"Only your stylus?"

When I bought this game I expected fast-paced shooting, great dogfights, and pretty much everything Star Fox 64 had accomplished, and maybe Star Fox Assault. Sadly, I was highly disappointed.

GAME-PLAY:
Instead, the game took a completely different turn from the usual find the enemy, shoot it down, and feel happy process. Instead of engaging in combat immediately, Nintendo took more of a strategic turn, giving us a poorly made strategy map that wasn't even worthy of Fire Emblem. The object is to guide Fox and his crew to shoot down all of the enemies and collect the enemy cores to proceed. This was very hard to do in my case, since a few of the enemies were strong and hard to hit (like that Saucerer at Venom).

And another thing, almost all of the stages in the games allowed me to fly freely without worrying about The Great Fox. On top of the new crappy design the Great Fox has, if any enemy reaches it, no matter how many red dots it has on the map, even if you're almost done, its game over for you. Yep. That's right; one enemy can make all the difference in the world. Although you can give the giant ship missiles for a way of protecting itself, there is only a limited quantity, you have to randomly bump into them, and the enemy has to be perfectly in sight. This leads to the new stupid fog thing. You have to see the enemy clearly in order to attack it. Although you can clear away this fog in order to solve this problem, but after awhile the fog thickens, and it thickens too deeply that clearing it away a turn earlier makes you feel little inside.

Besides that, when you play a chapter, it's divided into turns, which you only get two or three to begin with. This isn't normally a problem, since all you have to do is kill a mother ship and you get two extra ones, but man, sometimes you just want to fight without being attached to strings all the time.

Okay, enough of the outside strategic stuff; time to get into the actual dogfights. It seems ok at first sight, except one little thing. Everything is ruined by two small green numbers that represent a big problem at the top of the screen: the time limit. It is the most often problem that I lost a mission or “run out of fuel” and lose a spare ship, which you only get about 5 in the game and hard to gain more. However you can see your enemies on the bottom screen, shows how many bombs you have(which are suddenly so rare in Star Fox games today), power-up rings, the U-turn button, the somersault button, and pretty much anything in the field is put on that tiny little map. There are also enemies in the game called "missiles", which are frustratingly hard to shoot down cause of the controls. If you miss one "beam" you lose track of the missile and you "run out of fuel" or something like that.

SOUND:
Now to get into the sound. The sound is just barely passable. Each character you play with in dogfights gets their own unique fighting theme. This I was quite happy with. Also each boss also had a very good theme for each. Although I wasn't happy with the Star Wolf remix (I'm talking about the strings at the snare drum part), the boss music fits each boss very well. The talking isn't something I'm impressed with. Instead of voice acting like the usual Star Fox games, they replaced the voices with gibberish. Although, it would be kind of hard for voice acting in a DS game. But no matter, Nintendo sold us out on that one. The laser sound effects are also passable.

Story: Okay, instead of one ending over and over again, depending on the route you choose, you can pick up to nine very very short endings, which is good and bad for some people. Sadly, the game is very short. And also it's one of those games that you can beat again and again constantly, not like the other games in the series. It's also like Star Fox: Assault, but even Star Fox 64 was kinda short. The Nintendo 64 Star Fox only had one ending, but it was a good one. For me, I don't like the idea of picking different routes to get different endings. It should be one ending, and only one I think.

CONTROLS:
Oh, boy. Everything here is controlled by the stylus. This includes menu screens, dogfights, and the world map. I find it completely unnecessary to not have an option for players to use the D-Pad for all that. I mean, everything is controlled on the bottom screen. Everything. Also, you may use any button to shoot. Now this, I'm quite happy with.

GRAPHICS:
They are actually pretty good for a Nintendo DS game. The enemies I think need to be more detailed and designed, but it's alright. Fox and all his friends look okay to normal, but this area of the game is actually pretty good.

Gameplay: 4/10
Sound: 6/10
Story: 1/10
Controls: 1/10
Graphics: 4/10

Overall Score: 3/10. Many things in this game need to be fixed.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/09/07