Star Fox Adventures Review

Star Fox Adventures is a Gamecube exclusive title and it's the first Star Fox in the series to break away from what we're used to. This title shared mixed reactions because of that. This game was originally going to be named Dinosaur Planet and released for the N64 but they released it was very similar to Star Fox and retitled it and released it for the Gamecube after tweaking it a bit. The wikipedia has a cool picture of what the game art was intended to look like when it was still titled Dinosaur Planet.

 

Story 6/10
Soundtrack 10/10
Graphics 10/10
Gameplay 7/10
Controls 9/10
Overall 7.5/10

 

Story 6/10

The game follows Fox McCloud as he fights to save Dinosaur Planet from General Scales and Andross, the main villan of the Star Fox series. The game actually starts out with you playing Krystal, a female fox that looks similar to Star Fox. The game quickly changes perspectives though as she imprisons herself in the Krazoa Palace and loses her staff, which Fox picks up and it becomes his main weapon of the game. The whole game revolves around collecting 4 spell stones and bring them back to Dinosaur Planet and bringing all 6 Krazoa Spirits back to Krazoa Palace.

There's really nothing amazing about the story if you ask me, I don't think it was anything to Oooh or Aaaah about. Then again I primarily picked up the game because I was looking for an action adventure game.

Soundtrack 10/10

This is by far the best part of Star Fox Adventures if you ask me. The soundtrack to this game is really something awesome! The Thorntail Hollow theme is really kick ass. I absolutely love it! You'll notice my play time for Star Fox Adventures is something crazy like 25hrs if you check my completion page. The game really can be beaten in about 8 - 12hrs but I spent so much time sitting around in Thorntail Hollow working on guides for the game listening to the songs that my playtime piled up!

Graphics 10/10

The graphics for this game are really beautiful. The game is pretty short and the areas aren't too big so you can really tell they took their time developing each one. You can see a lot of the hairs on star fox, each blade of grass.. I know, I know, we're used to all this shit these days but back then this was like some mind blowing shit man!! So, needless to say as you could expect the graphics for this game get a solid 10/10.

Gameplay 7/10

Well, I found the gameplay for Star Fox Adventures to be a little repetative and while it is an adventure I wouldn't really call it an action adventure. This game is pretty much just puzzle after puzzle with a few older Star Fox elements thrown in as a palate cleanser between the puzzles. One really cool part about this game is there is an ingame helper when you hit start, you can talk to your commrades and access different menus and one of them will give you hints on what to do if you're stuck. Despite the game being almost entirely puzzles this helps alleviate a lot of the frustration you may encounter.

How the game actually plays (movement system, combat system) is a lot like Zelda. You'll notice the jumping is exactly like it in the sense that when you get near the edge of a cliff you'll either jump off or fall off and grab the edge. You can't actually jump in the game, the game jumps for you.

Controls 9/10

The controls for this game are quite fitting and work pretty well if you ask me. I felt comfortable with them for the entire game. The only complaint I can think of that I wish the game improved on was the C stick menu that they have. It can be pretty annoying since there is only 1 hot slot for it and cycling through the menu when you need something in the heat of battle can be really frustrating. One thing I will say though is luckily nothing in this game is inverted!!

Overall 7.5/10

This is one of the games I played growing up as a kid but I don't really remember that much about it. In fact, I remembered barely anything when I played it again recently. I did enjoy it but found that it started to get really repetative towards the end and I kind of had to force myself to beat it by the time I got the last spell stone. The main thing I really disliked about this game is I felt the puzzles were just piled ontop of each other. Each "dungeon" was like 4 or 5 rooms with 3 or 4 puzzles per room and that was really bland.