Game Preview: Why You Should NOT Buy Star Fox Zero
The unmitigated gall it takes Nintendo to release a new Star Fox game nearly 20 years after Star Fox 64 came out in 1997, knowing full well that they didn’t even attempt to make the game that is meant for this generation of gaming.
So here is the garbage in consideration that Nintendo is attempting to brainwash you into buying.
My first thought: “graphically underwhelming”. Maybe they were going for retro look. Whatever.
I slapped myself into realization. I’m not a graphics whore and I’m far more focused on gameplay mechanics (which make a game fun and playable).
I enjoyed Star Fox 64 when I was young, and it felt revolutionary to me in the way of cooperative AI. Not only were you a piloting a badass spaceship, but you were joined by colorful cast of fellow fauna. The height of the series was its dog-fighting mission when Fox and his team are tasked to fight Star Wolf and his company as seen here.
To break up the monotony of rail shooting missions, Star Fox 64 would employ “All-Range Mode” and similar to a Star Wars’ Rogue Squadron or Battlefront 2, you could fly within certain parameters in a 3-dimensional environment.
All-range mode is still present in Star Fox Zero and since the game hasn’t been released I can only guess at how often it will be used but from early footage it appears to still feel very limited.
When not in all-range mode, the game feels very linear and 2D, even if the graphics make the game appear to be 3D.
What marketing and early gameplay has told me so far is:
- This is a game specifically written and geared towards very young children who hold mommy’s hand when crossing the street
- Gameplay isn’t taking any chances from the base mechanics of Star Fox 64
In layman’s terms, this is a retro reboot that might as well have been Star Fox 64 updated to the Wii U.
To quickly emphasize the issue in the first point. The commentary and relationships between Fox, Falco, Slippy, and Peppy is a valuable opportunity to build a story whereas the characters have been reduced to catch phrases, quips, and the inevitable, “help me Fox, I’m actually a terrible pilot and have no evasive maneuvers”. Gameplay of Star Fox Zero so far has showed much of the same.
The story or dialogue doesn’t have to be non-children friendly, duh, but there’s a scene where Falco asks you: “can you shoot down 10 enemy fighters”, prompting you to shoot down 10 enemy ships to advance to the next objective. Games that are so blatantly obvious insult the intelligence of the player no matter how young they may be. It’s a suspension from reality that’s just not creative.. at all. But of course we haven’t known Nintendo to be very creative (cheap, but fair dig at Nintendo).
There’s limitless ways to go about taking a group of fantasy characters in space fighting with spaceships, and developing a cartoon-like plot that can even get an adult somewhat invested in taking down the evil powers of Andross. It’s a video game, so it doesn’t have to be extremely well written or philosophical, the story just has to be functional and believable. Why is Andross evil? Why is General Pepper good? What makes Andross and Star Wolf evil? What makes Star Fox who he is? Why is it a team of 4 completely different species teaming together? Why the fuck are we fighting at all?
And maybe I’m jumping the gun. I’m definitely assuming. But I’d be willing to put money on the fact that little to none of those questions gets answered.
Your obvious counterargument if you ride the proverbial Nintendo dildo is that Star Fox is a good game despite having no plot. To which I say, I’m making suggestions to make the game better and more appealing. Also, my second issue is far more important to me than the first.
The gameplay. Please let me dream, I ask. To which Nintendo and their fanboys say no, go suck a dick, Jonah, we enjoy our mediocre to shitty video games. And that’s why I’m going to play Far Cry 3 on Steam where I can enjoy a somewhat good story and enthralling gameplay.
The two gameplay videos I’ve watched are seen below. The IGN video is cringe worthy.
It’s just amazing to me that a game set in space can be so linear.
If you’re going to lack a good story, then allow some freedom in the final frontier. I’m not suggesting Star Fox should be a sandbox game though I would be curious to see what that would like, and it’d probably be better than this garbage. There’s ways to implement a sandbox feel, or freedom of choice within the structure of the game, whether it be by how you select missions, or choices you can make. There was elements of this in Star Fox 64 but it wasn’t simple or easy to spot.
A great spaceship shooter game for mechanics is Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike. First and foremost you have to aim at what you shoot at in a 3-dimensional environment. That’s how firing a fixed gun on a spaceship typically works IGN.
You can knock Rogue Squadron for little things here and there, but overall as a complete product, Rebel Strike is a fun game in the limited genre of badass spaceflight games.
Star Fox doesn’t need to become a disciple of the Rogue Squadron series to become a good game, but if the development team said, “we should take note of what good games have done in the last 2 decades”, there’s a lot that can be employed and learned to use in Star Fox Zero.
To this point, I’ve really been giving out free suggestions that Nintendo should hire me for so they can make a comparable game to real video games that are put out on other systems through game companies trying to actually make a profit.
And this is where I get to my frustration that’s been boiling since the announcement of this game in a franchise that, while I’ve only played one game (because it’s the only one that matters), has so much potential, but the ball has been dropped because of whose dirty hands the franchise is in.
So fuck Nintendo, for selling the people short on a game and a franchise that has so much potential and selling it for full price when a game developer could create a game just as comparable and sell it on Steam for $20.
Parents will buy this game for $60 so their kids can play it and be excited for all of 8 hours of mediocre to boring garbage.
I didn’t want to get too long winded in this diatribe about potential ideas, or the fact that another actually good F-Zero game could revitalize yet another franchise with gazillions of dollars of potential. So I’m just going to end it here, and go on to throw things at my computer whilst playing X-Com: Enemy Unknown. Because why would I play X-Com 2: We just added a bunch of random stuff and are acting like it’s not an expansion and worth $60???
Enjoy your god-awful Star Fox Zero game Nintendo apologists.
