Games I Beat: Star Fox Command

Star Fox Command
All-Range Shooter
1-4 Players
System: Nintendo DS
Developer: Q-Games
Year of Release: 2006
Beat: November 4th, 2014

Before anything else, a tangent. Ever since Star Fox Adventures came out every fan of the first two Star Fox games have complained it was a betrayal to the series, something they'd label most future games with. I just want to take a moment to claim that's bullshit. True, Star Fox was originally an on-rails shooting game, and that 64 took and refined that concept immensely. Two games shouldn't (and don't) restrict a game series to be any one thing. I can't help but disregard comments claiming other games in the series are bad due to not following in the footsteps of their predecessors. If you want to talk about why they're bad because of the games' actual short comings that's fine and fair, I might even agree. But to just write off a game because it doesn't fall in line with exactly what you want is just ridiculous. I apologize because I don't know where Command falls in all of this, but this has annoyed me for a while now.

With that out of the way, Command is a real odd ball of a game when I first read about the announcement for the game it sounded promising. It has this cool system where in between dogfights you could "command" where your pilots would go next adding a certain strategy to the game. This was apparently inspired by features in the scrapped Star Fox 2 for SNES which I've never played (there's a near complete ROM available out there). To be honest though I've never really been a huge Star Fox fan, sure I like the games just fine, it's just not a game that demands my attention upon release. So I didn't pick it up right away, on top of that reviews were usually middling or lower so I let it slide off my radar completely.

Years later while on a beach trip I found the game at a mom and pop game store for relatively cheap so I picked it up. I tried it out and it felt pretty awful. First off the character art just looks bad to me in this game, while this is totally subjective it just hurts my opinion of it and every cut scene has the same cheap look to it, though I do like the funny nonsense language the characters use to talk. Also I know this is game about fuzzy animal people flying space ships and shooting down other fuzzy animals but some of the dialogue and plot is just painful, I have seen worse though at least.

Obviously the meat of the game is space combat and, it's a let down honestly. You start your mission on a top down view of a map with the Great Fox deploying your fighters. Assuming fog of war isn't in effect you can see enemy fighters, bases, missiles, basically a bunch of things you want to kill. You then draw a line from each of your fighters to different parts of the map, then you'd confirm their routes and everybody would move and fights would ensue when two ships hit each other. This sounds neat, but the main problem I have is the turn system the game has. On every map your overall goal is to obtain a certain number of stars, basically a medal for each defeated enemy, before you run out of turns. It was my experience that these are in relatively short supply and was the main source of my game overs.

Honestly the map feature is the most interesting part of the game. The Great Fox can collect missiles to shoot at groups of enemies to take them out for free kills, and enemy missiles can head towards her which need to be intercepted or else a game over awaits. You can capture bases, then use them to extend the distance your ships can cover in one turn. Then when the fog of war rolls in on certain maps you have to decide between playing it safe and bunching together or exploring as much as you can.

And so we come to the combat itself. Bland is probably the best word to describe it. Everything looks generic and simple. This could be a fault of being a DS game running a fully 3D game at a consistent frame rate but everything just looked like jumbled polygons. The Arwing and other ships looked good at least. The problem is the control, it's one of those games where everything is touch based because, well, it's on the DS, why isn't everything touch controlled right? Ugh. While movement works and feels really accurate, having bombs, rolls, boost, brake, roll, and u-turn all on their is annoying and, especially in the case of boost and brake, can be irritating to pull off because of how similar they are to activate. Shooting is controlled by literally every face button including the directional pad. I don't know where else to mention this so, bombs are really cool and way overpowered in this game though. You drag and drop them anywhere on the map and anything caught in their wake is basically OHKO'ed, even bosses are heavily affected by this.

There are multiple circumstances where red rings will appear in the sky and you have to fly through them. No you HAVE to fly through them. Once you hit that first one if you miss any following you instantly die. You do this to chase missiles headed for the Great Fox, and at bases after you kill all the ships flying around to take out the mother ships. It all just kind of blurs together in an endless blur of repetition. Fly around bland environments, shooting bland enemies, before flying through some rings and starting the next turn. Did I mention it kind of hurts to play?

I'm not being sarcastic. Kid Icarus Uprising suffers a similar problem in that due to holding the system in one hand it quickly start to hurt. I think it was just from the awkward angle, and uneven weight distribution but playing the game for any length was usually literally painful. Laying down or using a stand to play on helps though. But we need to put our glasses back on and face the facts! A bland game, with an ugly look, with no real depth, bad story and it physically hurts you?

I like it, it's a worthwhile little experiment of a game, and if you can pick it up on the cheap I honestly recommend it. Yeah, it weirdly grew on me. After I figured out how to accumulate more turns, and got a better grip on the touch controls it all started to kind of click. Sure everything looked bland, but the control was precise, if annoying, and the basic shooting mechanics were accurate to Star Fox. Getting to switch between pilots and having to deal with their, albeit minor, differences changed things up enough and it could just be me but I really did have fun on the map screen especially with fog of war exploring where we needed to go.

I think a future Star Fox game could really do well to expand on these ideas. Increase the scope and have a more impactful story. Add more meaningful features to the map that allows for actual strategy to be implemented. Having to restore fuel, or protect a base, or wounded pilots, or anything really. They could even add-in on land missions (to the dismay of fans everywhere unfortunately) to mix things up further. Anything to make it stand out more. They recently announced a Wii U version, the game pad and increased power of the Wii U could utilize these ideas pretty much perfectly.

So, like I said. Star Fox Command is a very odd ball game. I've experienced the spectrum of "this is shit" to "this is actually really fun" and I'm back to somewhere in between again. There are multiple endings to encourage replays, some of which I might get around to eventually. It's an interesting entry in the series, actually a lot of Star Fox games garner a "why was this made" sort of reaction, so it's fitting I guess.