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Following Rare's brilliant Dinosaur Planet was always going to be a difficult task, but it was often thought that Nintendo needed to take Star Fox back to it's on-rails, shoot-em-up roots to provide the GameCube with a good pick-up-and-play action title. However, seeing the games in action at E3 has produced quite a stir, since while Namco, under advice from Nintendo themselves, have brought back the flying and dogfighting aspects that made the old Star Fox games so good, they've turned the entire title into what can only be described as a frantic deathmatch.
Rather than being forced along a set path ala Lylat Wars on the N64, instead Star Fox 2 hits the other extreme giving you complete freedom in each of the levels. You're simply told what your mission objectives are, and are left to go about completing them as you see fit. Whether you choose to do this on-foot, utilising bazookas or the Landmaster tank, or in the air, taking to the skies with your trusty Arwing, is completely up to you. While this may lose the fantastic scripted events of the previous games (remember the train boss in Lylat Wars?!), it should certainly add replay value to the game as you try to complete the objectives in different ways.
Unfortunately, though, the version of Star Fox 2 shown at E3 was more shocking for reasons other than just its change in gameplay style. After the glorius, expansive yet highly detailed environments and realistically furry characters of Dinosaur Planet, Namco's version Star Fox was a little bit disappointing. While the scale of the levels and the amount of action going on makes up for this slightly, and playing in the Arwing where you can oversee entire cities looks quite nice, the on-foot sections were abound with low-detail buildings and blurry textures, which is not charactertistic of modern GameCube games at all. Other problems were also evident, such as jerky enemy movement that made targetting of ground troops pretty difficult, which all point to this being very early code.
However, despite its faults, the basic concept seems pretty sound. The ability to do whatever you want in each of the levels should be a lot of fun, and the cooperative multiplayer mode seems to be shaping up really well. We just hope that the title's current rough edges are given a good smoothing before it appears on our shelves in Spring next year. Meanwhile, check out this E3 trailer and see what you think!
Star Fox 2 E3 trailer (12.5 MB Quicktime)
Marc Hull
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