Star Fox (NS2) - Review

  

When we first got wind about a new Star Fox game, I felt a strange mix of excitement and disappointment. Excitement because I've always been a huge fan of the Star Fox series, largely due to my exposure to Star Fox 64 as a child, but also disappointment because when Nintendo first showed us Star Fox they made it clear that it would be yet another journey where we revisit Star Fox 64. It's not surprising that they would opt for this given that the franchise has been on hiatus since 2016's underperformer Star Fox Zero, but as someone who has played Star Fox 64 more times than I could probably count, I wasn't all too excited to revisit a new version of the same game.

  

Even with these hesitations in mind, when I sat down to play Nintendo's new Star Fox, it almost instantly reaffirmed something to me that I've always known: Star Fox 64 is really, really fun. By extension, Star Fox on the Nintendo Switch 2 is also really, really fun.

  

  

There are more remakes releasing than ever in gaming today and in very broad strokes there are two different approaches you can take to remaking classic games which people love. There's the approach of doing a by-the-numbers remake which very much recreates the original but with modern technology to update the graphics, the sound, and perhaps some quality of life sprinkled in, and there are complete reimaginings which essentially feel like entirely new games while still retaining characters and story elements from the original. 

  

Star Fox is very much the former — that is to say, a straight remake of Star Fox 64 in basically every way you can imagine. You have the same stages, the same story being told, the same characters and largely the same gameplay, but none of these really feel like detriments. We've seen Nintendo revisit the Star Fox franchise's magnum opus many times, but with 2026's iteration they're really making it a full-fledged remake. While I don't mind playing with Nintendo 64 graphics, I can very much understand why younger players might find them a bit alienating, so the focus put on visuals in Star Fox is really stunning.

  

  

The game both looks and plays fantastic, with the only real potential drawback being the focus on making the anthropomorphic characters look so similar to real animals. This is something that didn't bother me personally, but it can be a hard sell for some people, especially after the much more cartoony design we saw for Fox McCloud in the Super Mario Galaxy movie a few months ago. Furthermore, when it comes to presentation, the rearrangements of the absolutely classic musical tracks are just as good as they were back when we first heard them in the 1997 original. 

  

Perhaps one of the most memorable parts of Star Fox 64 is the dialogue between characters, something that was a bit of a novelty back in the mid-90s when we didn't have too much voiced content in console games. Today, voice acting is very much the norm and Star Fox definitely delivers on the quality of voice acting, but as a full package it doesn't quite live up to the legacy it emulates. The main cast, which I would consider to be the Star Fox team crew themselves, the rival Star Wolf crew, objective-giver General Pepper, and the main villain Andross, all deliver good performances with a pretty even mix of classic lines and new ones mixed in. However, where the game's voice acting really falls short in comparison to the original is for the minor characters, the one-off bosses on specific stages. Their performances are much more muted than in the original, making them feel so much less memorable. 

  

  

Something that adds to the personality of the cast, though, is that we have a lot of new interactions between the main Star Fox team crew which take place between missions and differ depending on which route you take throughout the campaign. You'll get glimpses into their interpersonal relationships with one another. This also doubles as a more clear indication that you're free to pick between multiple different missions in a lot of cases, as the characters will clearly outline that you have different options available.

 

Further fleshing out the lore and character backstories, there are unlockable files on not just the cast, but also the visited planets and various enemy machines, so there are a lot of extra goodies to dig into as a reward for your hard work if you choose to do so. 

 

Although the main content of the game is practically identical to its predecessor, there are also some new features. Besides the already present multiple routes through the campaign, unlockable Expert Mode, and medals for achieving high hit counts or finding secret routes on stages, there are now also mission-specific challenges, encouraging you to replay the stages even more to truly uncover all of their secrets. These challenges are only achievable in a specific Challenge Mode, where you pick the stage you want to play instead of guiding your way through the campaign, so you can't unlock them during a normal playthrough.

  

  

There's also a completely revamped multiplayer mode, which gathers eight players together; four take on the roles of the Star Fox team and the other four join as the Star Wolf members and battle it out on one of three different maps, with specific objectives on each. This can be played either online or locally by using multiple systems, or simply on your own offline against bots, who actually feel considerably more formidable than the Star Wolf members do in the main missions. When playing online, you'll get assigned randomly which map you play on, but during offline sessions you can pick between the 'control the objective' style of Corneria, resource gathering mission on Fichina, or capture-the-flag type mode in Sector Z.

  

Largely, Star Fox delivers on showcasing the wonders of Star Fox 64 from 1997 to a new generation, with some added flair here and there, and perhaps to the surprise of some, but not to me, a game that was a great experience almost 30 years ago is still a great experience today. So now that we have a new development team with a perfect blueprint of what makes the Star Fox franchise great... how about a brand new game in the same spirit?