Star Fox Assault

The Good
In general, the concept and most of the execution are excellent. I like the idea of foot combat and the developers did a decent job here.

The plot was decent, the characters were interesting (though the voice acting was a little bit off). I particularly liked the Star Wolf team.

The graphics and music are very good, and look and sound nice. The graphics are excellent. The music is not exactly memorable stuff by all means, but it's pleasing enough and fits the situations well enough, and fits the general style of the series.

The Bad
The number one problem with the game is, pretty obviously, that there's only 10 single-player missions. Another problem is that they're pretty disproportional: Most are foot combat, and there's not enough of the famous Star Fox roller coaster ride style space shooting.

The foot combat works for the most part, but the makers should have put a bunch of additional effort to that; right now, it's just good, it could have been excellent. The Landmaster tank in particular is very aggravating thing to control: slow to get moving and impossible to aim with.

Time limits that crop up in some missions are also pretty annoying. The action is extremely hectic as it is, and adding additional hurries on top of that is a bit much. You only start to live with the time limits on later times when you play through the game, and, well, people don't play games too many times through these days, do they...

One small problem is that the plot doesn't really take full advantage of the characters and the potential; okay, in the end it doesn't really matter if the game where you blow tons of stuff up has a plot or not, but it seems to me that they developed some great potential but didn't use it all.

The Bottom Line
Star Fox Assault is a game of good old-fashioned space shooting and space fighter combat, but also a game of foot combat, with interesting twist that in some missions, you can pick your vehicle freely. The environments include familiar Star Fox locales and some new ones.

The concept works well enough. In free-form missions, fox can run around at staggering speed and even more staggeringly hypnotic tail-wagging. There's tons of enemies, tons of weapons strewn around the levels, tons of Stuff to Blow Up. Never in the series we've seen this much of senseless cartoon violence. It's kind of fun once you ignore slight frustration on the first time around. Regrettably, it never rises above the "kind of fun" afterwards... but it's "kind of fun" enough that I won't drag this game to the second-hand store.

Overall, the game works pretty well, looks and sounds pretty well; certainly, not the worst game imaginable. Not just exactly as smoothly playable as the previous parts, but it makes it up with the hectic pace. Okay, the previous parts of the series didn't exactly make you think; this game doesn't give you enough time to think at all, which is another kind of fine numb feeling.

The only big problem is that the single player game is stunningly short. The multiplayer game is fun, but does not feel like something you can play for too long at time. Perhaps with, say, twice the missions and a little bit more varied multiplayer mode this might have been a really great game, but right now, it's just something you pull off the shelf to play occasionally. Still, a very much decent game and doesn't ruin the rest of the series.