Star Suck Command!

I read the back of the box for this DS incarnation of the Star Fox games, and thought, "Hey, this looks like the SNES/N64 Star Fox, not the Legend of Star Fox games they've been making that don't even maintain the spirit of the originals in that you aren't flying around blowing stuff up with glee." I bought the game and within 20 minutes of playing it, was irrevocably unable to continue playing, and within a week had traded the game in. Allow me to elaborate on the reasoning behind this:

The game itself takes place after the N64 Star Fox, with the original Star Fox Team having split up and gone their seperate ways. A new threat has surfaced (literally) from the waters of planet Venom, and begin attacking the rest of the Lylat System. Initially, you start out playing as Fox McCloud, who, along with ROB, operate from the Great Fox (which looks different than on the N64 game) and begin to fight back against this threat while at the same time trying to track down their former teammates to join in the fray. Cool, I thought, this game has a plot. The voices though, are not in the game, replaced with the gibberish from the SNES version. However, the game allows you to speak into the DS to modulate your own voice for the oddball-squirrel talk you hear in the game. That's a neat little touch, however, it's dwarfed by several massive flaws that squash any hope of entertainment this game might have been able to convey.

You start out with an overhead view of an area map where your current mission takes place, with the Great Fox on one side, and enemy fighters on the other. You see, the game doesn't play exactly like the old/good Star Fox games. It plays like a psuedo-strategy/psuedo-shooter game, trying to marry these two dynamically opposed gameplay styles and falls flat on its face, failing horribly being a rather mild understatement, at best, and an insult to the Star Fox heritage at worst.

Anyway, you use the stylus to move Fox and/or whoever else's ships are on your map, toward the enemy to engage them in battle, all the while the enemies are moving towards you and the Great Fox. You have X amount of turns to complete the level/destroy all enemies, or the mission fails and the game ends. If any of the enemy fighters reach the Great Fox, the Great Fox is destroyed instantly and the game ends. If the fighters get close enough, they can fire upon the Great Fox, eventually destroying it and ending the game if they are allowed to do so unchecked. Strike one.

When you reach an enemy fighter you are taken into real-time to battle enemies in the free-roaming, all-range mode (like on Star Fox 64 during the battles of Katina, Fortuna, Sector Z, etc.). However, you only have a certain amount of time to do so before the game--

Wait a minute, hold on here, hold it, hold the hell on just one damn minute! Rewind that. There's a timer??? A TIMER??? A TIMER!!! What kind of freaking BS is that??? There's no timers in Star Fox games!

Yep, a timer. I'm not sure what genius came up with this wonderful concept, but, whoever they are, they need to be murdered with No. 2 pencils. Now, what is their justification for this timer? Fuel. FUEL!!! FUEL!!!!!!!! ARWINGS DON'T HAVE FUEL, THEY RUN OFF A GODDAM FUSION REACTOR, FUSION DON'T NEED FUEL CUZ IT'S ALWAYS MAKING FUEL LIKE THE SUN DOES!!!! ARGGGGGGGGGGGH!!! I'm going off the official Nintendo Player Guide for Star Fox 64 here. So did, like, everybody in the Lylat system inexplicably switch over from Nuclear Fusion, which is a clean, renewable, damn-near self-sustaining power source, to fossil fuels all of a sudden? I don't seem to recall even in the longest mission on Star Fox 64 the Arwings have to call a time out in the midst of facing down a thousand enemy fighters and dozens of battleships with 20 gun emplacements a piece shooting ceaselessly at them to refuel their fighters. This is BS pure and simple and completely unwarranted in a game whose very roots demand that you destroy everything you can with abandon and without any sort of restraint. The kind that this stupid timer puts on the gameplay, and goes a long way to diminish any fun the game has going for it right from the get go.

Anyway, how it works is that you only have so much time/fuel to complete the mission or you fail and it's game over. You can get time/fuel bonuses by shooting down enemies in rapid succession, and some enemies drop drums of fuel that give back more time. Furthermore, whatever fuel you have left is carried over to your next battle. So if you beat one level with only 20 seconds left, you start the next level with only 20 seconds left. Needless to say, this game could have definitely benefited from a quick-save option (which it doesn't have). This in and of itself doesn't 100% kill the game, but it does go a long in doing so. Strike two.

Now, the fuel/timer thing alone doesn't completely kill the fun this game could give. But it gets help from the controls. Now, whoever thought it'd be cool to make it to where you couldn't choose between flying the Arwing with either the stylus, or using the more traditional SNES-style controls, needs to have a first-generation Xbox controller shoved up their &ss and told that they could've been given the choice of choosing between that or a Wii-mote instead, but that we wanted to be "innovative" by shoving our narrow-minded, annoying, and cumbersome control scheme right up their spinchter.

Okay, now let me explain. You see, you fly the Arwing using the touchscreen, moving the stylus up/down/left/right to move around as though you would use the control pad, and you fire your weapons by using the control pad/Y,X,A,B buttons. You use your Nova/Smart Bombs by touching an icon for it and dragging it over the map, which is hard to do while trying to dodge enemy attacks, but I digress. There are also icons for pulling a loop-d-loop and performing a U-Turn. You do the barrel roll by rubbing the stylus on the screen back-and-forth rapidly a few times. While you perform the barrel roll, the boost/brake guage drains...

If you've never played the old SNES/N64 Star Fox games, you have no, no, no idea how annoying this is. I tried, I mean, I really did try to like the controls. But it's just plain stupid to not at least have the option of letting people choose between the stylus or using the buttons instead. The stylus is just very cumbersome. Holding it while trying to navigate and shoot stuff, let alone keep up with what you're shooting at, let alone being able to maintain a semblance of accuracy with your weapons is just very tiring, and uncomfortable to do all at once. And frustrating. STRIKE THREE!!!

I can tolerate a game despite any flaws it may have, as long as those flaws don't completely bury any enjoyment to be had from the game itself. I could have been willing to tolerate the haphazard controls, if the timer wasn't there to put the pressure on despite the awkwardness of said controls. Likewise, I could have accepted the timer if the controls were customizable to allow for the use of the traditional control scheme. However, with the threat of inevitable defeat constantly looming over your fighter ticking the seconds till you see the game over screen, coupled with the task of trying to fly right, and aim straight whilst enemies shoot at you from above, below, left, right and every other direction, it just ruins any fun to be gleaned from this game. And it's a damn shame, too, cuz this game looked like it could've been great.