Even the most diehard Star Fox fans will likely admit it’s one of Nintendo’s most mismanaged series. I could sing Star Fox 64’s praises all day; those fantastic space battles in the Arwing mean it’s one of the few games I continue revisiting. However, later entries left the series struggling to establish a cohesive direction. Adventures wasn’t originally a Star Fox game, Command’s strategic gameplay didn’t universally appeal, while gimmicky controls significantly hampered Zero.
Star Fox: Assault is my least favourite entry, and its predecessor’s legacy saw Namco design what I’d call a compromise game. Star Fox Adventures remains a great 3D adventure, I’m not arguing otherwise, but it’s not what drew people to the series in the first place and in turn it alienated some fans. Assault’s ambitious aims tried to bridge this gap by mixing ground and Arwing missions, failing badly at the former, but gracefully succeeding with the latter. I don’t love the game, then, but I love this aspect.
Part of the disparity is because on-foot missions offer no natural substance. Fox ditches his former staff for various guns as you fight the Aparoids, insect-like creatures hellbent on assimilation, and half of Assault’s 10-mission campaign is effectively a third-person shooter. Not necessarily the worst idea for an action game, but this needed more than tedious missions that lack variety beyond destroying enemy spawning devices. That’s frustrated further by a cumbersome control scheme.
