Star Fox Command - Every Gamer Review

Continuing our Star Fox Marathon, we go to the DS…AWWW THE DS!!! And when you have a series like Star Fox, you know what’s going to happen. But then again, it seems like it’s going back to the series’ roots, all flying and no BS with Adventure being just…NO! But Assault is pretty good and I like it despite its issues. But now I travel to the DS where the series gets the handheld treatment.

Star Fox Command (スターフォックス コマンド Sutā Fokkusu Komando), developed by Q-Games and Nintendo and published by Nintendo and was released in 2006 in Japan, the US and Australia, and in 2007 in Europe.

The evil forces from the planet Venom have been defeated and peace has been prosperous in the universe. But the Anglars, underwater creatures from the oceanic depths of Venom, start to attack the Lylat System in an attempt to destroy it. At this point, the Star Fox team have split up, Fox and Krystal have split up, Falco is doing the odd job or two like he did during Star Fox Adventures, Slippy found a girl who was willing to put up with his crap and decided to be with her instead, Peppy is now General of the Cornerian Army after the retirement of Pepper. As for Fox McCloud, he continues to patrol the Lylat System with his trusty robot buddy ROB. But when Fox finds out about the attacks, he tries to get his team back to save the day once again.

So…well, it’s pretty much a remake of Star Fox 2 but now fully developed and thought out. You start with a map; there will be the ships depending on how many characters there are, along with the bigger ship, Great Fox. With the stylus, you draw a path to where you want to go with the line being small unless you pick up an upgrade. You get a certain amount of turns to move, making this game a Turn-Based Strategy game, which makes it a first for Star Fox, but I feel it works here and the DS is perfect for that. There will be enemies you can fly to and you have to prevent the enemies from attacking Great Fox.

To do this, you need to draw a path so that you’ll collide with an enemy; you’ll be able to go to the next part of the game, the 3D Shoot ‘em Up, basically the All-Range Mode from Star Fox 64, where you’ll shoot a required number of enemies. When blasting enemies, you pick up Star-shaped cores from the defeated enemies. Though sometimes you’ll have to collide with enemies, bases or missiles. Bases will make you defeat enemies, and then destroy the base afterwards. And a Missile will be shot at and is targeting Great Fox, so you have to chase it and destroy the Missile. Items will be scattered around, one will increase time for any All-Range Mode you play in, rings will fill back up your health, and missiles that the Great Fox can use against enemies that are close to the ship.

At the start of the story, Fox will be the only pilot to play as, but when you get more pilots, you’ll have up to four to send into battle, so you have to strategize your way through many different maps, then there will be fog in later maps, but you can draw on the map to remove some of it, but you can’t get rid of all the fog so you need to basically guess where the enemy or items will be; Yep, enemies will hide in the fog and you’ll have no idea where they’ll come from so clearing the fog is also a strategic element too. So yeah, the game has many similarities to Star Fox 2, taking some of the best elements in that game and making something complete.

Now I go back to the story. You see, there are nine different endings, some of them just hammy and full of cheese. Meaning that you need to finish the first stage nine times, it’s Shadow the Hedgehog levels of ridiculousness. But you know what the best thing about these nine endings (and I’m definitely not saying it in a sarcastic way)? NONE OF THEM ARE CANON!!! Yep, if you were continuously playing the game, expecting to get a true ending, well tough luck, because the game doesn’t have a legitimate ending. So if you’re looking for a story worthy of the Star Fox series, it’s all pointless for you I guess. The developers did hint that the true ending would be in the next Star Fox game, set in the middle of Star Fox Command. One big problem, that game didn’t happen, sure we got Star Fox Zero, but that was a reboot, meaning Star Fox Command is pretty much the big question mark of the entire Star Fox series in terms of story.

Now for the gameplay, particularly the All-Range Mode. To control your ship, you use the stylus pen to move the retical and L or R to shoot with L or R depending on which hand you hold your stylus, but since I’m right-handed, L it is. You can press buttons to somersault and do a U-Turn. To do a barrel roll, you draw a circle on the touch screen. Now these controls aren’t too bad at first, but it’s where I realised the more challenging the game gets, the more the flaws show themselves and controlling with a stylus becomes uncomfortable after a while, I took a break and went back and nothing changed, and the stylus controls will work against you. You want to do a barrel roll, it may happen but only 6 times out of 10, and I recalibrated my DS touch screen, it can be finicky but the worst is that your hand and your stylus will block anything in your way, with more chances of you getting hit, I mean, I do have big hands but really that doesn’t matter. You can’t even change the controls to full-on button controls, and this doesn’t make me excited for Star Fox Zero at all.

The graphics and level design is pretty good for the DS, you still get the feeling of Star Fox so I’ll praise it for that and the music is decent, Star Wolf’s theme is still great.

Overall, Star Fox Command works very well as a Turn-Based Strategy game, but the All-Range Mode is decent at best if you have no issues with the stylus controls, but it can get repetitive very quickly and considering that there are nine non-canon endings to see, it’s not worth it I believe. I do like that it tries to be an improved version of Star Fox 2 and the elements could have worked well but the stylus controls ruins it. I mean, it was for the DS and I guess Nintendo had a good idea, but where’s the button controls? Super Mario 64 DS gave you button controls along with touch screen movement that no one used. I wouldn't recommend it, though if you're still curious, just give it a try.

You can get it on the Nintendo DS and the Wii U Virtual Console.

Next Time: It’s the grand finale, Star Fox Zero.