Star Fox: Assault has to be one of the most criminally underrated Nintendo games. Now I’m not saying that this is some hidden masterpiece to rival the all time greats. It definitely isn’t. But let me explain

I love Star Fox but it’s an interesting case of a series while good, never really goes anywhere. The series rarely evolved with each entry, rather choosing to continuously keep things familiar to its origins. This is with the exception of Star Fox Adventures which hardly counts due to the nature of its development (Was developed as a completely different game/new IP before being reworked into a Star Fox game). This kinda led many to share the sentiment that the franchise feels stale, has no idea where to go, etc. Star Fox: Assault seems to be absent from most of these conversations. Between people singing the praises of Star Fox 64, arguing about the strange existence of Star Fox Adventures, or saying how disappointed they were by Star Fox Zero, nobody really ever leaves room to talk about Assault…and that absolutely shocks me. Star Fox: Assault feels like the biggest and last step the series made to actually take itself somewhere, taking the formula and trying to evolve it over repeating itself. This feels like the proper sequel to Star Fox 64 rather than another loose imitation. Frankly, it feels like the final Star Fox game even though it wasn’t since what little came afterwards just went right back to basics.

Star Fox: Assault still contains the same great on rails space piloting and shooting gameplay you’ll certainly be familiar with by now. These segments are as good as ever, delivering on twice the spectacle thanks to the GameCube’s visual capabilities as well as the game’s excellent orchestral soundtrack. This is not the entire game, however. Alongside missions with the classic Arwing gameplay, Assault introduces ground missions. Now…depending on how much you get along with the controls will decide whether these missions are a make or break deal for you, considering they take up half the game. There are a few control options and while it doesn’t take long to get used to them, none of them particularly change the core issues. They’re still generally a bit clunky. The sensitivity is cranked up to 100 and everything just feels very slippery. I highly recommend the dual sticks control option which will give you the smoothest possible experience. I think the ground controls alone are enough to drop my rating from a 4 out of 5 to a 3.5, but…eeeeeeeeh. I love this game too much. While this is still A review and I like to be critically honest and fair, it’s still MY review and thus I don’t like to totally downplay or dismiss my personal feelings either.

All that being said, I do still enjoy these missions quite a bit actually. I think once you get a feel for the controls as best as you can, there’s plenty of fun to be had here. It’s really cool to run around and blast your way through enemies as Fox with a small handful of weapons at your disposal. Sometimes you have access to the Landmaster to ram through enemies on the ground with a tank or even your Arwing to seamlessly take the battle back up to the skies. Some missions even have you take up arms while standing on the side of a flying ship. 3rd person shooter segments feel surprisingly appropriate in a Star Fox game, especially when it’s integrated so seamlessly with the other classic play styles. While the controls could’ve absolutely used more polish, I love the variety that these ground missions add to Star Fox’s gameplay loop and they feel perfectly in line with the kind of series Star Fox is. I love how pretty much all missions maintain the feeling of a large scale space battle. The ground is highly populated with enemies to blast away whilst your allies cover an ongoing battle in the skies, and as mentioned before sometimes you can even hop back into your Arwing to assist them as the gameplay seamlessly transitions into SF64’s All-Range Mode. Honestly, even if you don’t enjoy these segments it’s hard to say they’re offensive. They still contain shooting, vehicle action and they typically don’t last very long at all. Nor do they take up the entire game. The classic Star Fox 64-type missions are still here to balance it out and they’re as quality as ever.

The only other thing to talk about really is the presentation and other miscellaneous things which I briefly touched upon earlier. This game looks fantastic. GameCube era visuals have continued to age pretty gracefully and Star Fox: Assault is no exception. The jump from Star Fox 64’s very simplistic, sometimes empty environments to Star Fox: Assault’s colorful, highly detailed, and populated environments is absolutely gigantic. Even other visual elements like UI and character design. I love the UI aesthetic and I’ve always enjoyed the pretty unique GameCube era designs of the cast. Everything is enhanced by the game’s truly spectacular soundtrack. Like, I’m serious. This game has a full blown orchestral soundtrack and it’s incredible. Truly makes the game feel like a space epic. Also just like Star Fox 64, the game still contains fully voice acted banter between the game’s cast during its missions. While not quite as quotable as 64, this dialogue still brings out the memorable personalities of the characters. Combined with some of the cutscenes and mission briefings, it’s actually pretty great how well the Star Fox series is able to showcase so much personality in such a short run time. Yes, this game is very short as is the case for most of the series. You can finish the main story in 2-3 hours. The story itself is nothing special but I do love the character moments it provides.

Don’t know where else to put this in the review so here’s this brief note- It’s been a hot minute since I’ve actually gotten to play the game’s multiplayer but it’s quite fun and one of the most remembered aspects of the game. Star Fox multiplayer is always a blast. Didn’t want to go by without mentioning it.

In the end, I think it’s a shame Star Fox: Assault as a whole has pretty much been all but forgotten. After the release of the DS’ Star Fox Command only a year later, the series went quiet without an entirely new mainline entry for 10 years with only a 3DS remake of Star Fox 64 in between. Star Fox Zero marked an anticlimactic return in 2016 as another reboot and becoming one of if not the series’ most hated entry. At least as of the time I’m writing this, Star Fox has been absent once again for almost another decade. You know what’s frustrating though? That they literally just had it. Star Fox: Assault was the one. It paved a great direction for sequels to follow…sequels that unfortunately never came. Nintendo has been vocally reluctant on pursuing some games because they don’t want to make anything that doesn’t offer a fresh idea. As I’d explained at the beginning, Star Fox as a series was often criticized for growing stale. So it kinda baffles me that when Assault actually helped bring the series forward…that’s where they quit? And when the series came back a decade later it was just…back to basics again? Make it make sense. Star Fox has unfortunately become a dying name in the eyes of the public and what little of it is still discussed is often spent on people’s strong opinions on other entries. But…I don’t want Star Fox: Assault to be forgotten. We don’t talk about it enough. It’s one of the couple Star Fox entries that really put its foot down in finding its place in a series that struggled to find one. A proper follow up and evolution to its predecessors. Not a repeat. A game like Star Fox: Assault is the game the series needed, but Nintendo didn’t realize that and probably never will.

Sonic Forces is bare minimum the video game. It has just enough polish to be playable but absolutely nothing beyond that to be anything other than one of the most ordinary experiences you will ever have. It doesn’t actively go out of its way to do much I would consider the absolute worst of the worst, but it never once tries to be anything good which in turn just creates a special blend of bad. I hate beating games to the ground, but it’s genuinely shocking how unremarkable Sonic Forces is. It’s like taking the blueprint of something and submitting the blueprint as the finished product before any construction was done.

Honestly, I’d barely consider it a game at all. Most stages are able to be completed in barely over a minute and require little to no input from the player. This is the one game people actually have a case for when they call Sonic a hold stick and occasionally press button to win simulator. Forces plays itself for you. The level design offers no incentive for your input. It largely consists of singular, unbroken straight lines with little to no obstacles. And the occasional times it does require your input? The characters control so frustratingly bad. They jump like they have 100 pound weights tied to their shoes. It takes them ages to turn around if at all. Running feels stiff, especially for Classic Sonic who feels like he’s always running against a wind current. Nothing about the control scheme or physics feel good at all. Overall I can only describe it as feeling like an extremely watered down Sonic Generations which frankly can be said about the entire game.

The story is absolutely miserable. On paper, a Sonic story about a resistance trying to take back an already conquered world sounds really cool. Unfortunately this game is barely over two hours long if even, and has Sonic’s 2010’s writing. So what you get instead is trailer bait and plot points that are resolved in the same breath they are revealed. I’m not even kidding. Cutscenes are typically only 30 seconds to a minute long and most major plot points are resolved in just those 30 seconds with no extra room to breathe for any additional dialogue. The pacing is WILD. Characters are lacking all the substance they used to have and only speak in cliche one liners. Its level of depth is only comparable to a basic plot synopsis you’d find on the back of a game’s box.

The only positives I can say is that…visually it looks solid? Like, really. I’m actually pretty disappointed such cool and colorful locations were wasted on this nothing of a game. The soundtrack has a small handful of decent songs…? It’s actually a shockingly mediocre soundtrack for a Sonic game.

…and that’s really it. Even in some of the worst games, I at least try and give credit to clear ideas, care, and passion even if they don’t always work out. There’s plenty of not so great games that still showcase a level of effort. Unfortunately…I cannot give that credit to Sonic Forces. This is still one of the laziest, effortless, passionless games I’ve ever played. The game’s existence feels like it was only designed to meet a release quota. Its best achievement is that it’s playable…and even then, if it’s so uninteresting why should anyone want to play it? Sonic Forces is the culmination of everything that was wrong with Sonic during that time. So much so that the series has since steered into an entirely new direction. Hopefully we never see another Sonic game as unremarkable as this ever again.

The Walking Dead: Season Two is still honestly one of my favorite video game sequels of all time. The first game was so spectacular that a follow up would be no easy task and depending on who you ask they’ll say it did or didn’t deliver, but I firmly believe it always has. It may not be quite as consistent as its predecessor, but in terms of how to craft a sequel I feel it’s often nothing short of genius…when it works.

Of all the sequels in the series, Season Two feels it most closely aligns with the foundation the first game set up. The narrative very clearly piggybacks off of the lessons and themes of its predecessor and challenges them in ways that recontextualize how you have to adapt to a continuously decaying world. Its ideas mirror the first game in ways that feel thought provoking instead of cheap. It’s used to provide alternative perspectives to some similar scenarios and gets you to realize that the same logic isn’t always going to work for different people, and especially when you are a different person. It shows that there’s more than one side to a coin. Season One and Season Two always felt like two sides of the same coin and I mean that in the best way possible. While they function effectively as individual games, I find that together they become twice as strong once you realize just how intertwined their themes are even in places you might not have expected. It may not always capture the same magic, but its own magic based on why the story resonated with people makes it feel like a worthy follow up.

…that’s all my opinion of course, but I feel that in concept this is pretty much the perfect sequel and it’s execution largely does those ideas justice. The execution is where things get divisive which yeah, I 100% agree that Season Two is far less consistent than the first even if I find these low points to be few and far between. The tension always feels incredibly high. No matter how many times I’ve replayed this game, I find it’s moments to be so effective that it feels like I’m experiencing the game for the first time all over again. I will say I can definitely understand why people would find this to be underwhelming. It’s probably one of the biggest games where I totally see why people may feel negatively towards certain things with its very different approach to pacing and characters compared to the first which became so beloved for those reasons. But for me? Man, I just love it. I absolutely love it. Even if it’s not better than the first overall, the many moments that I felt were on par and even surpassed the first make it my favorite in the series.