Star Fox Zero

It’s one thing to be a lazy video game sequel; simply replicating the experience of a predecessor with little to no ambition or innovation. It’s another thing entirely when a sequel tampers with something that was, for all intents and purposes, perfect.

Star Fox for the Super NES and Star Fox 64 for the Nintendo 64 (known originally as Starwing and Lylat Wars respectively in the UK) are absolute classics in my eyes. Yes, they may dated now in terms of graphics and sound but great game design can be timeless. Moving your Arwing fighter craft through guided 3D levels was simple, elegant and fun on a fundamental level. The controls were so intuitive, responsive and effortless that you almost believed that the SNES and N64 controllers were made specifically for these games.

Star Fox Zero, the long-awaited ‘true’ follow-up to Star Fox 64 with Nintendo back in the development cockpit (all of those spin-offs and farmed-out sequels kind of don’t count), seems to have forgotten these fundamentals which made those two original titles so good. There are many elements from those predecessors here, don’t get me wrong (in fact there’s too much directly ripped from Star Fox 64), but it mangles the one and only thing you don’t want to tinker with in a Star Fox game; the controls.

Many fans were rightly worried when Nintendo first released footage of what would become Star Fox Zero. A brief E3 video showed Shigeru Miyamoto manoeuvring an Arwing around via the bugbear of many gamers; motion controls. Those concerns turned out to be justified as almost every part of the final game in some way uses tilt controls or the split views between the TV and the Wii U Gamepad screens.

A lot has already been said about the integration of these Gamepad-specific controls and quirks and how they hamper the game on many levels. To spare you many sentences on the intricate details I’ll keep this brief; they do nothing but make the game harder, slower and less fun to play. Motion controls are always slower and less precise than more tactile inputs such as analog sticks, and this is as true as ever in Star Fox Zero. Furthermore, forcing you to switch between looking at TV and Gamepad screens adds another clunky and unnecessary layer on top of the basic controls. In an arcade-style action title like Star Fox, where fluidity and speed are key, these additions are hugely frustrating and frankly completely baffling.

And no, besides the independent canon controls in the standard Arwing sections, there is no way to completely switch off the motion controls and the two screen aspect in order to experience the game with the classic, tried and true Star Fox controls.

Sometimes you can tell when a game is built from the ground up to utilise gimmicky controls or even entire peripherals, and as a result reverting to classic analog sticks and button inputs would not be ideal or even possible. However, there is really nothing in Star Fox Zero that could not be accomplished with a more traditional control scheme, either with the Gamepad, Wii U Pro Controller, or perhaps even a Wii Remote and nun-chuck. It’s pretty clear that, in a seemingly desperate attempt to justify the under-utilised features of the Gamepad, the developers have awkwardly jammed in most of its features in here, and that’s proved to be a terrible decision.

Strangely though, this aspect might not be the element of Star Fox Zero that I took the most issue with. A handful of other gameplay foibles actually probably hampered my enjoyment of the game even more than the reliance on tilting and moving between screens.

Primarily my problem is with the right analog stick and how almost every one of your actions besides steering and your standard laser are now mapped to it. Tilting your ship, barrel rolls, boosting, braking, firing smart bombs and the two classic preset somersault and U-turn manoeuvres are all on the right stick now. While some of these actions are mapped to buttons as well, such as those preset manoeuvres and the smart bombs (which begs the question of why include them on the right stick at all?) this nonetheless leads to times when you’ll accidentally do two things at once by slightly nudging the stick in the wrong manner.

This happened all the time for me, increasing in frequency during the more frantic dogfights against Star Wolf in the late game as I tried to boost, roll and generally out-manoeuvre my foes. The most common occurrence was when I would hold forward on the stick to boost but found my ship tilting 90 degrees left or right because I was not holding it precisely down the centre. About as frequent and far more disruptive was when I would be boosting while pulling up or pushing down with the left manoeuvring analog stick (something you can do freely in the older Star Fox games) only to unintentionally trigger either the somersault or U-turn.

These sloppy controls are frustrating enough by themselves. Yet when you consider that both of my specific examples could have been solved by returning the tilt and barrel roll controls to the shoulder buttons and just keeping the U-turn solely mapped to the X button you realise just how big a design sin they truly are. These decisions are uncharacteristically illogical and flawed for the usually masterful Nintendo.

I’ve heard multiple people attempting to hand-wave away the gameplay, saying that it’s fine ‘once you get used to it’. People can ‘get used to’ deficiencies in many aspects of life but why settle for being handicapped here with cumbersome, slow and inaccurate controls? The only discernible trade-off for them in Zero is so a slew of the Gamepad’s rarely-used features get given a use. That’s it. This one idiotic pay-off comes nowhere close to justifying the player suffering through sub-standard controls, especially when we know that fantastic-playing Star Fox games already exist. This series was never built for these features in the first place and it shows.

There are a lot more little frustrations throughout too, such as the removal of a mini-map for seeing where your foes and allies are in the expansive ‘all range mode’ battle scenes. However, since I’m already pushing 1000 words in this review just due to the gameplay I should probably move on to another topic. That said, there’s actually not much else to cover as Zero is not only rather light on content but also because most of said content is reused or remixed from Star Fox 64. There are a lot of familiar though not entirely identical planets and locations to blast through on the short but multi-pathed journey to the final battle with, who else, Andross. There are only 12 stages here, several minor side challenges to be tackled and no proper multiplayer mode. I know Star Fox and Star Fox 64 were short too but in 2016 people expect a lot more substantive content for £40.

You can’t fault the game’s attempts at variety though. Your Arwing can now transform at will into the ground-based Walker mode, which is taken straight out of the finished but never officially released Star Fox 2 for the SNES. The sections of the game which force you use this form are okay but not particularly noteworthy. The Landmaster tank returns from Star Fox 64, though it feels a bit less useful now due to the inclusion of the Walkers. The Gyrowing, a new helicopter-like utility vehicle, actually plays decently with the motion controls but its slow deliberate levels feel more like they belong in a PilotWings game, not amongst the fast-paced arcade trappings of Star Fox.

After those initial alarm bells sounded regarded the game’s dependence on motion controls, I went into Star Fox Zero with tempered expectations. Even with my hopes lowered, I still came out of it disappointed. Zero is a confused mess of a game that seemingly doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. It attempts to reinvent the series yet sticks too closely to the beats of Star Fox 64. It seems to want to appeal to fans’ nostalgia for the series but throws the one thing you need to keep the same – the gameplay – out an airlock. Given its apparent identity crisis, it’s really hard to recommend the game to anyone apart from blind, die-hard Nintendo and/or Star Fox fans… and they’ve probably already bought it and convinced themselves it’s great regardless.

After waiting almost twenty years for the series’ proper return it’s such a crushing shame that Zero turned out the way it did. Was it really too much to ask for a faithful, high-definition Star Fox sequel featuring new vehicles, characters, stories and stages yet maintaining the classic gameplay? Given what we know of Nintendo and PlatinumGames’ talents, I don’t think it is.