Holy shit, where did this come from? I was honestly slightly dreading playing Star Fox 2, after finishing its predecessor with only a technical admiration of what it achieved on the console equivalent of a toaster rather than much fun, how could its unreleased, unfinished followup be any good?
How wrong was I, this game is honestly great. Unlike Star Fox 64 which is in all but name a souped up remake of the SNES original, Star Fox 2 goes in a new direction. Rather than being limited to the rails of before, here each level is an open field to be explored at will. Most start in an open area where you find/shoot/sit on some targets before entering a base. There you can transform at will into a strafing mech walker and navigate through to find a simple boss fight.
While the stages are fairly repetitive and simplistic, they're a brilliant proof of concept of what it could have been. But it's the level select screen that truly surprised me, as what was before a simple route select is now a strategic metagame about protecting Corneria from attack. It's almost like FTL, you choose a planet or ship to travel to and as you move, so do the enemy missiles advance on your homebase. While in missions, time continues to pass, meaning if you don't finish them quick enough, you risk losing the entire game. It's a great balance between trying to keep Corneria's health as full as possible while attacking to avoid Andross making you repeat levels.
If this all sounds as though I'm gushing, then that's about to change. Star Fox 2 is by no means perfect, chiefly because it feels at most like a prologue to a more substantial game. The whole thing took me less than an hour to beat, and that was me playing on the hard difficulty setting. Star Fox 2 is laughably easy too, with most enemies going down in only a handful of shots. It runs abysmally too, some interior sections taking me down to what could only be single figure framerates, but this is a flawed it's inherited from its forebear. The ability to choose two fights to swap between at the start is an interesting concept, but incredibly underdeveloped. The art is definitely improver though, with the character portraits being good enough now to please furries.
Overall, I was very pleasantly surprised. I only wish Nintendo had embraced Star Fox 2's innovations and applying them to future games. There's more complexity here than either 1 or 64, at times it reminded me more of Freespace or Wing Commander than of Star Fox. Hopefully someday the big N will see fit to make one less Mario spinoff and instead return to one of its long neglected series and give us a new Star Fox in the same ilk as 2. Don't hold your breath though.
How wrong was I, this game is honestly great. Unlike Star Fox 64 which is in all but name a souped up remake of the SNES original, Star Fox 2 goes in a new direction. Rather than being limited to the rails of before, here each level is an open field to be explored at will. Most start in an open area where you find/shoot/sit on some targets before entering a base. There you can transform at will into a strafing mech walker and navigate through to find a simple boss fight.
While the stages are fairly repetitive and simplistic, they're a brilliant proof of concept of what it could have been. But it's the level select screen that truly surprised me, as what was before a simple route select is now a strategic metagame about protecting Corneria from attack. It's almost like FTL, you choose a planet or ship to travel to and as you move, so do the enemy missiles advance on your homebase. While in missions, time continues to pass, meaning if you don't finish them quick enough, you risk losing the entire game. It's a great balance between trying to keep Corneria's health as full as possible while attacking to avoid Andross making you repeat levels.
If this all sounds as though I'm gushing, then that's about to change. Star Fox 2 is by no means perfect, chiefly because it feels at most like a prologue to a more substantial game. The whole thing took me less than an hour to beat, and that was me playing on the hard difficulty setting. Star Fox 2 is laughably easy too, with most enemies going down in only a handful of shots. It runs abysmally too, some interior sections taking me down to what could only be single figure framerates, but this is a flawed it's inherited from its forebear. The ability to choose two fights to swap between at the start is an interesting concept, but incredibly underdeveloped. The art is definitely improver though, with the character portraits being good enough now to please furries.
Overall, I was very pleasantly surprised. I only wish Nintendo had embraced Star Fox 2's innovations and applying them to future games. There's more complexity here than either 1 or 64, at times it reminded me more of Freespace or Wing Commander than of Star Fox. Hopefully someday the big N will see fit to make one less Mario spinoff and instead return to one of its long neglected series and give us a new Star Fox in the same ilk as 2. Don't hold your breath though.