Starfox Assault reviewed

So this ends my Gamecube Starfox themes and this kinda reinforces the belief that Starfox 64 seemed to be a fluke....well, I think Starfox: Command is well-liked but I haven't played it and I was never that big of a fan of the SNES Starfox, I mean controlling with the D-Pad! I remember the first time I played this and I flat-out hated it. I was like "That's it! I beat the game already!", "If I had emotionally connected with this, why are they undoing it!" and "Dammit Fox on foot and Landmaster, turn around in a quick and efficient manner!" But after a second playthough for the purpose of this review has made me kinder to it. Don't get me wrong, this is still heavily flawed but I do have some nice things to say.

So you remember Andross right? Well he's not in it, which is good since his appearance in Starfox Adventures was Wallbangingly illogical. So now Andrew, you remember him from Starfox 64 right, has gathered up the remains of Andross's army and is attacking the Lylat System. So you go up to stop him but then he gets shot down by the real enemy, The aparoids! They're like The Borg from Star Trek...exactly like The Borg, right down to the Queen who is not a humanoid so there is nothing disturbingly sexy about her. And then you realize how much of Star Trek this is, Krystal(yes the one from Adventures and no, the death of her parents is still unreferenced) is like Deanna Troi. I guess Star Wolf would be Klingons that you team up with due to intense respect. Oh, and Great Fox is the Enterprise and what not.

Assault does shine when it does what Starfox does best, on-the-rails flying missions. They're fast, they're intense and they are fun with all the things you can blast and the shoutouts to the game. When Slippy got bogies on his tail for the first time I had a tear in my eye. But that's only three missions out of ten. Most of them you are on foot and have the Landmaster though sometimes you have the Arwing but it's in All-Range Mode. Anyways the ground controls are a bit sloppy, and by a bit I mean really sloppy. It uses the tank-scheme controls where up is forward, down is moonwalk and the rest are turning without going anywhere. And worse, there's a free-roaming camera so that makes the tank controls even more clunky cause they one work with close non-roaming cameras. Then I have real problems with the ending. Without spoilers, it undoes all the attempted emotional backbone of the story in fell swoop.

Also, it's a bit short. First-timers can finish this in about two-and-a-half hours. Now I know what you're thinking, can't somebody good at Starfox 64 finish it in less than 90 minutes using the hard path? Yes you can but that had alternate paths you can go to, awesome voice-acting, even more awesome music and it made you want to play again just for fun than for 100% completion. Now Assault does try to have replay value in it, there's flags, medals and stuff for multiplayer that you can unlock but there's no desire for me to actually do these things. It completely misses the biggest part of replayment, alternate paths are absent. You play one playthrough and you played it, now you can play it again but harder...or easier whatever you choose.

Now my biggest complaint about Adventures was the horrible voice acting but I did admit there was some fun in seeing how the next voice was going sound like. Here, the voice acting is much improved. Slippy is just as annoying as he was in 64, which is much less annoying than Adventures. Peppy sounds old and wise instead of "Get off my space-lawn you space-punks!". Fox sounds like a leader once again instead of a whiny brat. But every once in a while the script does fail it with some heavy-handed lines and that detour back to Dinosaur Planet...or Sauria as it's been renamed is just horribly written when Prince Tricky makes his cameo, granted he sounds better than Adventures. But more importantly, the direction is kinda poor especially in Fox, he sounds flat. There's no fault in the writing or the voice itself but this is something a deaf and competent voice-over director could do better.

This is a type of game that you kinda have to play at least twice. The first time to be angry and disappointed on how things to turned out. Then the second one to know that this isn't so bad once you don't expect much out of it. The on-the-rails flying missions are fun, the rest get the job done in a jerky manner. But I will say while this is better made than Adventures, Assault doesn't have that So Bad It's Good quality that Adventures had.

5/10

Starfox Adventures reviewed

I'm embarking on another mini-arc, I'll be reviewing the Gamecube Starfox titles, this and Starfox Assault. Now both games have less than stellar reputations, especially Adventures but is the hate warranted? Well in Adventures case it was the horrible end-product of Executive Meddling, it was slated to be a stand-alone game with no connections to Starfox and it was supposed to be for the N64. Of course, things didn't work that way and so we have a Starfox game for better or worse.

Anyways the plot may take too long to actually get going. You start off as some blue fox chick Krystal, who's off avenging her parents(remember this, it won't get referenced again) helping out Dinosaur Planet for some reason, well because she's kind but for no real reason. She gets captured by General Scales and finally, you're playing as Fox. It's been years since the events of Starfox 64 and it shows, Great Fox is rusted and Falco left out of extreme boredom. You then get a mission to repair Dinosaur Planet cause it broke apart(it makes sense in context) and you do, being forced to ally with the annoying Prince Tricky and then having to rescue Krystal with only Krystal's staff, that you find, as a weapon.

The main gameplay looks familiar, real damn familiar. Yeah, it's pretty much the same system that any of the 3-D Zelda's use. I'm not knocking the system cause it's an awesome and easy-to-use system but is it really Fox's system? This leads to people's biggest complaint about this game, Fox doesn't belong here. He belongs in space blowing things up saving Slippy's butt, being told to do a barrel roll by Peppy and nurturing his rivalry with Falco, not on the ground. But, I will be the first to admit that Fox solving a problem on the ground is a good one. It does show a new side to Fox but it's so whiny that we almost wished we didn't know what he can do on the ground. Then the flying missions are horrible, yes the missions that are Starfox's bread and butter are too short and not fun. Then you also have to collect gold rings for some stupid, illogical reason about opening a force-field but you never know how it works and it's not good enough for you to accept on good faith.

None of that matters in regard to game's biggest flaw, the voice-acting is almost uniformally awful. All the characters are either Irish or Scottish or retarded or just sounds like jerks. The only halfway-decent voice acting is with General Scales and Krystal, and I have spot for that cause she says General like how Dee-Jay said General in the Street Fighter movie. And then there's Star Fox itself. Fox sounds like a whiny brat even though every so often he has some good moments. Peppy now sounds like he should be chasing punk kids off his space lawn. Slippy is even MORE annoying than he was on Starfox 64, which is shocking cause he doesn't fly with you so he never begs for you to get guys off of him.

So are there anything good about this. Well the graphics are bright, colorful and pretty. It does have a little problem with fur, it sticks out like selective static cling. Then there's Fox's teeth, all of them are so pointy it makes him look demonic, especially when he does his "Item found" animation. And like I said about the gameplay, it is pretty fun even though it's highly derivative. The puzzles successfully ride the line between being too easy and being too hard for a nice middle ground.

So with all the flaws in the game, there is some entertainment to be found. It's pretty to look at and there is a So Bad It's Good quality to it. You do want to know what ridiculous voice the next dinosaur is going to use and what illogical turn will the story go next. So this isn't really a bad game, it's just not a good Starfox game.

6/10