Review: Starfox Command

‘Starfox Command’ is Nintendo’s fifth Starfox game (if you count ‘Starfox Adventures’) and their first Starfox game for the DS. I’ve been a long time ‘Starfox’ fan, ever since the original was released back in 1993 (wow, it’s been 13 years already?). I’ve always been a fan of non-simulation shooters and since I’ve been craving a new game for my DS, so ‘Starfox Command’ was an instant buy for me. I jumped on this title the day it was released, but was I too quick to throw my thirty bucks at it so eagerly?

Starting Out:
The game starts out just as you’d expect, you’ve got your basic start menu for single-player, download play (multiplayer modes which I’ll cover later in the review), wi-fi play (again, I’ll cover later) and your options menu, all complete with dramatic Starfox music! You’ll probably want to hit up the options menu first, considering that the game starts out with non-inverted controls and if you’re anything like me, you’d normally expect them inverted in a flight game. You can also adjust your sound settings with the ability to change the characters voices. You have “normal”, “recorded” and “machine”. Normal goes back to the classic “Starfox” sounding voices, if you never played the original, they’re basically the same gibberish, “Microsoft Sam” sounding voices like in ‘Animal Crossing’. “Recorded” is actually really cool because it asks you a bunch of questions, getting a range of sound from your own voice and cutting it up and mixing your phrases into fake words, giving the characters the tone of your or a friend’s voice. “Machine” is just the old-school beeps and bloops during text. Also in the options menu, you can set up your nickname for Multiplayer and Wi-Fi modes.


Single Player and Controls:
You’re given your basic options for starting story mode, selecting to continue a mission to replay a previous one, viewing the cut-scenes and training. You’ll probably want to try out the training mode first, since this game plays different than any other Starfox game. First of all, ‘Command’ is 100% reliant on the stylus, there is no other way around it or an option to play with out it (as ‘Metroid Prime: Hunters’ offers). All of the DS’ buttons, including the D-pad, have the same function, which is to fire or lock-on if you hold it down. This actually works really well. Other than your Y-axis, there are are no other controls you have to adjust. The game controls great no matter your dexterity. There aren’t any tricky controller flicks, or shoulder button sequences for doing any flight maneuvers this time around. If you want to do a u-turn or a corkscrew, there is a button for each on your touch-screen. Boosts are handled by double-tapping the upper half of your touch-screen and braking is preformed by double-tapping the lower half and if you want to barrel roll, just draw a circle. Very, very simple and intuitive. How about bombs? Just drag the bomb icon on the touch-screen, which also happens to be your map/radar onto any specific enemy and you’ll will fire a bomb onto that specific location. I must say that the developers really got these controls down well.

The Graphics
As for Story Mode, the game starts out with a really long text/picture-based cut-scene explaining how Team Starfox has broken up and the current whereabouts of each team member and the new enemy called “The Anglar Army” threatening the Lylat system…yada yada yada… Slippy has now has a female fiance, for instance… Unfortunately, none of this is compelling, and you’ll probably want to skip it just to get to gameplay. You’ll be shocked when you see that ‘Command’ now has a new turn-based, strategy system almost akin to ‘Advance Wars’ that takes place before every battle. This is a REALLY cool addition to the series and one of my favorite features about the game. Using the touch screen, you can move Fox (and eventually other team members) around the map, plotting paths based on the amount of fuel you have. When you plot a path, you do so with the intent of intercepting power-ups (which included missiles for the Great Fox to shoot at enemies, shields for your current fighter and time bonuses), bases and enemy squads. You have to make your moves precise, since there are many obstacles like mountain-tops, fog, storm clouds, and what I think is lava (which I don’t understand inhibits your flightpath).
Not to get off-track, but an important thing to note is to not ignore what R.O.B. has to say. R.O.B. is your robot buddy on the Great Fox, and he’ll tell you specific things about the map–skip what he has to tell you and you may be screwed… Like when I missed that you have to clear fog off the map using your stylus in order so see where enemy squads and power-ups are. None-the-less, I had to restart the mission, which sucked. These missions require precision, and even early on you’re given a limited number of turns and lives. You also do not regenerate shields or time in between battles, which makes everything all the more difficult. If you run out of turns, time or lives, you’re done. Also, you have to protect the Great Fox. If just one enemy squad touches him, you’re done and it’s mission restart from the beginning.

When you trigger a battle, you’ll be fighting in a closed arena, similar to the multiplayer levels in ‘Starfox 64?, and you’re told how many enemies of a certain type to eliminate. During the fight, there are minor enemies like gun turrets and boxy alien creatures shooting at you. They’re petty, but defeating them will reward you with time bonuses and power-ups. You can also do barrel-rolls into enemy fire, of fly through rings to get power-ups. Doing barrel rolls will suck power-ups in, just like the charge beam in the ‘Metroid Prime’ games. After you beat an enemy, you have to collect their “cores”, which are basically little star icons and you have to collect each of the cores in a set time limit to move on to the next turn. You’re also going to be facing enemy bases too, which are just basically the same as fighting a squad, only with an often stationary mini-boss to face after defeating the squad and collecting their cores. After liberating a base, you’re often rewarded with more time and turns. It’s not just all repetitive battles though, often times you’ll be given a short mission where an enemy will fire a missile at the Great Fox, and you’ll have to fly though rings in order to gain speed boosts and catch the missile.

There aren’t any on-rails levels, other than the missile chase levels, just these closed-arena levels. I would have liked to seen the on-rails levels included, even if they just rehashed some of them from the original ‘Starfox’ or ‘Starfox 64? and included new dialogue. Playing with the stylus would have made it a new enough experience. Also, the Arwing’s ability to transform into a tank has been removed. You’re in your Arwing for the entirely of the game. Needless to say, mission variety takes a step back from ‘Starfox 64? and ‘Assault’, GRANTED this is a portable game, I would have expected more from a first-party DS game after what ‘Metroid Prime: Hunters’ delivered.

Generally, after you’ve done all that can be done you’re faced with a boss battle. Boss Battles vary between fighting enemy fighters and giant monster ships. Fighting the giant monster ships is fine, they’re normal and often really fun boss battles. Fighting the giant snake ship for example, is a really fun boss battle. However, your first boss fight, against team StarWolf is a real pain. First off, unlike other ‘Starfox 64? and ‘Assult’, you have no wing-men during these fights. Secondly, if you were low on time during the current mission, you’re going to be low on time during the boss fight. Third, if you’re low on shields, you’re stuck fighting the boss with limited health. You’re practically going to have to lose a life and start the fight over with more time and shields. That was bad design, in my opinion. Fighting against boss squads is extremely hard, since their AI is really good. They will do their best to avoid you and they have all of your moves, and then some. The first fight with Team Starwolf is very hard because Panther and Wolf, for example, will ride your rear as Leon leaves air mines in front of you. Naturally, you’d want to take out Leon first, but his air mines disrupt your ability to lock-on to him, and you’re constantly boosting and barrel-rolling to avoid Wolf and Panther. When you DO lock-on to one of them, they’ll simply cork-screw or do a u-turn, which causes them to go off-screen and break the lock-on. You can drop bombs on them, but they’ll often boost away from them… So you’re fighting three guys, with your capability and then some, who are all shooting at you. Time is running out and you only have three rings to give you power-ups. Sounds easy, huh? For just about every fun boss fight, there’s an equally frustrating one. What makes these all the more frustrating is that when you’re out of lives, you’ll be forced to replay the mission from the start, rather than starting over at the boss battle, since you can’t save until you’ve beaten a mission. This is my main complaint about the game.

As I said earlier, you’re reunited with the rest of your team during the course of the game, and as you’d expect, you unlock the ability to play as all of the characters–sans R.O.B. who’s always on the Great Fox. And as expected, each of the characters has significantly different traits. Number and type of lasers, the amount of bombs they can hold, the ability to and the amount of enemies they can lock on to, their amount of shields, boost their time bonuses are all variables. Slippy for instance has the strongest shields, holds three bombs, a larger time bonus and the strongest firepower, but he can’t lock on to enemies and has very little boost. On the other hand, Falco can lock-on to multiple enemies and has the largest amount of boost, but his lasers and shields are weaker and he can only hold one bomb and gets less of a time bonus. Playing with some characters is harder than others and you WILL be forced to use all of your characters, so keep that in mind. I’ll often use Slippy and Fox to fighter smaller squads and Falco and Krystal to fight larger ones, for example.

Multiplayer:
Multiplayer goes both online and offline. Offline you can have up to six players (on one cartridge, too) and online you can have four. These are very basic and there are no options for team battles, they’re complete free-for-alls. The game plays a lot like ‘Starfox 64’s’ multi-player, almost to a ‘T’, with the exception that when you kill someone you have to collect their core to score a point. So, if someone were flying close enough, they can steal that core and steal the point for himself, which makes the games really intense. You’ll be playing in really basic, reasonably sized levels, which are pretty much taken straight from the normal missions. There are basic, but old-school power-ups like twin-lasers, plasma shot, bombs, shields and invisibility. Really basic stuff, but fun. WiFi works, but so far it’s been really hard to connect to a match, let alone play one without someone dropping. Also, if someone drops, which has no real consequences other than resetting There could have been more options, like ‘Metroid Prime: Hunters’ had, like Team-Play and Juggernaut games or even a type of game where just a kill got you a point…but such is not the case. It’s still really fun, but there are more satisfying online experiences on the DS.

Graphics, Sound and Presentation:
Graphically, the game looks better than ‘Starfox 64?, which should be a given, since everything in the Starfox universe is generally low-poly. It runs at a solid 30 fps, but slow-down occurs when there are a lot of enemies on screen or when you drop a bomb, but fortunately it never really interferes with gameplay. My only real gripe with the graphics is with the draw distance. Often when you see an enemy dead ahead on your radar, you won’t see them onscreen, which is an issue when trying to lock-on. The menus are very well done,
Sound-wise, the game is probably everything you’d expect. The music is on the same level as the N64 games, albeit none of the tunes are memorable. As I mentioned earlier, the character voices are a throwback back to the SNES days, where they are machine-like and garbled. You can swap them out for either your own voice tone, beeps or classic synthesized garbles. Explosions and laser blasts are cartoony and pretty standard stuff, very classic sounds and the old-school enemy alert noise makes a return. All-in-all the sound design gets the job done, but I’d have loved to hear the N64 voices make a return, despite how cheesy they were, I think they added to the experience. Also, when you could hear mission specific dialogue, you didn’t have to move your eyes away from the action.

From a design standpoint, some people might have a problem with the art style, which depicts the character in a really clean, simple, kinda chunky and almost different style than before…it’s almost like their ‘64 styling but different. Personally, I don’t mind this change as every single Starfox game, like Zelda, varies from an artistic standpoint. The static art for the cut scenes is also well drawn and gets its point across. The menus are very clean, bold and easy to navigate, so it gets points for that.

Final Thoughts:
I was expecting a bit more from ‘Starfox Command’, in that I’ve been spoiled by all that ‘Prime: Hunters’ had to offer. Yeah, they’re two different games from two different in-house developers, but you’d think that at this point in the DS WiFi’s lifespan titles would be trying to offer more and more. Everything in the game is functional, but the game’s choppy difficulty makes things awkward. If anything, the game should have just had difficulty settings. Since the game warrants multiple playthroughs to get all of the endings, that would have only made sense. I am aware that this is a handheld game, but fact of the matter is that it’s also a Nintendo game and with other titles out there offering so much more and Starfox being such a high-profile game, I was expecting a lot more. Definitely try this game before you buy. If you’re a long time Starfox fan, you’re going to be turned off by this title for it’s lack of variety. If you’re looking for a game that’s easy to pick-up, play, save, resume with little frustration, just avoid this title. If you’re just looking for something different on your DS and a decent shooter, you’ll probably find something here that you’re going to enjoy. Despite the lack of options, the multiplayer is really worth checking out and makes the game worth a rent. It’s a good looking game, and if you’re looking for something else to show off your DS, or just how effective the touchscreen can be for games, but it’s just got too much holding it back from greatness.
Breakdown:

Pros:
Good Graphics
Excellent Controls
Easy to Navigate Menus
Cool Strategy Elements
Decent Single Cart Multiplayer

Cons:
Draw Distance Issues
Inconsistent Difficulty
Flaws with WiFi
Limited Muliplayer Options
Lack of Mission Variety In Story Mode
Story Isn’t Interesting

Score: 6.5 out of 10