Star Fox Guard

Genre: Tower Defense / Shooting Gallery Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Star Fox Guard was released in 2016 on Wii U alongside Star Fox Zero as a pack-in bonus game. Its connection to the Star Fox franchise is somewhat tenuous – the gameplay has nothing in common with the mainline Star Fox games, and the Star Fox characters only appear here as cameos. Rather, in this game players take the role of a new assistant to Grippy Toad, the uncle of Star Fox crew’s Slippy Toad. You are tasked with defending lucrative resources from invading robots, with the gameplay working out to be a combination of Tower Defense and Shooting Gallery Game.

Each of the game’s levels takes place on a map that’s fairly typical of a Tower Defense game – you have a vulnerable core at the center that you need to protect, and it is surrounded by a maze of corridors that enemies must walk through to get to that core. Dotted around that map are various cameras watching over the area, and players can swap to any of the cameras to control it and use it to fire at enemies within range via stationary first-person view. It’s a fairly simple premise, yet the gameplay seems pretty unique – there’s not much I can think to compare the game to.

Having said that, there are issues, and unfortunately they come from trying to shoehorn in the use of the game’s Wii U Gamepad and its touchscreen controls. Players cannot quickly swap between the various cameras with a simple press of a button. Instead, they must locate the camera number on the Wii U Gamepad’s screen and press it using the touchscreen. This is a really cumbersome setup, and causes delays as you have to adjust to reading the screen you’re looking at as you look back and forth between the two. However, worse than this, the cameras’ numerical placement is often not something that will be automatic or natural for the player, meaning that even once you adjust to looking at the gamepad’s screen, you’ll sometimes still have to take a moment to search the screen to locate the right camera number. All while this is happening, enemies continue to infiltrate your base.

Even without the control issues, this is a pretty repetitive game – you get different locations and have to shoot different kinds of robots, but beyond that there’s not much in the way of variety in the gameplay.

In terms of presentation, Star Fox Guard looks decent, but isn’t anything special. Some of the visuals and interface here are re-used from Star Fox Zero, which looked great, but looked great as you were moving quickly over a landscape, not glued to one spot. As a result, everything here looks polished, but bland. It’s nothing terrible, but certainly nothing to write home about. Likewise, the music and voice acting here works well enough, but isn’t anything to write home about.

It’s hard to complain too much about Star Fox Guard when it’s included as a free extra with another game, and to its credit, it is a fairly unique and original game that’s worth playing just for its novelty alone. However, it seems like the novelty at times won out over utility here, making for a game that’s awkward to control and parse correctly, which can make for frustration, and that novelty doesn’t make up for the lack of variety here. On the whole, this is still an enjoyable experience worth trying out, but it feels like it would have greatly benefited from more time in development and playtesting, even if that meant releasing it as its own separate, unique game.

tl;dr – Star Fox Guard is an odd blend of Tower Defense and Shooting Gallery Game that’s fairly unique, having players swapping between camera turrets to fend off invading robots. Unfortunately, the novelty does at times interfere with the gameplay, as it’s not always intuitive how to switch to the camera turret you want, and the gameplay could do with a bit more variety. It’s still well worth trying out, but it definitely feels like it could have used more time in development.

Grade: C

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