Starfox Assault is a game of shooting bad guys with lasers pew pew pew! I kind of love it. It's simple, poppy, and I love how 2005 it is, despite all of its problems coming from it being made in 2005. I really like the textures on the environments, and the sound effects are pretty good too.

Okay, here's what's wrong with Starfox: Assault. It's pretty poorly written in the macro and the micro, as well as poorly translated. The game's story has the structure of a poppy space-opera, complete with dramatic moments and lines which are said earlier in the game coming up later at key points and characters dying heroically and stuff. StarFox Assault is pretty bad at building up concepts and drama. For example, the line in question, Wolf O'Donnel says "when the time comes, just act" and shit, that line doesn't particularly have anything to do with the finale, when the line comes back. There is also a moment when Peppy becomes sentimental and tells the crew how much he loves them, before dramatically sacrificing himself for the team five minutes later. It's like, "uh, okay, I guess." Maybe if the game showed the ship getting infected during the mission and Peppy trying to hide it? Also, the main antagonist of the game, the aparoid menace, is discovered to use the memories of its victims to try to fool its prey into giving themselves up willingly, but in gameplay, the aparoids are simply monsters who shoot at you. Even fighting the final boss, illusions aren't used either in dialogue or gameplay to try and fool the player or anything like that. Instead, Krystal simply says "keep fighting! The queen is afraid of us!" a dozen times. The hivemind theme isn't used very well and could have been swapped out with any old character trait, and the game would have functioned the same way. That is to say, it's disappointing to take the half-step to introduce the illusory aspect but not capitalize on it. I do like that the aparoids look like robot-bugs, though, and the kaleidoscope final boss setting, even if it makes me unable to see when and where precious powerups are being dropped. When I say that this game is poorly written in the micro, I'm referring to individual lines of dialogue in gameplay taking too long to say. By the time a character finishes telling the player that they have a bogey on their tail or that an enemy has locked on to their ship, I will have already taken care of the problem, but the character will finish their line unless interrupted by another line. Dialogue like this should be spoken in as few words as possible to match the fast pace of the scenario! Additionally, when you're fighting bosses, sometimes their lines will take a really long time to say, too, which makes it harder for those lines to enhance the drama of the scene. Instead of complete, long sentences, boss characters should have simply grunted, screamed, or used two-to-three word phrases, like General Pepper does sometimes! The last thing about the dialogue being poor is simply the performance of the voice actors. They definitely sound like they're reading their lines for the first or second time and likely don't know the context of the scene those lines take place in. A lot of phrases are spoken in an inflection which would make sense in a void but not in the context of the scene. It's very Sonic Adventure 1 in that sense.

Honestly, though, despite being clunky and awful, I think the third-person-shooter footsoldier segments were charming! I dislike that certain enemies are only vulnerable to charge shots or rockets, which I don't want to spend precious ammo on, even though, in retrospect, I had plenty of ammo for them, and they are what the rocket launcher was for. I think I shouldn't even have an infinite-ammo blaster which kills everything handily-but-slowly. I understand that the blaster is a fallback for players who run out of ammo, but the blaster's sheer effectiveness and the presence of enemies only vulnerable to charge shots invalidates the ammo system and makes me use the least fun weapon the entire time. Instead, certain enemies should have been weak to the machine gun or a grenade, which, honestly, some enemies could be weak to a grenade. I only played through the game once.

Star Fox Assault has the most fun arwing segments in the entire series, simply because it has the processing power (read: draw distance) to render it lovingly. Of course, 64's chunky, polygonal lasers look great, but the ships were a little lower-poly than ideal, and 64 was very poorly lit overall. Assault's ships and blasters are poppy and fun, and the ship controls as smoothly as ever. Assault even fixes all-range mode segments to not be not garbage, because you can actually use your brakes and kill things without circling back a thousand times. I wish they could have made escaping enemy fire more interesting, though. Every time an enemy mook got on my tail, all I had to do, and the only thing I could do, was press down on the c-stick to to a circle move, and then the enemy was in front of me, and I shoot them. It's a boring non-decision and takes a long time to do.

Star Fox: Assault also has the best mission in the game, in which Wolf saves Fox's life, Fox rides on Wolf's ship wing, and provides him with cover fire, as he takes them on a pleasure cruise around the city and whispers sweet nothings into Fox's ear. They are gay for each other. They are boyfriends.

Overall, Star Fox: Assault was a fun game, in which I shot my blaster at a lot of guys and blew them up, and I like Star Fox. But, man, weird how this series never quite hit a home run and then petered out. Maybe 64 3D...?