Star Fox

Star Fox is a weird game to me. One one hand, I have a ton of respect for it especially in terms of its visuals and creativity, but on the other, it's plagued with issues and I had to almost force myself to fully finish it.

Let's start with the positives first. I think this is quite an important game in Nintendos catalog for being the (unless I missed something) first true 3D game that they've made. 3D games in the early era were fairly difficult to pull off because you'd need to properly communicate the 3rd axis or otherwise have a sense of depth. To that extent, I think Star Fox succeeds as a 3D game. It does feel clear a lot of the time how close or far away enemies, powerups, walls, etc. are. Being able to communicate that is a key foundation of the core on-rails shooter gameplay and if that didn't work then Star Fox would be awful to play. Another positive are the graphics and soundtrack. The soundtrack gets a lot of praise for good reason and the game looks pretty beautiful all around, with some excellent sprite designs and pretty sensible 3d polygon designs too. I especially like the look of the Arwings and the visuals of the Andross fight. One final praise I have for this game is that it's not afraid to be fairly creative with its themes and level design. The Space Armada level has a lot of sections to destroy cores of big ships, Sector Y feels like you're underwater, Fortuna pretty much has you fight a lot of the wildlife and Titania involves some weather manipulation, the Level-2 path of Venom leads you to a highway level, and of course I have to mention the level where you fight a slot machine as a boss fight. It's a very fresh and interesting game all the way through at least when considering those positives.

That being said though, this game kinda sucks to play a lot of the time. It feels like an inconsistent experience caused by some problems. For one thing, I wish a lot of the level design is better. There are several sections in the game that feel either cheap or hard to react to, such as plasma beams being fired at close range from certain enemies, suddenly appearing or moving blocks within the Venom surface stages, or the one part in Section Z that has a million spinning rectangular blocks which I'm shocked if anyone cleared that first try without taking damage. This extends to the boss design too, some of these bosses are just really tedious to fight even if a good portion of the others are fun. I'm particularly thinking of Great Commander in the Level-3 route because I feel like they programmed the hitboxes weirdly. Another problem is that the Arwing's control options are limited. I'm talking more about what I can actually do as the Arwing. It really feels like the core functionalities are: move, shoot, and occasionally tilt the ship in a direction to make dodging a bit easier. There is a barrel roll move but honestly you almost never need to use it, same for the accelerate and brake buttons that the game gives you. It's probably a nitpick but I feel the game could have benefitted from a deeper selection of controls.

Those two problems don't compare to the biggest problem of the game though, and the reason why it felt like more of a chore to play the more I actually played it: the framerate. The framerate for this game is pretty awful, having both a low on average fps and also being very inconsistent. There are points in the game where it feels responsive (I think the highest fps I usually experience is on the Venom space stages) and other times where it's sluggish due to bad slowdown. Nintendo isn't a stranger to having slowdown problems in their games but, in general, their instances happen rather infrequently. This game in comparison even has slowdown during the CREDITS SEQUENCE. I get that this game is very ambitious for its time on a visual front but this pretty much kills any chance at it aging well in the slightest as well as any chance of me having an experience that is both fun and consistent. I don't think it's an exaggeration to claim that low, unstable framerate has the potential to kill a lot of enjoyment for any game and I think this isn't an exception, especially since a lot of it focuses on reaction to what is on screen. It's a shame because this game does have quite a bit going for it and the core gameplay works well enough, not to mention the list of positives that I already explained.

Overall, this game was fun at first but became more and more frustrating to get through as time went on especially due to the slowdown problems. I appreciate its impact and ambition as a Nintendo game and the visuals and soundtrack are great but I definitely never want to play this again. It's worth trying out but not worth attempting to complete even though it's a short game.