Star Fox Zero (Wii U)
By: Nintendo
THE original Star Fox, powered by the wizardry of Nintendo's Super FX chip, was a technical benchmark back in 1993, bringing arcade-quality 3D space battles to your cathode ray. Star Wars with roadkill, the game featured a ragtag band of varmints in angular spaceships, targeting lasers and lobbing bombs at waves of bogeys.
The follow-up, Star Fox 64, perfected the formula, with classic wingman banter and more dogfights than a south Armagh barn. Nintendo has since struggled to improve on the N64 behemoth, with Star Fox Adventures slapping the brand onto a Zelda clone, Assault shoe-horning plodding on-foot blasting and Command dabbling in turn-based strategy.
The latest, Star Fox Zero, exhumes the N64 classic, brushing off the maggots and draping it in modern bells and whistles. Fans of the original will feel right at home as Fox and his anthropomorphic wingmen, Slippy, Peppy and Falco, barrel-roll through obstacle course levels littered with archways and towers.
Slippy is still useless, Falco remains a belligerent git while the game even preserves the badly digitised "good luck" sample from the original, throbbing the nostalgia gland enormously.
While gameplay apes the N64 classic, your Arwing ship can now transform into the Landmaster tank, drone-like Gyrowing and tromp through levels as a bipedal chicken walker (an idea pilfered from the scrapped Star Fox 2).
A short-lived treasure that'll take around six hours to master, Zero's pick-up-and-play design makes it ideal for short blasts. Co-developed by Platinum, the game is suitably heavy on replayability, with players actively encouraged to stick around and seek out hidden worlds.
In an insane move, however, Zero chooses to spotlight the Wii U's second-screen tech, with the Gamepad hosting cockpit view (and gyroscopic aiming duties) while the TV shows your ship from behind. Not only is constant recalibration required, waving Nintendo's hefty Gamepad around requires the most muscular of wrists.
If I wanted to move more than necessary I wouldn't be a fan of videogames (indeed, games have rendered me unable to move more than necessary) and unlike Splatoon, there's no traditional twin-stick option.
Yet while the cumbersome scheme seems counter-intuitive to begin with, a few hours of brain remapping will have most players barrel-rolling like Donkey Kong.
Back when a market-dominating Nintendo used to set graphical milestones instead of control gimmicks, Star Fox's intergalactic ballet was without peer, and with no drawn-out back-stories, cut-scenes or gung-ho machismo, there's a purity to Zero's blasting.
Spackled in nostalgic nods, Zero is to Star Fox 64 what The Force Awakens is to A New Hope – a reskin of the original that hits the same highs, even if they're overly familiar by now. A fly down memory lane, then, even if the Draconian control scheme hardly welcome fans with open wings.
