Today I’ll be taking a look at Star Fox 64. Don’t worry, this isn’t some revisionist, contrarian review of the game. I’m not going to go “um actually, Star Fox is bad”, this isn’t YouTube. This is more of an excuse for me to talk about one of my favorite games of all time. I’ll try to look at it from a more critical point of view. I could have just written “Star Fox good me likey” and saved myself the trouble of typing this whole thing out, but I’ll try to do it justice with a proper review.
Gameplay
Star Fox 64 is a 3D on-rails shooter. You fly (or drive in some stages) in an auto-scrolling straight line and fight against the forces of Andross, the mad scientist. Each run takes you through seven stages, and there are sixteen in total. A lot of stages have alternate endings that lead you to other paths. These are organized in Easy, Medium and Hard routes. Every route starts in Corneria and ends in one of two versions of Venom.
Most of the game is spent flying in the Arwing, Star Fox’s signature ship. It can move in all eight directions, barrel roll to deflect enemy shots and lean left or right to take sharp turns. The game is an auto-scroller, but you can use the boost to gain a temporary speed up to get past obstacles, or use the brake to slow down for a bit. These are rarely required in the game, but they’re useful for high score runs. There’s also the loop and U-turn, two techniques used for repositioning. The flight controls are very snappy and responsive. The ship has some slight inertia, but it’s hardly noticeable, and the game’s levels are built with this in mind.
There are three levels where you get to use something other than the Arwing, those being the tank and the submarine. The tank is used in two levels, and it controls very similarly to the ship, but without the vertical movement. It has more inertia when moving from side to side, but it gets a special sideways barrel roll to compensate for its lack of movement. The submarine gets only one level. It handles a lot like the Arwing, with full eight-way movement, but it’s slower and it has infinite torpedoes instead of bombs.
These two vehicles add a little variety to the gameplay, in a good way. Their handling is different enough from the space ship to be noticeable, but not so new as to require a different skill set. It feels familiar, without detracting from the overall experience.
Joining you in your journey against Andross is your squad of talking animals. There’s Peppy, the wise old mentor figure, Falco, the hot-headed angry one and Slippy, who’s constantly in peril. They will banter throughout the stage, doing things like ask for help, request assistance, scream for you to rescue them or just scream in general. For an elite squadron of pilots, they can’t seem to handle basic enemies. Maybe Fox hired them on the cheap.
Stages
The stages are where Star Fox really shines. There are sixteen of them in total, with each presenting a different challenge. Some are straight forward shooting stages, where your goal is to survive to the end of the level. Others have you shooting down missiles or completing other objectives.
I’ll be going through them and giving my thoughts on how they play, how they look/feel and if there’s anything noteworthy about them. There will also be some fun facts along the way.
There’s a medal you can get on every stage. There are two requirements for them: reach or surpass a specific number of points and have all your squad mates alive. I’ll comment on each stage’s medal, their difficulty and any stray observations.
I’ll be a little nitpicky here and there, since I’m a grumpy old man, and I’ve been playing this game since my age was in the single digits. If I say a stage is “the game’s low point”, it’s not me saying the stage is terrible. It’s bad in the context of the game, but this game at its worst is still better than a lot of games at their best.
Corneria
Corneria… fourth planet of the Lylat system, and the perfect introductory stage. It’s very basic in how it plays, but it does an incredible job of teaching the player how the game works through gameplay alone.
It starts over the water, as you approach Corneria City, which is like if Earth had a city named Earth City. The first enemy you see is a tiny, nondescript ship that just looks at you. You shoot it down or hit it with a charged laser. Then, two of those same ships fly in. If you hit them with a charged laser, you’ll see the Hit+1 text, letting you know that hitting two things with one shot gives you a bonus of some kind. After a few more enemies, Slippy flies by screaming that he needs help, introducing you to the fact that your squad mates will be asking you for help every few seconds. They’re always in trouble and getting shot at by basic enemies. It baffles me how they even got into team Starfox if they can’t even handle getting chased by the first few enemies.
After that, the stage goes on as normal. Enemies spawn, you shoot them down, you get power ups, that sort of thing. Then you fly under an arch or between two buildings and you notice that, when you do that, more enemies show up. That teaches you to fly between things to trigger special events. This setup is then payed off with the “true” boss and an alternate route. This blew my mind as a kid, and made me want to explore each level more thoroughly, which is then rewarded with new content.
A perfect introductory stage that sets up all the major gameplay mechanics and gives the player a hint on how they should approach the rest of the game.
Medal difficulty: Medium. It’s not too hard to get the medal here, but it requires some finesse and knowledge of the stage. Maximizing enemy spawns by flying through things and liberal use of the charge shot are key here. You need to shoot down most enemies to get to the 150 points, which is more than what you’d expect for the first stage.
Fun Fact: Speaking of the Hit+1 mechanic with the charged laser, if you manage to hit a group of enemies with the charge laser without locking on to them, you get bonus points. It’s a neat little trick that, once you know how to do it and where, makes getting the medals a lot easier. Wow even Star Fox has some advanced tech, who knew!
Meteo
After ridding Corneria of one of its bosses, and presumably leaving the other to wreak havoc, you fly off into the asteroid belt known as Meteos. It’s full of meteors, to no one’s surprise, and it introduces the concept of hazards. Dodging, flying through stuff, avoiding massive rocks, that sort of thing.
It’s a fine level, but what bothers me about it is the constant downtime. There are sections where you dodge rocks and others where you float in empty space with nothing threatening you or nothing to shoot at. These sections are all the more noticeable when compared against the short bits where you’re blasting at a screen full of asteroids. It’s a very feast or famine level, but it manages to be fun thanks to its setting and set pieces, even if some parts wear thin after repeat playthroughs.
The level’s alternate route is one of the best, along with Sector X’s. You fly through a series of rings as your ship starts spinning, faster and faster and faster. Your crew is cheering you on, space is distorting around you. Peppy yells “Never give up! Trust your instincts!”, you clear the last ring and enter hyper drive into a pocket dimension. The music changes, the meteors become black with white designs and everything gets hazy and weird.
The subspace sequence is another argument in the case for original hardware, since the game’s low res fuzzy graphics, coupled with the slowdown, displayed on a CRT TV, it makes this part look surreal and dreamy. On the recompile, with cleaner graphics and on an HD display, it starts to fall apart. You see the man behind the curtain. The background, which on a crappy tube TV is a bright halo of light turns into a cheap, undulating JPEG. Now that everything is sharp and clear, it looks less like you’re traveling through a spatial distortion and more like you’re going through a cheap theme park attraction. It’s still a great sequence, but it loses a lot of its impact in the translation to HD.
Another point in favor of the original hardware is the Nintendo 64’s controller. That weird, three-pronged oddity has the most precise analogue stick I’ve even used. Star Fox doesn’t require pin-point precision, but there are some routes and targets that I could hit reliably on the original hardware but I can’t on PC with my dinky Xbox controller. How did I get the game to work on PC? Well it’s totally not emulation no haha Nintendo stop looking at me like that.
Medal Difficulty: Easy. Just throw some bombs in the sections with a lot of asteroids and you’ll be fine. It’s easier to get it in the alternate route at the end, since it spawns a lot more things to shoot, but it’s doable in the regular route, even if it is a bit tight to get all 250.
Fun Fact: Someone’s going to get mad over the meteor/asteroid terminology used here, and I don’t care.
Sector Y
A giant Y-shaped nebula serves as the backdrop to a massive space war against Andross’s fleet. This stage has some of my favorite visuals in the entire game. The colossal carriers, the mechs flying around, the constant laser fire everywhere. It looks like something out of Gundam or Macross.
Medal Difficulty: Medium. Need to take specific routes to get to the more populated areas and shoot everything. The charge shot trick is needed here.
Fun Fact: Years ago when I tried to get every medal in the game, I got some bad intel that this stage’s goal was 200 shots. I retried the stage over and over again until I got one run where I barely scraped by. The goal is 150. I thought that was tough, but this guy got 377.
Fortuna
A fully all-range stage where you fly around a base and shoot down enemies coming out of a base. All-range means you have full 360 degree control of your ship and can fly around. It happens in some boss fights and stages.
Why are ships coming out of the base? Because someone set us up the bomb! The base is going to explode, but just as Fox goes into the base he’s interrupted by none other than Star Wolf. From there the level turns into one big dog fight against Star Wolf, a second group of animals in space ships, but this time they’re evil! The Vergils to your Dantes. They’re equipped with ships similar to the Arwing. They can loop around behind you if you try to engage, they target your buddies and they can even do a barrel roll to avoid fire.
Despite how cool they are and how quotable their dialogue is, they’re complete pushovers. Their ships are very fragile and can be taken down in a few shots from the fully upgraded laser. Wolf is the only one who is a bit of a challenge, only because he does an evasive loop at the first sign of trouble.
Now that Star Wolf has been dealt with, Fox can disarm the bomb and save the day.
Medal Difficulty: Trivial. The easiest medal in the entire game, in my opinion. Take out a few enemies in the first part of the stage and then kill Star Wolf when they show up and you’ll hit 50 points without having to do anything special. Skip their cutscene to get a few free shots in while they enter.
This was one of my favorite stages as a kid. I loved Star Wolf and their dialogue; their quotes still live rent-free in my head to this day. The idea of a pure dog fighting stage is great, and it was a lot more difficult for me as a kid, but playing it as an overgrown man-child, it’s too easy, which takes some of the magic out of it.
Fun Fact: Can’t let you do that, Star Fox. Andross has ordered us to take you down. Peppy! Long time no see! Andross’s enemy is my enemy! Just what I need to see. Star Wolf. Let’s take care of these guys first!
Sector X
A leisurely stroll through a destroyed base. Take the right hand path to go through the stage normally, where you dodge debris and fight a boss, or go to through the left for the warp. The warp here is a series of gates you shoot at to open. They will destroy your finger if you don’t know how to effectively burst fire. It’s counter intuitive, but if you mash the fire button you shoot slower than if you burst fire. Instead of tapping, press and hold for a few frames and repeat. Knowing this would have saved me a ton of frustration as a kid. I once stayed home from school with a fever and spent the day playing Star Fox. I was at this stage and wanted to do the warp, so I mashed like a maniac, and the combined strain of hammering at the button like a coked-out chimp and the fever made me go woozy.
The stage itself is highly unremarkable. It has a warp, much like Meteos. Everything goes blurry and you float through subspace. This one is more interesting than the previous warp. It involves a lot more dodging.
Medal difficulty: Trivial. Use smart bombs on the first two enemy swarms for a ton of free hits, then complete the stage as you normally would. I managed to hit the 150 mark way before the boss and the warp.
Fun Fact: This stage was previously called Sector Twitter. That was awful.
Titania
Slippy went and got himself slapped onto a desert planet, and for some reason, you have to go rescue him. The stage itself is good. A lot of enemies to shoot and things to dodge; stuff like mines on the ground and constant hazards. The orange, dry look it has is a good change of pace and brings some variety.
Medal Difficulty: Easy, but you need to know a little about the level beforehand, since some groups hide behind structures.
Fun fact: Slippy is an integral part of the team, and you have to save him because you love him.
Aquas
I’m not a fan of horror media. Movies, books, games especially. Not my cup of tea. It’s not that I’m a big, tough man, but they don’t scare me, because no other spooky movie or story will ever be as scary as playing through Aquas at age six. Oh that A24 movie is scary, eh? It’s got themes and imagery and it makes you reflect on your past mistakes and how we live in a cold and unfeeling universe. Does it have a giant one-eyed clam at the end? No? Not interested. Giant one-eyed clam sounds like a euphemism for something.
This whole level is spooky. It’s dark, dreary, the music is eerie with chanting choral vocals. It’s full of weird fish and giant sea monsters. It runs at 10 frames per second. That’s real terror right there. When the game’ framerate dips into the single digits. It adds to the ambiance since the game starts to feel so sluggish it’s like you’re playing it underwater.
I think this is the low point of the game, and not just because you’re deep under water (ha ha ha I make the funny joke). The level is interesting in its aesthetics and themes. It shows how Andross’s war machine has devastated the entire solar system, with Zoness being an even more extreme example. It’s a good change of scenery from the rest of the game, and getting to pilot the submarine is a fun time. It’s just that the performance issues really put a damper on the whole experience. The stage itself isn’t that fun to play through, since it involves spamming the infinite torpedoes and moving forward. The boss is a highlight with how cool it is; it’s a giant clam with an eye where the pearl would be. It made six-year-old me recoil in horror, so it has that going for it.
Medal difficulty: Easy. It’s possible to miss one or two enemies, but spam shoot and torpedo, as you would anyway, and go for the gold.
Fun Fact: Even without giant bio-engineered clams, the ocean is a very scary place.
Katina
An all range-mode stage that has two halves: one where you shoot enemies and then another with a timed objective. It’s Fortuna again, but without Star Wolf, which is like saying “it’s a bacon cheeseburger, without the bacon”.The stage itself is good. It makes up for its lack of Star Wolf by having a ton of enemies to shoot at and a giant flying saucer that spawns even more enemies. It even has its own iconic voice lines. When you shoot an allied ship down (which happens a lot), Bill screams “FOX! That’s one of ours!”, and that voice clip is etched deep in my brain, forming one of its few wrinkles. Another voice line from this stage that has impacted my life the one at the end of the mission when Fox says “You too, Bill”. For some reason that wormed its way into my brain as a kid and I would sometimes add “Bill” when I said “you, too”, prompting a friend of mine to ask me “Why do you keep calling me Bill?”. If you’re wondering: yes, I was a weirdo. Who would have thought that the guy who writes needlessly detailed game reviews as a hobby was a bit special as a kid.
Medal difficulty: Trivial. Shoot as many enemies as you can during the first section. When the enemy mother ship approaches, shoot at enemies until the hatches open, but don’t shoot the hatches and keep fighting the popcorn enemies. After that, speed kill the boss for an easy medal.
Fun Fact: If you don’t destroy the mother ship before time runs out, it fires a giant beam and destroys the pyramid in the center of the map in a giant explosion. This is a reference to the movie Independence Day, starring Will Smith. Will Smith does not appear in Star Fox 64. I checked.
Solar
The closest thing to a bad stage. It’s a straight shot over the surface of the sun, dodging solar flares, shooting rocks and birds. That’s it. That’s the whole stage. The sun will slowly drain you shields, so you have to stick to the top of the screen, where it’s cooler. That’s the stage’s gimmick and its entire idea. There is no variation to it, no alternate path, and no enemies other than the birds. The boss is kind of interesting to look at, at least. It’s a giant lava monster. He doesn’t do much, but his design is cool and he explodes.
Medal difficulty: Easy. Shoot all the birds and you’re good. It might be a lot harder if you’re like me and thought the medal was 150 shots. I kept restarting thinking I wasn’t going to get it.
Fun Fact: Despite being called “Solar” and looking like the sun, Solar is a planet, not a star.
Macbeth
Tank stage. Drive alongside a large transport train blowing it apart piece by piece. The giant train is a memorable, interesting set piece. There’s an alternate path where you scramble to get to eight switches, which sends the boss into a building and nukes him. The guy gets hit with like five massive explosions. It’s enough to kill him and three generations of his descendants. Is it morbid to say I’ve always found it hilarious? This is pretty much the way to beat the stage if you want a good score, but it’s a shame since the regular boss is really cool. It’s a butterfly robot that’s being dragged along by the train like a kite. It has a cool move set and destructible parts.
Medal difficulty: Easy. As long as you get the “true” ending, you get +50 hits for atomizing the boss.
Fun Fact: This planet is named after the play Macbeth written by Shakespeare. This being a tank stage is a reference to the lack of tanks in the original play.
Zoness
Andross turned an entire planet into a toxic waste dump. Dodge mutated sea monsters as you fly through a naval fleet.
The gimmick to get the “true” ending here is pretty fun. You have to shoot some searchlights, and they’re scattered to the left, right and behind props, which means you have to move around to get them.
This level is a case against original hardware, much like Aquas. The muddy textures the N64 is infamous for come out in full force. It makes the stage look a lot more decroded, but probably not in a way the developers intended. Its color palette of puke green and darker vomit green don’t help it much.
Medal Difficulty: Medium. It’s a little tight and requires you to get the tiny, jumping shrimp that show up sporadically. Not my favorite to get.
Fun Fact: Toxic waste isn’t nearly as fun as it is in media. It won’t give you super powers. It just kills you and poisons the groundwater.
Bolse
A giant floating satellite that defends Venom somehow. I’m not an expert on the lore. You fly around, take down some magnetic towers and then destroy the core. If you don’t know the most efficient way to destroy the magnets, the stage can drag. The towers pull your ship around, and it can be disorienting at first.
If you skip Fortuna and end up here through an alternate route, you get to fight Star Wolf. A really cool detail.
Medal difficulty: Trivial. Shoot some of the ships that come out with the core and then destroy the core. It’s almost automatic.
Fun Fact: Bolse kinda sounds like Balls. This is the kind of high-IQ comedy you can only get on Load Last Save.
Sector Z
Out of all the levels in this game, this was always my least favorite, even as a kid. Even when compared against the 10 fps nightmare of Aquas, with its dreary atmosphere, creepy music and scary final boss, my six-year-old self still preferred the underoo-shitting horror of Aquos over Sector Z. Why? Because Sector Z is pure stress.
The team is ambushed, six missiles are headed straight to Great Fox, and you have to shoot them down before they make contact. Meanwhile, you’re trying to keep enemies off your buddies. It’s a constant yap-fest. Rob 64 is constantly alerting you of a new missile every few seconds and giving you their distance from the ship, your crew is screaming for help and the stressful version of the boss theme is blaring. It’s a nightmare, but at least it’s a lot more enjoyable as an adult who can manage that stress, right?
Medal Difficulty: I hate my team. You need to shoot down every missile to get the medal. Sounds easy enough, but there are three other furries in spaceships who want to shoot them down, and if they get the final hit, it doesn’t count. It’s possible to get these consistently, but there will be times when they get the last shot and you miss out on 10 points, and you’ll wonder how you can strangle Slippy when he doesn’t have a neck.
Fun Fact: If you fly inside of Great Fox, you’ll get a free repair.
Area 6
One last charge before Venom right through the entirety of Andross’s army. It’s the most frantic stage in the game, with hundreds of enemies and constant threats. Missiles, giant satellites, war ships, swarms of drones. Hammer on the fire button and shoot at anything and everything. It’s the most difficult stage in the game, and my personal favorite. There should have been more like it.
The only downside here is the boss, which isn’t very interesting. It has a long invulnerability phase at the start where you have to cycle shooting at things until it becomes vulnerable. It wastes a good amount of time teleporting and standing around.
Andross messages you occasionally using the same c-button prompt Rob 64 uses, which absolutely terrified me as a kid. If Amnesia or any other horror game replaced their spooky jump scares with messages from Andross, I’d play them.
Medal Difficulty: Easy. Wait, what? Easy? For the hardest stage? Yeah. The target is 300, which is the highest out of any stage, but there are so many enemies and things to shoot, you can reach 300 reliably. You need to use burst fire consistently throughout the entire stage and blast things as soon as they appear on screen, which is a little tricky, but if you do that it’s a breeze. It’s a ton of fun, too.
Fun Fact: An elephant’s trunk can hold 2.5 gallons of water. I didn’t have any Area 6 facts.
Venom 1
After battling through all of Andross’s army, you arrive at his doorstep ready to leave a flaming bag of justice on the porch. It’s a pretty hectic stage worthy of being the final level. Fly through the dark, green and brown world of Venom as you fight an increased number of enemies and dodge attacks that seem to come from the planet itself. There’s a mini-boss, which is the only one in the game, where you shoot a giant stone robot in a temple. It’s really cool. I’ve always loved that temple area. It’s very different from anything in the game and it sparked my imagination as a kid as to what else could be going on in Venom. Maybe there’s an entire civilization that worships Andross as a god.
The boss is Andross, the giant floating… thing behind all this mess. I don’t know what he’s supposed to be. He’s a giant floating monkey head with floating hands. You fight him in a swirling green void in the center of the planet, which always confused me. Is he a scientist? A space wizard? A god? Who knows, but you shoot him until he explodes and reveals a massive robot head! He explodes, you escape and the day is saved.
Or is it?
Medal Difficulty: Don’t bother. You can get the medal by completing Venom 2. If you want a challenge, give this one a try. While you’re at it, try playing through the game with one hand while reciting the lyrics to Weird Al’s Hardware Store. No one’s going to reward you for it, but hey, you can do it.
Fun Fact: Andross has an attack where he sucks up your ship and chews it. If you shoot a bomb at him while he’s doing it, he’ll swallow the bomb and it will explode in his mouth.
Venom 2
A rematch against Star Wolf. You took down their original ships, so they’re back with improved crafts and mechanical parts, since they were maimed in the fiery crash you caused. That is if you go to Venom 2 after Fortuna. If not, they just show up with new ships and a grudge against you for no reason. They went off and got themselves in trouble and now they’re blaming you. It’s a great rematch, even if they dodge a bit too much.
Andross is back. This time, after you blow him up, he reveals that he was a giant floating brain. Shoot his creepy eyeballs and then blow up his hippocampus to free the Lylat system.
Medal Difficulty: Trivial*. It’s technically trivial. Shoot them down like you would in Fortuna, and that’s it. The problem here lies with your buddies. There’s a considerable chance of one of them getting shot down. Most of the time it’s Star Wolf’s fault. Most of the time. Okay, 9 times out of 10 I’m the one shooting them down. It’s an accident, and by this point in the game everyone’s on their last leg.
Fun Fact: According to the Star Fox wiki, Andross was a regular, mortal monkey and used science to turn himself into a giant floating brain.
After getting every medal, you’re rewarded with Expert mode. It’s supposed to make the game harder. There are more enemies, they shoot more often, and the most noticeable change: your ship loses a wing if it touches terrain just once, which means no more hyper laser.
I said it’s “supposed” to make the game harder, since it’s not all that difficult. There are some stages, like Venom 1 and Area 6 that get kind of hairy, but they were already on the tougher end of the scale. Additional enemies means three or four more in some groups, and they don’t do much. I wish it were tougher. Star Fox is a lot of things, but tough isn’t one of them.
Graphics
Trying to discuss the graphics of a Nintendo 64 game 30 years after its release seems like a pointless task. I could just say it looks like garbage and be done with it, because modern games look better, obviously. Look at any Unreal Engine 5 game and you’ll be amazed at how far we’ve come.
Star Fox 64 looks nice. It suffers from the same problems as a lot of other N64 games, mainly the muddy textures and the slowdown. The slowdown is a bit much in some areas. The game runs at a suggested 30 frames per second, with the actual frame rate being closer to 20. The recompile fixes this, but we here at Load Last Save are good little boys and girls, and we don’t emulate. We follow the rules, even if a game hasn’t been sold in a lifetime.
There aren’t any glaring issues with clarity, which is my most important criteria. As long as I can tell what’s on screen, we’re good, and Star Fox manages to convey information well. Draw distance isn’t a problem. Things pop into view when they’re supposed to and you have enough time to react to things as they happen. Obstacles are always clearly marked, hitboxes are accurate to their model and you can tell what is a mission objective and what isn’t. The only exception to this are the bonus boxes in Sector Z that blend into the background and are hard to spot.
The game has solid art direction. Each stage looks different and keeps to its theme well. With a quick look you can tell the difference between the levels, even the ones that look similar. Every nebula stage takes place in space, but their background color and enemy design distinguishes them. Sector Y is green with a lot of dark, metallic enemies and giant ships. Area 6 looks similar, with Venom lurking in the background and a huge space fleet in the foreground, but the enemies and set pieces set them apart. Even less visually interesting stages like Fortuna and Katina, which are just wide, open fields with a structure in the middle, manage to stand out thanks to their color palettes. Fortuna looks cold with its blue and white snow and ice, while Katina is brown to signify it takes place somewhere brown. Look, I really don’t know what Katina is going for. Not every stage is a winner.
My personal favorites, in terms of aesthetics, are Titania, Venom and Solar. I called Solar the low point of the game, but it’s still a great looking stage. Its fiery red color scheme and shifting magma really help sell it as a burning inferno and a real threat. Titania’s on the list because I like desert stages, and Venom looks evil and intimidating, with its dark green palette, spikes and the weird temple. It’s a great final stage.
I have to mention the Arwings. Their design is fantastic. The silhouette is sleek, it reads perfectly from every angle, and it uses the N64’s low polygon count to its advantage. The gray and blue color palette makes it stand out in every area, no matter the background.
Overall, it looks good even if it shows its age. It doesn’t run as smoothly as something like F-Zero X, but it’s not a foggy mess like some of the other games on the system.
Sound
The game’s soundscape is arguably the most memorable part about it. Its character’s constant yapping gets stuck in your brain, as demonstrated in the stages section. Each voice line is delivered with expert acting, it’s superb. Listen to the uncompressed voice lines if you don’t believe me.
The soundtrack is great and fits the action perfectly. It switches between being understated and grandiose with ease. It goes for a militaristic feel, with strong, snare-based percussion that makes each stage theme feel like a march. The constant horn samples add a bombastic grandness, while strings and synths provide the melodies and give them some sci-fi texture. A very unique and memorable score.
The general sound design is fantastic, as well. The laser sound is one of the most satisfying shot sounds in gaming, which is a good thing since that’s what you’ll be doing 99% of the time. Picking up items sounds great. They make a very sharp, synthy sound, and every type of item makes a different chime. The explosions deserve a mention, too. When an enemy gets shot down, it makes a very crunchy sound when it crashes and explodes. The ones for the bosses are less crunchy, and a lot windier. There’s the initial explosion then a long, lingering whistle of the air rushing around. It’s very old school sci-fi anime, and it’s awesome.
Conclusion
Why do I keep coming back to Star Fox 64 after all these years? What makes this unimpressive, simple, 30-year old game worth playing in the modern day? I’d say it’s its simplicity. It doesn’t have any fancy bells and whistles, no massive story and no sections where you squeeze through a narrow opening while listening to characters yap. It’s a game that does one thing, and it does it well. You fly, you shoot, you go forward. Everything in the game is geared towards making that one singular experience fun. You know what you’re getting, and it’s good.
It takes the concept and iterates on it in very subtle ways that keep things varied from stage to stage, but don’t feel too weird or out of place. Flying in a linear stage, then going a level where you have full 360 degree movement, then to a tank feels natural and like it’s part of a cohesive whole. A lot of this is thanks to the game’s smooth, responsive controls, which translate well to every scenario.
The replayability is an important factor in its longevity. There are 16 levels, with 7 per run and a large combination of routes, with secret paths and characters that bring new interactions to the stages. It’s a lot of fun just playing through it to see what happens in each stage. Even a slight change in dialogue, or a new character showing up, is enough to spice up a stage and make you go “hey, that’s pretty neat”. It’s a great arcade game, in that respect.
Trying to talk about the game is hard for me, since I could be blinded by nostalgia. Star Fox 64, alongside Megaman X, are games that I have played religiously since I was a kid. It’s an integral part of my childhood. I can’t play through Aquas without thinking back to how scared it made me as a kid. Every time I play through Corneria and speedkill the regular boss, I remember that I learned that one time at a friend’s house, or how I didn’t believe that same friend when he told me he got to a secret fight against Andross where he turns into a giant brain. Trying to talk about this game in terms other than glowing praise is hard for me, but I think it still deserves it.
Does it have its flaws? Yes, but they’re very minor and negligible. Nit picks, really. The difficulty is one. It’s too easy. Even Expert Mode isn’t much of an issue, but it’s still fun. I didn’t find myself bored because of the lack of difficulty. Another, which is a bit more concerning for me, are the unskippable cutscenes between each level. I’ve seen them a billion times, and would like to skip them sometimes, even if the music that plays during them is incredibly triumphant and uplifting.
I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel and reach for bad things in this game, and all I could come up with were minor inconveniences. Maybe someone with 3,000 hours in the game has some very specific, technical gripes, but then again they spent 3,000 hours in the game, so it must have something going for it. I don’t give out scores, but I’d give Star Fox 64 a 10/10 if I did.
It’s a testament to the game’s longevity that after 30 years and God knows how many runs, I still enjoy playing it, and I highly recommend you play it, too.
