Star Fox Review: A Beautiful $49.99 Coat of Paint on a 30-Year-Old Game

Star Fox on Nintendo Switch 2 marks the franchise’s 2nd official remake of Lylat Wars in 15 years. The previous Nintendo 3DS version shipped back in 2011. The IP has been gathering dust for nearly 10 years since Star Fox Zero flopped on the Wii U in 2016. Fox McCloud‘s return banks heavily on the Mario Galaxy Movie that’s crushing it at the box office in 2026. The renewed buzz around classic Nintendo 64 IPs gives this revival a perfect launch window. Nintendo hands the keys to Velan Studios, the American studio behind Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit and the short-lived Knockout City.

The result is a remake that plays it too safe, faithfully ripping Lylat Wars‘ 1997 blueprint without modernizing its foundations. Velan Studios chose a heartfelt tribute over real reinvention. That puts the game squarely against modern competitors like Capcom‘s Resident Evil remakes, which dare to overhaul their systems wholesale. At $59.99 retail, the ask is steep for a remake that seems scared of touching its own source material.

The faithfulness gamble backfires on Velan Studios at the exact moment when the industry expects real creative bravery. The most accomplished modern remakes don’t just polish a 30-year-old game. They reimagine its structure, pacing, and narrative depth from the ground up. PAL territories, where the game shipped as Lylat Wars back in the day, are taking this miss especially hard. Velan Studios didn’t take the risks the franchise deserved at the dawn of a new gaming era.

The campaign wraps up in 90 minutes to 3 hours depending on which path you take. The branching system unlocks alternate routes based on hidden objectives completed during each mission. 7 different biomes stretch across Corneria, Fichina, Zoness, Solar, Sector Y, and other planets across the Lylat System. Replayability hangs entirely on the scoring chase to land the gold medal on every stage.

The progression system carries a major flaw inherited from the 1997 original. To land the medal on a specific stage, you have to restart the entire campaign from the top and take all the right branches again. Back in the day, that constraint made perfect sense to pad out the runtime of a 4 MB cartridge game. In 2026, keeping that mechanic in a full-price remake is flat-out unacceptable. Velan Studios brought zero improvements on this front. It’s a complete absence of modern quality of life, which stings hard against today’s standards.

The AI running Falco, Peppy, and Slippy hasn’t seen a single upgrade since 1997. Your wingmates spam help requests without ever clearing enemies themselves, especially during All-Range sequences in open zones. Worse still, they can get themselves killed and lock you out of the mission-end medal even when they bring nothing to the table. That structural failure is unacceptable in a remake priced at $59.99 in 2026.

Challenge Mode stacks 6 standard challenges and 6 expert challenges onto every campaign stage. These side objectives push you to track environmental cues or highlight specific enemies and set pieces. On paper, the mode promises to stretch the runtime of a thin game. In practice, the letdown is total.

The challenges land inconsistent and forgettable across plenty of stages. Some push toward the impossible without ever clearly defining the action window for the player. Others get completed during the regular campaign but don’t credit back automatically in Challenge Mode. Players have to replay stages just to validate challenges they already pulled off, for no structural reason.

Challenge Mode literally lifts the same campaign missions without introducing a single structural shake-up. No new stages, no new environments, no exclusive mechanics. It’s not a real standalone mode but a layer of fake replayability dropped on top of existing content. Challenge Mode pads the runtime without ever delivering real value, and it perfectly sums up the remake’s overall lack of ambition.

The remake’s headline local multiplayer feature is the 2-player co-op mode. Each player grabs a Joy-Con 2 and shares a single Arwing. One player takes the pilot seat and steers the ship, the other plays gunner and aims at enemies using the Joy-Con 2 mouse mode. The concept calls back to 80s arcade sessions where 2 players shared one cabinet.

In practice, sharing the same Arwing creates more friction than it removes. The coordination between pilot and gunner demands constant communication and breaks the original gameplay flow. No split-screen option ships with the game to let each player fly their own ship. That omission stings even harder given that Switch 2 has all the graphical horsepower needed to run 2 Arwings on screen at once.

The Joy-Con 2 mouse mode automatically flips you to cockpit view the moment you set the Joy-Con on a table. That auto-transition tanks visibility and yanks you out of the experience. Players used to the classic chase camera get trapped in a cockpit view that adds nothing meaningful. It’s a half-baked feature that should have been optional instead of triggered by the simple act of placing a Joy-Con down.

Battle Mode pits 2 teams of 4 players against each other, Team Star Fox against Team Star Wolf, online or local. 3 maps ship with the launch package. A Corneria-inspired map runs a zone control objective. A Fichina map tasks players with grabbing energy crystals out of falling meteorites. A Sector Y map has players hauling cargo back to base. Each map runs its own objective and its own tactical mechanics.

The multiplayer experience holds up well on the sensation front. The open zones unlock real tactical openings for piloting the Arwing and tapping power-ups like teleport and missiles. The pace runs sharp and the 4-vs-4 dogfights deliver moments that match the franchise’s full potential when players really commit.

The real problem is the glaring lack of content. Only 3 maps for an entire multiplayer mode is a major letdown in 2026. Nintendo and Velan Studios could have mined the franchise’s rich back catalog for maps based on Aquas, Solar, or Venom. The rotation cycles back to the same map fast. Online matches don’t even let players vote on the next map.

Star Fox is hands-down one of the best-looking games on Switch 2 right now. Velan’s proprietary VIPER engine elevates every planet with stunning lighting, smoke effects, and silky-smooth performance. Corneria comes fully reimagined as a chaotic battlefield with flames and rubble. Fichina packs snowflakes that stick to the camera before melting away. The whole package runs at 60 FPS locked in 1440p docked.

The orchestral score with John Williams-style flourishes hits at the highest level. The franchise’s iconic themes come back fully reorchestrated with scale and emotional weight. The English voice cast is top-shelf, with Nintendo clearly putting real money behind a proper professional production. Brand-new cutscenes between every mission deliver an immersive layer the 1997 game never had. They still can’t fully cover for the remake’s overall narrative thinness.

The character redesigns split opinions but ultimately win out. Fox McCloud sports a more realistic look pulled from the original SNES box puppet artwork. Falco packs a sharper-eyed look, Peppy reads older, and Slippy ramps up his expressive range. The more mature art direction lines up neatly with the Mario Galaxy Movie. The tech is rock-solid and that’s essentially what stops this remake from sinking outright.

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