Half-baked ideas and control issues mar the series' strong legacy.
Kyle Orland
All other issues aside, weaving through the canyons and waterfalls of Corneria city is still pretty great.
Star Fox Zero recaptures Star Fox 64’s satisfying simplicity at points, but it spends too much time getting in its own way with half-baked ideas and unneeded complexity. Nearly 20 years after the formula was laid down almost perfectly, Star Fox Zero just can’t seem to avoid mucking up the lessons of the past.
Tilt-based annoyance
The most readily apparent change to the Star Fox 64 formula in Star Fox Zero is the Wii U GamePad and its tilt-based motion controls. While the targeting reticle still moves as you move your ship with the analog stick, it now also moves independently as you tilt the GamePad. The idea is to let you fly your ship in one direction and fire in another without require you to fly directly toward your target.This control scheme actually comes in handy in some situations, such as strafing runs where you fly alongside a target and fire at weak points off to the side before looping around and making another pass. In general, though, the Wii U GamePad is way too big and bulky to comfortably and precisely use for tilt-based aiming.
By the end of a long play session, my wrists would be sore from trying to move the massive touchscreen-equipped controller at all angles as I flew. What’s more, the Gamepad’s tilt-sensor often gets slightly misaligned during intense action, requiring a quick manual re-centering that’s annoying in the middle of a firefight. Why this independent aiming couldn’t have been mapped to the secondary analog stick is frankly beyond me.
You can try to ignore these motion controls and simply use the movement of your ship to aim as normal. That’s easier said than done, though, because the motion controls can’t be turned off completely. So if you don’t want errant controller movement to throw off your aim, you have to hold the GamePad perfectly still in your lap or in front of you. (There’s an option to toggle motion controls to only work when pressing the “fire laser” button, but since you tend to press or hold that button for 90 percent of the game, that doesn’t help too much).
Just let me fly down a corridor
Control issues aside, Star Fox Zero still manages to capture some of that old series charm in the surprisingly rare levels where your Arwing flies directly forward down a corridor. Weaving the ship around obstacles and incoming fire while targeting incoming enemies before they fly past you is a familiar and intense experience and shows off the game’s strong environmental design. With your ship automatically propelled forward, it’s easy to enter a zen-like state of focus of dodging and shooting. This is Star Fox Zero at its best.Much too frequently, though, the game gives up this corridor shooting in favor of “all range mode,” which lets you fly freely in 360 degrees. These dogfights are much less interesting, usually taking place in vast expanses of empty space with only a few enemies dotting the view. Instead of simply focusing on what’s in front of you, you end up spending most of your All Range Mode time trying to slow down and turn around to get an enemy in your sights.
There’s not even an on-screen radar to help you track down enemies that might be behind you or off to the side. Instead, you have to rely on a lock-on system that secures the camera to a nearby target. That’s OK for short bursts, but using it means moving the behind-the-ship camera such that you have only a very loose idea of the direction you’re actually flying in and aiming.
Star Fox Zero tries to make up for this shortcoming with a first-person cockpit view that’s permanently displayed on the Wii U GamePad, but averting your gaze from the TV to look down at your lap is pretty cumbersome in practice (you can also switch to the first-person view on the TV). Cockpit view also makes it even tougher to dodge incoming fire or see enemies coming in from the rear. This is especially annoying during many boss fights, where you end up permanently and awkwardly circling around a central point and using the cockpit view to try to figure out what’s actually going on.
Too many vehicles spoil the broth
Even all-range mode is preferable to the all-too-frequent missions that eschew traditional Arwing flying in favor of some other vehicle. These missions include the ground-based Landmaster tank, familiar to series fans, which can now transform for a modified flight mode in short bursts. The Landmaster missions aren’t too awful, and the tilt-based controls actually work a little better for aiming at sky-based enemies while slowly rolling forward along the ground. Still, I found myself missing the easy maneuverability and three-dimensional movement of the Arwing.
Tilting the GamePad to fire at targets off to the side of your flight path is occasionally useful, though rarely worth the aggravation.
The Landmaster apparently wasn’t enough ground-based action for a game based around flying, though, because there’s now a second land-based vehicle in the game. The Arwing can now transform at will into an Ostrich-like mech, which can dash along on the ground or hover for short periods of time. This mode controls like the most awkward third-person shooter you’ve ever played, relying on those imprecise tilt controls for aiming and on both analog sticks for movement and turning. The time spent running around in tight corridors and awkwardly picking lonely enemies off of walls is time you’ll wish you were flying around instead.
Star Fox Zero also throws in a new hovering gyrocopter, which can move and angle itself freely in three dimensions (as long as it stays level with the ground). The slow, choppy movement in this gyrocopter is a depressing change of pace from the fast, free-flying Arwing.
One mission in particular has you using the chopper for a stealthy search-and-rescue mission. You barely fire your lasers at all as you slowly weave around searchlights and lower down a wired drone to hack into guard systems. This mission seemed to drag on and on, completely killing any sense of pacing and action that had been built up by what came before.
Getting in its own way
It would be one thing if these different play styles were a rare change of pace from the core Star Fox gameplay. But if you combine the non-Arwing missions with the awkward All Range Mode, easily over half the game is spent away from what Star Fox Zero does best.That’s a shame, because there’s some strong design on display here. The game does its best to make each battle truly cinematic, with story beats that briefly interrupt the action to explain what’s happening and why. Your wingmen still pipe up with some charmingly cheesy radio chatter during missions, too, now delivered in engaging “3D sound” that comes directly from the GamePad itself. Many of the story beats (and even some entire dialogue exchanges) are lifted directly from Star Fox 64, but there are enough changes to make it feel like an homage rather than a rip-off.
Star Fox 64’s intricate scoring system is back, too—hitting multiple enemies with a single, charged lock-on missile gives bonus points and provides an expert-level challenge that’s engaging for multiple playthroughs. The game also features branching paths through its handful of levels if you complete certain hidden objectives, meaning each playthrough can be quite different.
But by the time I got done with Star Fox Zero’s incredibly annoying final boss, roughly five hours after I first started the game, I found myself not all that eager to replay any of its levels a second time (though I did, for the sake of completeness). Instead, what I really felt the urge to do was replay Star Fox 64, which captured all the good parts of Star Fox Zero 20 years ago without any of the chaff that constantly gets in the way.
The good
- Portions where you dodge-and-shoot down a corridor are as fun as ever
- Cinematic mission design and well-integrated (if cheesy) story beats
The bad
- Tilt-based controls are awkward and imprecise
- Frequent “all range mode” dogfights are slow and uninteresting
- Reliance on hard-to-use, first-person cockpit view in many situations
- Way too many missions in hard-to-control, non-Arwing vehicles
The ugly
- Losing your limited lives and restarting the entire level during a failed boss fight
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