I’ve enjoyed many a remake, but I’m losing my patience for them.
Take this week’s Star Fox release, which I reviewed for NPR. It’s polished to the gleaming Nintendo standard, with an orchestrated score worthy of John Williams. Its new cinematics admirably establish the quirks and rivalries of Fox’s team. And unflattering as the new character models might be, the detailed visuals and snappy controls elevate the creaky 1990s source material.
Yet the game never gave me a compelling answer to the question “why make this instead of something new?” It’s an obvious attempt to cash in on Fox’s appearance in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, of course, but Nintendo could have just as easily greenlit a new Star Fox game, even one with limited scope. Has the company truly run out of ideas for the vulpine hero? This is the fourth time it’s chosen to remake or revamp the original game’s story after all.
If this trial balloon sells well, I hold the distant hope that the lesson isn’t “make more remakes” but “make more Star Fox.” The best part of the new game, after all, is its delightful and largely new dogfight mode. Give me more of that — more Star Fox, without the constraints of decades-old design.
As we barrel towards an Ocarina of Time remake and countless more nostalgic brand extensions, I pray for the game developers trying to push the medium forward. Much as I too would play a Bloodborne remake, perhaps it’s better for the industry that From Software shot each pitch to make it down. I’d take an experiment like The Duskbloods over it any day.
Here’s more from my NPR.org review of Star Fox:
The Star Fox campaign begins with a cinematic dramatization of the original game's opening text crawl… Each successive mission briefing gets reworked from its original clipped dialogue into fully animated mini-movies.
But the visuals are a mixed bag. Detailed as the planets and ships might be, fans objected to Fox’s unflattering appearance after the game’s trailer dropped. His original character designer, who wasn’t involved in the new game, admitted to preferring the Super Mario Galaxy Movie version of Fox to this remake’s. For my money, the lighting is more of a problem than the models. In nearly every scene, the cockpit illuminates Fox in a gross green glow.
This campaign doesn’t take long to complete — between an hour to two hours, depending on how often you die and reload. But to reach the game’s true ending, you’ll have to restart and hunt for secret paths, easily quadrupling the runtime. You can also play cooperatively on two systems if you’re in the same room, or you can split your Joy-Cons to have one player steer and the other use mouse controls to fire lasers (an example of Nintendo sacrificing ease for a new gimmick). I’d have loved this mode much more if you could have a second player aim with a joystick, as in Donkey Kong Bananza.
Battle Mode makes for a more entertaining multiplayer experience, but you can’t play it on the same system. I tried it through an online session Nintendo set up, diving and gunning my way through 4v4 matches that required us to capture points or collect energy from meteorites. If you’re hooked up to a webcam, you can use an augmented reality feature to puppet a character’s portrait in GameChat. The facetracking is pretty good: raise your eyebrows, and your character will raise their eyebrows back. Open your mouth to speak and they’ll do the same. If you’re playing as Slippy Toad and puff out your cheeks, you’ll see him inflate his chin.
But even with these charming flourishes, Star Fox remains awkward. It's got the production values of a modern blockbuster, but the sensibility of a 1990s arcade game. The campaign feels particularly antiquated, even with its expanded script and cutscenes. […]
If you've got buddies to battle or a tolerance for odd co-op, go for it. Otherwise, you're better off skipping this remake and saving up for an original game.
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