"Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse..."

I really love Star Fox.

I thought that I should get that out of the way before anything else was said in this review. I don't want people to get the idea that I am just bias against the series, or the concept, or anything like that. Many hours of my life were wasted staring at the original Star Fox on the SNES, and perhaps even more in the multiplayer component of “Star Fox 64”.

So I think that like most fans of the first two incarnations of the Star Fox series, I was a little disappointed to hear the direction it was taking on the GameCube (Star Fox Adventures). Likewise, I was uplifted to then hear about “Star Fox: Assault”, only be to be disappointed again after playing it. Point being, the Star Fox series has been in bad shape as of late

When the world first saw “Star Fox Command”, fans of the series let out a sigh of relief. Finally, after all these years of bizarre Star Fox games, we would finally see one that went back to the roots of the series, fast-paced space combat.

Well, that is what they wanted you to see.

In it's final form, “Star Fox Command” is nothing like the classic Star Fox games. Sure, you get to fly the Arwing around, take out some enemies, even get into some multiplayer dog fights, but the very concept and execution of the game is so completely broken that it is nearly unplayable.

The general concept in “Star Fox Command” is to direct Fox and the members of the Star Fox team towards enemy ships approaching the Great Fox. You do this by drawing courses for the craft to take on an overhead radar display shown on the touch screen. This is done in a turn based manner, so you will draw the courses you want everyone to take, then the enemies will move, and then it will be your turn to move again. The concept is pretty straight forward.

The trick when drawing the course for the ships is to bring them close enough to the enemy that they give chase, and as such lead them away from the Great Fox a bit. Once the enemy has reached you, you will then need to actually fight them directly.

This is the part of the game that everyone sees in the commercials. Here you will be flying around, similar to the “All Range Mode” seen in “Star Fox 64”, and taking out various enemy craft and installations. It isn't a free-for-all though, the game will tell you right before you go into battle how many enemy units need to be taken down, and you will be given a set amount of time to do it in.

Once the enemies have been taken care of, you will be sent back to the overhead radar display, and you will continue on with the turn based routine.

Alright, now if you haven't figured it out already, this is about as un-Star Fox as anything can possibly get. But you know, I probably could have dealt with it. Perhaps if there was less turn based activity and more combat, everything would have ended up pretty good. But the problem is, you spend much too much time drawing little lines for the craft to follow, and then once you actually do get to attack the enemy, they have the nerve to set a time and kill limit!

The Star Fox series is based on a very simple formula. You fly in a straight line, and blow things up. It isn't a very complicated or deep, but that concept has been at the core of both the original Star Fox and “Star Fox 64”; and nobody could argue that it didn't work there. This game slaps that entire concept in the face, and decides to go in a completely different direction. Granted it isn't as far off from the original concept as the GameCube Star Fox games have been, but that really isn't saying much.

I really wish that is the worst I could say about “Star Fox Command”, but sadly there is something even worse, the controls. You cannot fly the craft with the directional pad, even more, you can't do anything with the buttons on the DS beyond firing your lasers. Everything is done on the touch screen.

For actual flight control, it is great, you have very precise control over the craft's movement thanks to the highly accurate touch screen. What is terrible is doing everything else. Rolling has you swipe the touch screen back and forth laterally, boosting requires you to double tap the top of the screen, and breaking requires the same action on the bottom. Perhaps worst of all, doing the tricks (loop and U-Turn) requires you to tap small buttons on either side of the screen.

This control scheme is just sickeningly bad. It is almost painful to try and fly the craft this way. Against the slow and stupid AI it is tolerable, but when you get online and want to have a serious dog fight, you might as well be doing battle in slot cars.

Since the DS was released, there have always been games that made questionable use of the touch screen; games that forced the player to use it just so they could list it as a feature on the back of the box. But none are more guilty of this than “Star Fox Command”, there is absolutely no reason the player should be prevented from using the digital buttons to fly if he wanted to. To limit us this way is just a cheap way to force “innovation”, while all it really does is bring the whole product down.

I will have to give the game credit though. It looks and sounds fantastic. The graphics are very impressive, and it generally maintains a respectable framerate. The music is a collection of remixed tracks and original songs, and it all sounds really nice, and fits the game well.

Though I was a bit disappointed when I realized that there was no voice acting in the game, and instead, it went back to the gibberish noises that were used in the original Star Fox. I don't know why they did this, it certainly isn't an issue of power or storage capacity, as the DS has the N64 beat in those respects, and “Star Fox 64” had great voice acting for every character. The situation is made even worse however when you start to read some of the dialog in the cutscenes. While the writing for the overall story is pretty good, a considerable amount of the individual lines of dialog are laughably bad. Which gives me the impression that Command wasn't given enough attention in the localization process.

The addition of online multiplayer is one of the few reasons to even recognize this game exists. While it is seriously hindered by the utterly atrocious control scheme, it is a decent multiplayer experience. There was no noticeable lag in any of the matches I played, which is impressive, considering I was playing mainly against opponents from Japan. One very nice feature is the ability to specify how many people you want to play with before it searches for opponents. This doesn't sound like much, but essentially every “Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection” game before this one would make you sit there waiting for 4 players to join, even if you only wanted a 1 on 1 match.

Even here though, there are a number of faults that really make me question what the developers were thinking. Beyond the rather limited options you are given in the online multiplayer (which, let's be honest, is pretty much par for the course with a Wi-Fi Connection game), some very strange decisions were made from design standpoint.

When you shoot down one of your opponents, instead of immediately getting points for it, the downed craft drops a star, which you must then fly and retrieve the star to get any points for the kill. As if it wasn't obvious, this leads to the problem of players that simply cruise around the level, and then just boost in to snap up the stars dropped from another player's kill. This is simply infuriating, and really ruins the whole concept of having dog fights.

The second problem is just too strange to comprehend. For whatever reason, if a person leaves the game, the entire game stops for everyone else. Rather than just continuing on without that person, as every other online game I have ever played would. This is really frustrating, especially with the amount of people who will casually drop out of the game when it isn't going well for them.

The fact is, if it was more polished, the online mutliplayer alone would have been enough to sell this game to me. But in it's current state, I just got frustrated with it after a few matches, much the same way I felt about the single player.

In all honestly, I could never advise anyone to buy this game. It is the least fun I have had in a very long time. While it is a great technical achievement, it is simply ruined by the developer's unnecessary push to “innovate” through radically different controls and gameplay, rather than actually adding something new and compelling to the existing formula. Had the developers just kept it a classic Star Fox game, it could have been one of the best games the DS has ever seen. But as it is, it is just an unfortunate attempt to improve on something that was perfected in 1997.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/28/06, Updated 08/31/06