Star Fox Command review

The classic Star Fox games featured straightforward, on-rails levels that threw wave after wave of enemies in your face. Still, even with the linear missions, there were hidden exits and branching paths to take, giving the furry space opera room to grow.

With Command, it's all arena-style dog fighting with time limits and identifiable targets. But at the end of each mission, you can choose which action to take, be it "follow those creeps back into the asteroid belt" or "let's go find Falco," so even when you've beaten back the oppressive fish monsters once, you can go back again and again, checking out all the planets, pilots and story you missed the first time around.

While replaying Command to see new characters and bosses has some appeal, scraping through an entire mission just to have a loose enemy take down the Great Fox at the last second is infuriating. It seems like some of the scenarios can't be handled without losing at least once, just so you can learn the aliens' battle plan. On the flipside, the actual skirmishes themselves aren't tough at all - Star Fox vets will ace this campaign in no time, multiple plays through or not.

The touch-screen controls also take some getting used to. Doing u-turns, loops and barrel rolls is easy, but double-tapping for a speed boost doesn't always connect. The 90 degree banking is missing too, which, along with no on-rails levels, removes some the smooth-piloting bliss the original game and Star Fox 64 had in spades. Hauling ass to fly out of an exploding base really gets your blood pumping, and save for one late boss encounter, we didn't dodge much of anything during the whole game.