The Star Fox series has definitely had its ups and downs. The original Star Fox for the SNES revolutionized the way the SNES games were made, and was 3-D when 2-D was the norm. Starfox 64 further compounded on the game, and made it one of Nintendo's most popular franchises. However, since Star Fox Adventures for the Gamecube, the series has been going downhill. The game's popularity shot downward as people found out that many missions would be on foot, and there is much less of the popular dogfighting in space. Nintendo is out to change the dying trend however, and takes Star Fox Command back to its roots in the SNES and N64.

Presentation

When you first start up the game, you will be impressed. It starts off with the usual developer ad (this time its Q) and then brings you to the start screen, which has the cool Star Fox Command Logo on the top screen, and a sci-fi looking maze going through both screens. With the cool and somewhat freaky music playing, its a very cool thing to see. Then you come to the menus, which are clean, cool, and efficient. The thing I like about this menu is that unlike nearly every other DS game, the menu isn't just all text and kinda bland. There are four menu bars, and three of them have an image on the bar. I normally don't care about menus and such, but these really did impress me. As far as first impressions go, this game is the best.

--Graphics

The game switches in between 2-D and 3-D here. 2-D is only for single player, and it is just... bleh. It is a top down view of the battle scene, and no real detail is included in it. Enemies look like a bunch of red dots together, and bases are just cool looking triangles. Much more effort was put into the Star Fox team, but it is obvious that this mode is not here to impress. The in-game dogfighting, on the other hand, has amazing graphics. The ships look sleek and cool, with no noticeable imperfections anywhere. Some enemies in the single-player campaign aren't quite as great-looking, but overall this game seriously looks better than many first-gen gamecube games I've played.


--Sound

For the most part, the sound is great in this game. The music is fabulous, and most of the sound effects are spot-on and sound great. I have only two issues in terms of sound with this game. For one, the searching sound on wifi. On Mario Kart we got some half-decent elevator music that wasn't all that bad, on Metroid we got really cool sci-fi music, and on Animal Crossing we got a little jingle. But with Star Fox we get a somewhat annoying beeping sound when you're searching. It's really the first game where I’d be on the couch searching and family members would say "what the heck is that noise?". It’s not really that bad, but its not like the other wi-fi games where you could actually chill and listen to it. Secondly, they dropped the voice acting in favor of gibberish. Kind of like animal crossing, where they move their mouths and you can read what they say, but you can't tell what they're saying. When I said this game went back to its roots, I meant that in more than the lack-of-foot missions sense. The last Star Fox game to do this was on the SNES. Overall the sound is great but with a few small exceptions.

Gameplay

This is where the DS's functions really revolutionize the franchise's controls. The controls seem very hard and awkward when you first pick up the game, and even after doing training a couple times. I'd say the learning curve on this one is seriously about one and a half to two hours. Once you get the feel for this though, it becomes very easy and like second nature. You no longer shoot bombs at people by pressing B. Now they have actually become bombs, where you can drop them on the screen by dragging the bomb on the touch screen and over to your enemies. Flips and redirects have become easier as well, just a tap on the icon on the touch screen and you're doing the maneuver. And thankfully the aiming system no longer shifts into the middle constantly. You have full control of the aiming system, there are no limits. This obviously makes it much easier(once you get the hang of the controls) for shooting down your opponents.

The story mode is not your typical Star Fox. Although it has the multiple paths to the ending and multiple endings, the way you go about battling is very different. First, you are placed in a top-down turnbased/real-time strategy mode, where you move your fighters and intercept enemies. Only one team member does the mission, unlike the previous games where you would occasionally see Falco or Slippy fly in front of you whining about someone on their tail. With the exception of the missile take-downs, all levels are free-roaming, instead of the usual one-track mission where you could not turn around and go the other way, or you could not stray too far right or left. The strategy element is a good addition to the game and actually makes you think, and personally I think they should keep it in future games. Overall, story mode is mostly a 20-minute fun thing. It is fun, but you really can’t play it for extended periods of time without getting pretty bored.

--Multiplayer

There are two multiplayer options, download play and DS Wi-Fi. So obviously it won’t matter if everyone else has the game anyway, because you have to download to play multiplayer LAN. This is not a bad thing however, it seems they dropped the multi-card play in favor of expanding the single-card. In either mode, everything is the same.

The basics of multiplayer? Five items/ship upgrades are spaced evenly around the center of the map, and the four players started in each corner of the map. Each ship is the same, and everyone starts out with only a single laser. In the beginning, the main focus is to boost and get to the laser upgrades as fast as possible. The green upgrade is 2x the power of single laser, and red upgrade is 2x the power of the green upgrade. The only way to obtain these after they are taken is to kill the person with the upgrade and take it from them. The three other items are less important, but if used wisely they can easily win you the game. Bombs will randomly spawn, as well as stealth and health rings.

The multiplayer is great in this game mainly because it is so well balanced. Unlike certain previous wi-fi games, this really has no balance issues at all. However, you’re always going to have whiners. And the whiners have two main complaints: kill stealing, and disconnections drop the game. When you destroy someone, they drop their “core”(they appear as rotating stars) which you are supposed to collect. The person with the most stars wins the game. Sometimes you’ll kill someone from a far distance, and the guy who is closer will boost and get the star before you. Although I agree it can get annoying sometimes, it still requires you to put in the extra effort after the kill and it makes it a little more fun and frantic. The biggest problem though, is that when one person disconnects, it drops the whole game. But the ranking system in this game is much nicer than say Metroid’s, which is probably meant to decrease disconnections. And so far it has worked, I have seen far less disconnections in SFC than in MPH or MK.

Quite possibly, the best thing about the Wi-Fi for this game is that there is a free battle option. In free battle, you can practice with other people and the game will not go on your record. This is great because you can practice it up all the time before going onto the harder Battle Royale option, and there are virtually zero disconnections. Overall this game is the best for wi-fi in terms of balance, so the whiners can finally stop complaining.

Lifespan

Star Fox Command offers nine different story mode endings, which should keep you busy for a while. You can also replay every level you’ve beaten and try to get high scores, which adds a huge amount of replay if you are into those kinds of things. But wi-fi is the big replay factor for this game, and it can keep you busy for a very long time. Although multiplayer should keep you going for a good long while, I don’t see it lasting as long as games like Metroid. At the end of the day, the replay value for this is great even if it still isn’t up there with the replayability greats like MPH and MK. I could easily be wrong, though.
-- SFC links
Official Site
SFC at Gamestats
TDS SFC Clan

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