This game is the second in the Star Fox series. It is a ‘on rails’ shooter in which you play as Fox who flies through the galaxy in his ship (known as an Arwing).
The story is that Andross has invaded the Lylat System and so team Star Fox (Fox, Falco, Peppy and Slippy) have been hired to stop him. Not a game that’s particularly story-heavy, though it does have some very well defined characters. The attitudes and personalities of the main team come across very well due to the fact that throughout every level they’re chatting with one another over their communicators. These little chats (which extend to the villains at times too) are quite charming and often bring a nice amount of humour into the game. Falco is an especially good character (and certainly my favourite in Star Fox) who you’ll really get to know through this game. There’re also lots of hints of backstory and whatnot that come out of these interactions and they really give the game some depth.
Anyway, more about what it’s like to play. You’re given a map of the Lylat system and, depending on what you do on each planet, you’ll take a slightly different route through it each time. You always start in the same place but, there are different things you can do in the first level which gives two possible second levels, which have their own possible third levels and so on. It doesn’t actually take all that long to go all the way through the game and defeat Andross, but, it certainly won’t be hard to find the motivation to do it again. Since you quickly fly through every level, it’s easy to miss many of the secrets hidden about the place, so that more times you play through the more familiar you’ll become with each level’s intricacies and find all of the alternate routes. Besides, most of the levels are just plain fun: for example flying through a war torn planet or flying just over the surface of a sun while monsters try to attack! Plus, you’re not always flying in the Arwing spaceship; sometimes you take control of a tank or a submarine.
There is also a multiplayer mode, if you’d like to play with your friends. Sadly, this multiplayer mode does not allow different people to control different members of the team and have you all go through the story together; instead you just have dogfights in large arenas. It’s fun enough for a few minutes, but I was never particularly fond of this multiplayer mode.
Overall rating: 8.5/10
