Littaly

Okay, i know this game came out a long time ago, and being a StarFox fanboy I'm surprised it passed me by unnoticed. Anyway, here is the review for StarFox Command on the Nintendo DS.

StarFox returns to it's roots. Or at least that's what the back of the box states. StarFox Command is developed by NIntendo and Q-Games, founded by former members of Argonaut, who worked on the original StarFox aswell as it's unreleased sequel: StarFox 2. StarFox Command has taken alot of ideas that were originally supposed to be in StarFox 2, just in the same way Lylat Wars did (that's StarFox 64 if you're outside the PAL region).

The question on everybody's mind is probably "how does an Arwing control with a stylus?". Not half bad actually, the touchscreen serves as both radar and control and it's all pretty self explanatory. Move the stylus up, ship goes up, down ship goes down and left right to turn. Boosting and breaking is preformed by double tapping top and bottom of the touchscreen and loops are done by touching the loop button. I was surprised to see that it actually works pretty well, if you grip the stylus too hard you may end up with an ache in your fingers but that's about it. Unfortunately there turned out to be plenty of other things that could go wrong...

StarFox Command plays differently then previous games, by now this should not com as a surprise, StarFox has always had trouble with sticking to a winning concept, or any concept at all for that matter. Each lever consists of a map screen, you have your mothership, your fighters and enemy fighters approaching, then you use your stylus to draw flightpaths to engage enemies in battle and destroy them all before they reach your mothership or before you run out of turns. Turn based strategy element in between the fights no means an original concept, lots of games have tried it before and with mixed results. I am usually the guy who enjoys these kind of elements in a game so I don't really feel that it ruins the game in itself even if it feels a bit misplaced. The problem comes when you engage the enemy in battle. They all come in groups of 1-20 and your objective is to fly around in your ship destroying all. The setting are not very detailed and the fights are pretty much the same, and they don't last very long either, you fly in, kill the enemies and after half a minute later you are back on the map screen. In Lylat Wars and StarFox Assault the setting kept changing and the fights were different,you could say Command dropped the quality for the quantity, needless to say a bad move. But you know what? I can live with it, it's still fun to fly around blasting things even if it's only for a short while before you go back to turned based strategy, but you know what i can't live with? The time limit...

... That's right, apparently the Arwings fuel tank has been significantly reduced in size and is now shared in between multiple ships! Now i ask you, when during the latest ten years has a time limit been a good idea? Didn't Pikmin 2 receive praise for removing the time limit from the first game? Doesn't that say anything about how stupid it is to implement a timer in to a fully functional game? I guess they were trying to add to the challenge, and sure, it worked, problem is that with the extra challenge comes stress and frustration. It's like even if you wanted to take your time and enjoy the short battles you get you can't because that spells game over! Of course there are ways to refuel but that is not the point, you shouldn't have to. And even if you eventually get used to it the problem remains, the game is not fun.

So are there any good things about the game? Well yes, there are. The story does already from the beginning set a darker tone then previous games and when you finish it after a couple of hours odds are you are going to find the ending dark and unsatisfying. This is where the game gives you the option to replay the game and take different paths to get another ending, there are supposed to be a total of nine endings if you can reach them all. This is really the games saving grace (saving of course being relative), chasing a satisfying ending is really the only thing that made me want to keep playing. It's pretty interesting that you for once can chose to take different paths or follow the paths of other character such as Falco Lombardi or Wolf o' Donell, which is awesome if you are a fan of the series. I managed to get three additional endings (of which none i consider "happy") before i grew tired and put away the game. Multiple endings is overall a good feature but two things brings it down. First of all the bad gameplay, having to sit through the game again to get a different ending does needless to say get repetitive, but most of all it's brought down by the DS. All the storylines are good, but unfortunately the game does not feature voice acting or cutscenes, the voice acting is replaced by nonsense talk and the cutscenes by pictures and text, this way alot of the storytelling gets lost. And having to read all the corny lines that the franchise has been known for takes away the fun.

There is also a multiplayer mode, but i failed to get online (even if i did i find it hard to believe that anyone else would be playing) and my oonly friend with a DS is on vacation. I shamefully admit, that is a failure from my side, but I'll go back and edit it if i ever get a chance to play it with someone else.

So let's summarize. Overall it feels like a good idea executed in a horrible way. Had the gameplay been less repetitive and the DS less limiting this game could have been good. If you are not a fan of the series i would not recommend it, if you are, i still would think twice before buying it. There has been rumours of a StarFox game for the Wii floating around the internet (Miyamoto has stated that StarFox would work well with the Wiimote to be precise) and i can only hope that Nintendo comes to it's senses and brings back the railed flying of the first two games, because if they manage to mess up another StarFox game it is really time to bury this franchise forever.