"Surprisingly Fantastic"

I admit that I was extremely wary of this game after reading previews (Strategic Elements? Touchscreen Control Only? No Rail-Missions?), but the finished product is SO good that I'm embarrassed to have ever doubted it.

The story is well above average for the series, detailing both the fact that the Star Fox Team broke up sometime after Assault, and is forced to reassemble to confront a new threat from Venom (courtesy of giant space fish. No seriously). The initial path through the game didn't really focus on anything significant, but the rest of the paths are meatier.

Each strategic section is based around you trying to get whatever Team Members you have at the moment to each enemy group, while defending the almost helpless Great Fox. Whenever a ship encounters an enemy the game splits into some proper dogfighting (which is very similar to the All-Range missions in SF64), where your typical objective is to hunt down all the enemies containing Core Data, identified in cut-scene before battle, before time runs out. But there are other objectives such as shooting down huge missiles and mother ships (which involves flying through rings while either shooting like crazy, or doing a barrel roll).

If ANYTHING touches the Great Fox, you fail the mission, so defending it is pretty important. Luckily, either by picking them up on the map, or by defeating every single enemy in a battle, the Great Fox can get a Missile. You can store up to 3 Missiles at a time, and they can destroy any enemy party within range instantly. They don't work against enemy missiles, so you'll still have to intercept those.

Speaking of intercepting things on the map, there are quite a few things that make this difficult. Fog of War blacks out large sections of the map (you can blow some of it away with the stylus), asteroids throw your flight plans all out of whack, No-Fly Zones can't be flown over (this doesn't apply to missiles), and each character can only go so far each turn.

Sometimes after defeating all the enemies on a map, a boss appears. Bosses are fought in a fairly typical fashion for the genre (discovering weak points and then blasting the hell out of them) and are pretty enjoyable to fight. On the first path through the game, you only encounter a few, but more are encountered in other paths.

Each character you command has a different ship with different capabilities (Slippy has crazy high health and super strong lasers, but no Lock-On and a small boost bar, Falco has a fairly weak beam, but multiple lock-ons etc). Strangely, Fox's Arwing is one of the worst ships in the game. And you're stuck with it in multiplayer.

The game has many branches throughout, leading to one of 9 different endings. The first time through you're stuck with one path, but the rest open up once you clear the game once (which shouldn't take more then an hour or two).

I haven't tried it yet, but the Multiplayer is supposedly great. Though you're stuck with the one game mode and character (which is baffling considering how so many are offered in single player). So, between that, the many, many story paths, and the fact that you can replay any mission for higher scores, replay value is high.

The game controls surprisingly well. Pretty well every element of control is confined to the Touch Screen (which also functions as a map). Banking, Climbing and Diving are simple matter of moving the stylus in the appropriate direction. Doing a loop or turn require touching a certain button on either side of the screen (which is distracting, but they aren't often used so it matters little). By quickly scribbling a zig-zag on the screen you DO A BARREL ROLL, which persists until you let go of the screen. Barrel Rolls are more important here then in any other Star Fox game, since they not only protect you from projectiles, but attract any nearby items and damage enemies). Double tapping on either the top or bottom of the screen lets you boost and brake, respectively. Every single button on the system is used for beams. Tap for single shots, hold for Lock-On. Using Bombs requires you dragging one from your stock and placing it wherever you feel a small-nuclear weapon would look best. They take a couple of seconds to take effect, so you need to aim carefully.

All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the game, and rank it among the finest handheld games released this year.

Pros:
Excellent Presentation
Smooth, Highly Effective Control
Many routes through the game
Strategic portions surprisingly robust for an action game
That crazy Gibbering from the original Star Fox is back! :)

Cons:
Only one character in multiplayer
Story Branches are manually chosen, rather then the result of fulfilling certain conditions
None too difficult

Better Then: Star Fox Assault
Slightly Better Then: Star Fox
On Par With: Star Fox 64

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/31/06