It painfully shows that this started as a unique IP and was pigeon holed by nintendo to become a Star Fox game because Miyamoto thought the main character looked like Star Fox. What a shame. As a result you have this constantly jarring tone between the trademarked juvenile humor and characterization of Rareware (from the likes of Banjo-Kazooie) with an overly serious edge lord Fox. It's hard to get invested into a story that takes itself so seriously and constantly undermines the stakes with a cast of dinguses for characters. It worked in Banjo-Kazooie since the plot was never meant to be serious. But this conceit doesn't lead to any insight into Fox or his crew as characters since their characterization is thinner than the polygon count. Which to be fair, actually ages pretty well.

It's pretty absurd and asinine to explain that Fox is on a "peaceful" mission so he can't have a gun, but then moments later he finds a staff and starts to beat to death anything that moves with it...

It's a highly stylized game that honestly still looks good. It won't blow a modern audience away and the Wind Waker's aesthetics certainly looks better. Still, it's worth commending the game here. Honestly the graphics are one of the best parts. The use of lighting, color, the trick of adding fur to Fox and other characters really elevates the graphics to another level. There were plenty of levels I just stopped and admired the artistry. Then a dingus came up and starting squawking nonsense and ruined the entire vibe.

The whole experience feels very video-gamey. Which comes at odds with the overly sincere plot. This wouldn't be as much of an issue if the game constantly challenged you, instead it's often extremely easy with these sporadic moments of pure frustration. No build up. Most of the challenge comes from the scavenger hunt. And that mostly challenges your observational skills.

Gameplay is very similar to Ocarina of Time, though inferior. You will have lots of puzzles involving pushing blocks, carrying an explosive barrel through platforming challenges. Various timed challenges, ect. There are a few dungeons but they lose their charm when the game forces you to back track to them multiple times. Man there's a lot of backtracking in this game...

It includes a similar Z-targeting, albeit inferior to the one in OOT. You can't really cycle between targets and you will automatically lock on to nearby enemies which can honestly get pretty annoying. The combat is simplistic where once you lock on you then mash your A button until they die. You do get moves and while you can switch items and weapons on the fly with the c-stick, you still feel limited in combat since you can only bind one item at a time, whereas in OOT you can bind 3. Sure you never have to pause to switch an item, which is nice, but it can feel tedious how you always have to select an item you need to give to someone or interact with the environment with. It's a shame they didn't main stream it and have you automatically select the item you need for a quest or event. It works, just feels clunky and dated. In addition, the strength of you staff remains the same from start to finish. The only difference being access to new abilities. Once you get the freeze ability all combat becomes trivialized since you can freeze almost any enemy and then one shot them. Not even remotely engaging but hey it makes combat quicker which is great because of how terrible it is.

The shooting is also extremely clunky and requires timed precision aiming... It plays like OOT manual aim, which is to say it's awful. The game always forces the aiming reticle to lock to the center of the screen which results in you constantly fighting the controls... It's a shame they couldn't implement a two-joy stick shooter mechanic which would make the game play significantly better... who ever came up with single joy stick aim with the reticle defaulting to the center of the screen is a terrible person. They should be shamed from game design.

While the game throws tons of variety at you in terms of mini games, none of these end up being deep as a result since they are rarely repeated and don't allow for their concepts to be explored. Honestly, most feel pretty half baked and can be pretty frustrating in difficulty. The rail shooter sequences are fun call backs to the original game, but don't play as responsively or with as much flexibility as the original titles. What makes these rail shooter segments aggressively terrible is how you have to replay them every time you want to travel to a given location... thus you will be doing the "Dinosaur Planet" space level nearly a dozen times and it never changes... so fucking tedious... These only get frustrating at the end of the game when it throws absurdly hard back to back rail shooter challenges at you, including two bosses... not fun and extremely long and unforgiving... Another frustrating mini-game was the snow ski sequence... I had to repeat it about 15 times ... the second sequence on a snow ski is laughably easy...

The worst mini game was by far was the spirit of fear test. You have to haphazardly and gently tilt the joy stick left and right to balance a meter. Ostensibly you are meant to look in the direction of raptors, so I guess the meter is supposed to measure you are looking in the right direction? The issues though are the camera keeps jumping around to different angles, disorienting you constantly and changing what left and right are... meanwhile the meter will sporadically, with little opportunity to react, force you to jab the joy stick in different direction, but if the camera angle changes mid input, you need to change directions again rapidly or fail... there is next to no margin for error and what makes this worse is you have a running gauntlet to complete in order to try the mini game again... this makes attempts take a very long time both from failing the gauntlet but also with how long it is... and the first 3-5 times you will probably need to fail to figure out what the hell is going on... easily the most frustrating and poorly designed puzzle. So tedious, poorly communicated and little room for error.

It's also extremely disappointing to have the main antagonist die in a cut scene and then get replaced with Andross (sure the main baddie was paper thin and was established to just be evil)... the least subtle way to communicate that this wasn't meant to be a Star Fox game... and man is the Andross fight so frustrating... it's long and janky AF. You need to shoot these gems to start phase 2. Once there, you have to destroy both his hands and avoid getting sucked into his mouth to move onto the next phase. The clencher is I couldn't ever find a reliable way to not get sucked into his mouth. If you get sucked in, you get sent back to phase 1 and ALL damage done to his hands is reset... You go throw 90% of the game killing things with puzzles and your staff and the game commits the biggest game design sin of having the final hours of the game be COMPLETELY different. Forcing you to do multiple tedious and frustrating rail shooter gauntlets. And instead of having the final boss be a showcase of all the skills you learned in the game, it's instead a shoddy Star Fox 64 boss fight...

With all this negativity aside, I do think the level design was actually quite good. Often times levels would loop in on themselves and while the backtracking is extremely tedious, the level hub has good design. They just should have removed all the tedious backtracking. It's also a shame they couldn't think of a way to connect the four space hubs to the main world. They do tack on a plot reason for this, but the plot is garbage so who cares?

In conclusion, I wanted to rate this higher especially because I was compelled enough to see the game to the end. This had a lot of potential but it was squandered due to the game being forced to become a Star Fox game and throwing too much shit at the wall instead of refining and creating a coherent experience. I hope to God that the rail shooting sequences were only added at the end because man they are so half baked and terrible.