Fox McCloud has sky-high expectations to live up to in Star Fox, the Nintendo Switch 2’s glitzy remake of 1997’s Star Fox 64 (itself a glitzy remake of the 1993 SNES Star Fox). No matter how many successful missions he leads, he’s always left chasing his father’s tail. See, James McCloud was a war hero — an ace pilot who sacrificed everything to save his squad. That’s what a real star looks like, not some brash hotshot retracing his pop’s flight path. Who does McCloud Jr. think he is, anyway?
While this generational anxiety made for a light backdrop to Star Fox 64’s interstellar dogfights, developer Velan Studios places it front-and-center in its less subtle remake. Cinematic cutscenes lay it on thick between dazzling shoot-‘em-up missions, as Fox’s squad mates are eager to remind him (and you) that James’ boots aren’t easy to fill.
The family drama is made more explicit than it was in the Nintendo 64 version, but is the quality of a story proportional to the length of the script? Do cutscenes that are as carefully staged and shot as The Super Mario Galaxy Movie make a game better? Questions like that hang over Star Fox, a fine remake that’s overeager to live up to an all-time great. In its attempt to soar beyond an ironclad classic, Star Fox at times confuses modernity for maturity. It’s more polished and silver screen-ready, but big woof, pal! A whiter smile doesn’t make you the better pilot.
Structurally, Star Fox is wise to stay faithful to the timeless game it’s built on. It’s still an old-school space shooter where you pilot Fox’s Arwing across seven planets, blasting enemies and swerving around falling buildings along the way. The entire campaign can be completed in under two hours, even with new interstitial cutscenes that set up each mission. The real meat comes from starting over and trying to figure out secrets that will take you to alternate planets next time. (The old tricks still work, for the record.) All of that was potent enough to fuel countless Star Fox 64 playthroughs for the past 30 years, and it still holds true here. After a half dozen campaign clears, I still find myself eager to try new route configurations and rack up higher hit scores.
Like its predecessor, what’s impressive about Star Fox is that it doesn’t suck you in by dangling carrots in front of you. There are no meta progression hooks, and the only tangible incentive to play a level again is to gain its high score medals or try it in Expert difficulty. It’s simply a pleasure to play, like a reliable action movie that you’re happy to rewatch any time if it happens to be on cable. It’s Top Gun for gamers — in multiple ways. For one, it fulfills that same dogfighting fantasy without requiring a ton of technical execution. Barrel rolling to dodge incoming shots, tilting your ship on its side to cut through narrow passages, and performing somersaults to get pilots off your tail are accomplished through quick button presses, thanks to lightly streamlined controls. There are just enough evasive maneuvers to infuse a standard shoot-’em-up with Hollywood drama.
Everything that worked in Star Fox 64 still works today. Corneria, faithfully reconstructed with glossy visuals and grander explosions, remains a thrilling opening level that takes Fox and his crew through a city under siege; ducking under bridges and squeezing between burning buildings is as exciting as ever. Stages like Sector X and Meteo bring Star Fox even closer to its Star Wars inspiration, sending you zipping around meteor storms and industrial debris fields. Conversely, anything that didn’t work on Nintendo 64 is still a low point here. The remake’s All-Range levels, where Fox can freely fly around a circular arena, can still be a frustrating drag, even with useful evasive actions. The submarine and tank levels control a bit better than they used to, but the aerial action still flies circles around them.
Blasting enemies with charged shots and bombs is as simple and satisfying as ever, but there’s always a little room for improvement each time that drives you towards mastery. That’s why the most quietly disappointing part of the remake is that it nixes the original game’s high-score leaderboards, instead leaning on achievement-like challenges and unlockable profile banners to test your skills and ensure more hours for your buck. (You can still see your top hit score for each individual level, but no list tracking your final scores.) It’s a missed opportunity to give players a way to show off online and compete with friends.
That’s one small cut, but one that underlines the remake’s broader philosophical shift. Compare Star Fox to its 1997 counterpart, and you’ll find a tangible document of how what we value in big-budget games has changed over 30 years. Bragging rights aren’t enough of a selling point for tentpole blockbusters anymore; Star Fox has to be more substantive to capture a modern audience. How do you solve that and bring in more players? Velan Studios’ answer is to dial the cinematic undertones of the earlier games all the way up.
Few of the attempts to get today’s players to label Star Fox as “cinema” make the base game any better or worse.
That starts with the remake’s polarizing character redesigns that feel like they’re auditioning for a movie. The uncanny nature of them is jarring at first sight, as if they’re pulled from a fan-made Unreal Engine 5 render. They do look better in context than they do in quick clips; they’re more grounded than the toony Fox we’ve seen over the past few decades, skewing closer to the taxidermy design of the puppets that graced the original Star Fox game’s marketing materials. The redesigns wind up being hit-and-miss — Peppy still retains his essence in furrier form, while Slippy is uncomfortably slick. But the main problem with the models lies in their dead eyes. What does seeing every strand of fur really mean if your characters aren’t much more expressive than Star Fox 64’s mouth-flapping avatars?
The redesigns come with new voice acting, too. These performances toss aside the exaggerated tooniness of the original cast for something that presents as slightly more refined. Slippy’s memorably annoying high-pitched wail, something that communicates that he is an egghead who truly needs your protection, is replaced by less exaggerated line readings that sand the mechanic’s character down to “capable pilot.” Falco is similarly flat, dialing down the thick sarcasm until lines like “Gee, I’ve been saved by Fox” just leave him sounding bored. Maybe that’s what some players need to take these characters “seriously,” but it’s a shame to see those playful dynamics tossed aside.
More successful is the remake’s reorchestrated soundtrack, which trades synthetic brass and strings for a fleet of real instruments. Like much of Star Fox, it’s so over-the-top that its nose pierces the ozone layer, but the grandiose arrangements are riveting enough to clarify the pitch that the rest of the game struggles to sell. The remake isn’t meant to be subtle; it’s trying to crank up the melodrama and lean into the space opera of it all. I’m most on board with that vision when I’m barreling through Macbeth in a Landmaster tank to the sounds of a patriotic theme that sounds like it was pulled from a World War II propaganda video.
Then there are the new cutscenes, which is where Star Fox tries too hard to create something mature. It’s not that these newly added sequences don’t look great; watching Arwings weave through laser fire and explosions, complete with lens flares and widescreen bars, makes it feel like you’re playing through movie setpieces. But are they actually additive? Take the game’s new opening. Rather than setting up the story with a Star Wars-style text crawl, we’re treated to a short cinematic that actually shows James McCloud’s ill-fated Venom mission. It doesn’t tell us anything new or add nuance to the story; it’s just the action scene you always pictured placed in front of you. Would A New Hope be better if it replaced its iconic opening with a scene showing the birth of the galactic civil war? If anything, George Lucas’ retroactive attempts to fill in the gaps only dented our imaginations.
The same goes for the interstitial scenes, where the Star Fox crew lounges around their flying base, the Great Fox, and get their mission debriefs from General Pepper via holotable. What do those new scenes tell us? That Aquas is a water planet, and Slippy Toad has invented a submarine that will let Fox explore it. Great. The cast gets more time to quip in these scenes, but they’re mostly just reiterating character traits that come out in their comms chatter during missions. Fox repeatedly reminds General Pepper that his crew is doing this for the paycheck. Falco Lombardi fires off more pithy one-liners. The veteran Peppy Hare compares Fox to his dad. There’s no plot movement or character growth in these scenes; they’re largely there to make sure you didn’t miss anything while flying — or maybe to convince a future producer that there’s a movie-ready story here.
The problem with that approach is that the familiar story of Star Fox isn’t all that rich once you start stretching it out to fill cutscenes. That’s part of what makes it such an easy target for remakes, like a vague folk legend meant to be passed down between generations. There’s a war raging in the Lylat System, and Star Fox’s crew has been hired to join the fight against the nefarious Andross. The pilots have a set of barely developed foils in Star Wolf, but evildoers like Leon have about as much depth as Wario in a Mario Tennis game. The only kernel of substance we get is the detail that Fox wants to live up to his father’s legacy, something that is delivered just enough in the original game to give our star some motivation. The expanded version of all this just amounts to longer explanations of each planet’s terrain and more “your fathers.” It’s a Disney movie with extra lore.
The elegance of Star Fox 64 is in its ability to tell its entire story while you’re playing. The radio chatter is dense with character details that build the interpersonal dynamics between pilots. You have a full sense of who everyone is by the end, and how they feel about one another. Despite the attempts to elevate the narrative, Star Fox’s best storytelling still exists in the act of play. Midway through the Corneria operation, Falco overconfidently boosts into action. His bravado earns him some bogeys on his tail. If Fox saves him, he takes it as an ego test and challenges Fox to fly under a set of stone archways. Pull that off and Falco deems Fox worthy enough to chase after a high-profile target on a hidden path. It’s a fantastic moment that tells you everything you need to know about the two through what you actually pull off with your hands.
Few of the attempts to get today’s players to label Star Fox as “cinema” make the base game any better or worse — just more alluring as a transmedia IP. If anything, it takes some attention away from Velan Studios’ brightest ideas. The biggest casualty of that is a great multiplayer Battle Mode that’s let down by very limited support. Here, two teams of four players go against each other in objective-based modes that have them capturing zones, playing capture the flag with cargo, and collecting crashed meteors. Power-ups like decoys and teleporting boosts bring some extra strategy to flying, letting you outsmart an enemy that’s on your six. All of that puts the fine-tuned flying to good use, creating some tense dogfighting action that approaches the thrills of Star Wars: Squadrons. The addition of Snapchat-like AR filters that turn you into one of the pilots is a charming touch, too. But with only three maps, each one locked to its own objective mode, there’s just not enough depth to make Battle Mode more than a quick curiosity.
It’s a shame, because that’s where it feels like Velan Studios can really leave its mark on a series going forward. It has the fundamentals of ship piloting, and it knows how to make environments that give you enough opportunities to outmaneuver your opponent. I can see a future where Star Fox could be reinvented as a strong multiplayer game. (Even the co-op support, which lets one player fire using Switch 2’s mouse controls, offers a refreshingly novel way to play a shoot-’em-up with your kids.) It’s just going to take some confidence on Nintendo’s part to steer the ship in an exciting new direction rather than reversing course again.
Star Fox is another good excuse to revisit one of Nintendo’s best games, but it doesn’t meaningfully build on it. Fox McCloud is left in the same stasis he’s been in for decades now: surviving the Lylat Wars to show that he can walk in his father’s footsteps. I get it. How many more times will he have to prove he’s his own fox before he’s allowed to fight his own battles? Give his future cubs a war story that’s worth feeling insecure about.
Star Fox will be released June 25 on Nintendo Switch 2. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by Nintendo. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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