might think I was disappointed as I had paid $50 to play a game that lasted only something like 4 hours, but that’s not the way I see it. I might have paid $50, but I was able to experience one of the best GameCube game to date, and a worthy sequel to Star Fox 64.

The game starts with an opening video much like past Star Fox games. The Lylat system is being attacked by Andross’ fleet and the Star Fox team comes to save the day. It’s kind of like every other Nintendo franchise as it always starts the same way, always ends the same way too, but it’s what between that mostly interests us.

This game offers new play modes that weren’t available before. While there is still the story mode, there is also the possibility to play any of the completed 10 missions in any order you want, and also a survival mode where you have to complete the whole game in one sitting without getting game over. In the normal story mode you can restart any time you want, but in survival mode you’ll have to restart from the start if you die. There are also 3 different difficulty levels for the expert Star Foxers out there who want more. The bronze difficulty level is quite easy, but when you start playing silver and gold you’ll see that only the skilled players will be able to play through those as they offer more challenge than I have ever seen in a Star Fox game before.

The game offers a total of 10 stages but, unlike Star Fox 64, you can’t choose the path you want to take to get to the final boss. If some of you do remember, in SF64 you could perform certain tasks and that gave you the choice of choosing a different route and that gave the game a lot of replayability. That is now gone from Star Fox Assault and I think it’s a bad thing as, like I said, it gave us a reason to play through the game many times just to see what the best route was to get the most points as possible and also to find out all of the little secrets in each stage.