I've been sitting out on the Starfox franchise for years, thanks to all the lackluster offerings during the GameCube era. It sucks, because I really liked Starfox 64 and I really want a new hip iteration in that style. For some reason, Nintendo is bound and determined to avoid that classic, blistering on-rails shooting action... giving us Starfox-as-Zelda and Starfox-as-Rogue-Leader-2 instead. Starfox Command is a return to the game's roots, but not in the way we all expected.
Most franchises are ridiculed for not offering enough change-up. Starfox is the rare bird that gets smacked around for not maintaining enough of the status quo. SFC has two gameplay modes: a 2D tactical turn-based strategy half and a 3D arena dogfight half. You plot the course of your fleet on the flat map and, when your planes encounter enemies, you switch to the full-on space combat mode.
"Our army alone can't do the job. Hurry, Starfox!"
The 2D bits work out much better than advertised. It's like a miniature Advance Wars without the grid system. The idea is to eliminate all pockets of enemies, while protecting your carrier ship, the Great Fox, which is usually stashed in one of the corners. Using the stylus, you draw paths for each fighter, and then double-tap the screen to make everything move simultaneously. (That double-tap is an incredibly short-sighted choice, since each map begins with a couple screens of story text. If you tap too quickly through the empty conversation, you risk doing a double-tap and prematurely ending your turn. They couldn't have placed a GO! button in one of the corners?)
The map includes roving bands of baddies, enemy bases that must be blown up, and the requisite happy power-ups (health, missile and time bonuses). All enemy ships will hone in on the (nearly) defenseless Great Fox, so you have to plot intercept courses to distract the bad guys from the capital ship. Once you gather a few missile upgrades for the Great Fox, you can use them to assassinate any incoming enemy fleet on the map.
It is a clever and fun way of framing all the 3D dogfighting stuff - gives the game some class. Using the intuitive stylus makes strategic planning a breeze. And when you reach the harder levels, you have to be smart about which characters you send in which directions, because everyone has a slightly different ship and some types are better in some situations than others.
The latter maps also have an Only-On-The-DS "fog of war"... a thick soup that covers most of the map. With a set amount of stylus scratching, you can wipe away some of the fog to get an advance look at enemy movements.
I could have gone for a lot more of the 2D strategy mode. It's that cool. I'm thinking of maps that are ten times the size of the DS screen(s), with greatly expanded options. Out of all the flaky new-look Starfox crap we've endured over the past few years, this is far and away the winner. Letting Starfox DS morph into a portable, online, multiplayer RTS would be killer.
"Do a barrel roll!"
The 3D sections arise when your 2D ships fly into nests of opposing blips. In a nice touch, the particular map topology at your point of contact determines the visual landscape for the dogfight... canyons, cities, mountains, oceans. These backdrops aren't stunning, to say the least, but at least there is a good variety of them. By the way, in the Starfox world, starfighters work just as well planetside and underwater as they do in outer space. Figure that one out.
The stylus controls are mostly fine, with a couple of demoralizing exceptions. Your basic movement feels like using a mouse, just with that pleasantly precise connection you get from actually touching a screen. As with Metroid Prime Hunters, you do your stylus work on a live radar screen, with a couple of touchscreen buttons easily available (these trigger a 180, a loop-de-loop, and allow you to drag bombs directly onto the radar map). Barrel rolls are accomplished with some quick horizontal strokes (I draw small circles with the same effect.) Very easy, although some ships are looser than others and may require some finesse adjustments as you move from character to character.
Any physical button - shoulder, d-pad, A-B-X-Y - fires your guns. Holding said button for a few seconds activates a target lock (if your chosen vessel has a lock). This lets you choose a hand grip that is most comfortable for you, because, like all portables, hand cramps are a game-killing bitch. It also neatly avoids any left-handed vs. right-handed stylus issues! I (a rightie) tend to use either the d-pad up or d-pad down for my gun button. I find that the shoulder buttons cause too much lateral motion on the DS.
The downer about the control scheme is the same thing that sucked back on the 2D map (and the same thing that sucked about Metroid Prime Hunters, come to think of it): the dreaded double-tap. You have to double-tap in the top half of the screen for a speed boost, and double-tap in the bottom half to hit the brakes. It sounds elegant, but it is clumsy and prone to screw you up. This is the cost for having all those button choices for your guns. the game would probably run a whole hell of a lot smoother had they assigned d-pad up for boost and d-pad down for brake. (And then I would have had to find another favored shoot button!)
"You're becoming more like your father."
That aside, the dogfights are slick and intense. There are plenty of enemy types, including a plethora of mini-bosses that require advanced strategy to defeat. When you go after a base, the level ends on a nail-biting attack run where you have to dive straight through the center of the enemy installation. I'm not sure how that works, exactly, but it sure is cool. Nintendo did not cheap out on baddies, and that goes a long way toward keeping the 3D portions palatable.
Because, you see, the arena dogfights are all you're going to get, apart from a few specialized boss sequences. The closest you get to the classic on-rails scenes is the obnoxious chase-a-missile levels (see sidebar).
That is Starfox Command's most striking failure, the lack of the scripted, memorization-friendly, cinematic levels. You'd think they would have included a couple, just to change things up a bit. You don't even get to see fellow squadmates zipping by in the arenas; it's just you and the scattered enemy forces.
"Gee, I've been saved by Fox. How swell."
Connecting all of these 2D and 3D elements is a tedious and overwritten soap opera, told chiefly through the retro standard of character still frames and dialogue boxes. Not that the Starfox series is known for high drama, but I would expect something a little better than this grade-school novella that stretches on between the action chapters.
You know right away that the storyline is a half-told joke. There's all this buildup in the opening scene about how Team Starfox has disbanded and now Fox is going it alone... but can he do it without his former teammates? And then in the very next level they all start re-joining with little to no conflict. Falco is still a dick; Slippy is still a yutz. Only Krystal - transplanted from the GameCube editions - provides a will-she-won't-she angle, and then even that is bogged down with cliched conversations of her somehow-tortured relationship with our man McCloud. (I was happy to see Team Star Wolf return, as well as the bit players like Bill and Katt. All with their own unique ships!)
It is impossible to care about the storyline, but thankfully not impossible to hit the Skip button. I like the cast of Starfox; they easily have more personality and potential than Mario and Company. But they are not given any opportunity to transcend here. This game's script feels like it was beamed to us directly from 1987.
Another thing that bugged me was the inconsistent character artwork. The box art, conversation stills and production art all uses a clean, smooth style. The team looks plastic, rather than furry. It's more CG-looking. Yet, in the slideshow cutscenes, the art is much more detailed and painterly, with obvious fur. Weird.
The only saving grace to the story is that the whole thing is a huge branching path where your dialogue decisions will lead you towards one of nine possible endings. Your first pass through the game will probably feel very short... until you go back and realize you've seen only a smidgeon of the levels and enemies and ship types that the game actually possesses.
The final element to Starfox Command is the online play, which is pretty much a copy/paste of the weaksauce online mode of Mario Kart DS. That is to say, you have to sit through minutes and minutes of waiting to be connected with worldwide players, and have no way to tag them as Friends if you thought it was a good match. The only changes are differentiated "ranked" games that track your kills, plus the ever-so-terrible feature of ending the game if any one player decides to bail.
Also, the game offers no customization features for online play. All players have to run the same generic ship, which sucks when you consider how many varied types there are in the single player game (I'd like to give Panther's ship an online go!) I guess balancing the fleet was a problem Nintendo opted not to tackle. You can't even select the environment for each online dogfight, which is just mean.
"You'll be seeing your Dad soon, Fox..."
I think that game reviewers have officially given up on getting on a new decent Starfox title, so SFC is just getting the bye. It's being called a true successor to Starfox 64, but without the on-rails levels, I just don't agree with that. For what it does, it does it well enough, and I fully expect to squeeze plenty of terrific fun out of it. The 2D strategy bits are great; the 3D dogfighting is great. But quite frankly, I'm still waiting for the next awesome Starfox game.
