Star Fox 2 (Super Nintendo) Review

2017 proves to be a huge year for Nintendo. It was the year the company released the Nintendo Switch which turned out to be a smashing success in spite of the various patent lawsuits. Both The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey released to universal acclaim and huge sales. Even Samus got some love with Metroid: Samus Returns, an official remake that the fans have been clamouring for since the original game got remade on Gameboy Advance. When the Super Nintendo Classic Edition was announced to include Star Fox 2, it was another big moment for the Japanese game company's history. This was one of the earliest examples of a game going through development hell despite the fact the game itself was completed... allegedly.

Here is the thing with Star Fox 2 and its predecessor: they have not aged well at all. The Super Nintendo was a console that was just not built to render 3D graphics at all. In the 1990s when these games were made, it was a novelty to see 3D polygons at all in a video game. Even games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D which advertised themselves as 3D action games were not actually displaying any 3D graphics at all but were just ray-casting 2D assets which looked 3D. The FX chip used in Star Fox 2 was an expensive little piece of hardware that overclocked the console's capabilities to just render the scant few polygons to make the in-game graphics. This low-poly and low-detailed aesthetic does manage to work for the art style thankfully and would be forgivable since these are the earliest examples of Nintendo experimenting with polygonal visuals. What does not work is the unbearable choppiness and low frame rate.

Anyone who has played Star Fox Command will feel right at home because Star Fox 2 is its proof of concept. After selecting two fighter pilots, a map is presented and there are enemy ships and missiles shown en route towards Corneria, the friendly HQ. The object is to protect Corneria from taking too much damage while also intercepting enemy ships or sending the secondary fighter to an enemy satellite. When doing the action portions, most of the time it is done in a first-person view in all-range mode. Other times player-controlled Arwings will transform into their walker-mode as seen in Star Fox Zero. These third-person walker sections play out more or less like traditional rail-shooter sections that culminate in a boss battle in an open room and last a few minutes. This ebb and flow with the strategy and managing the protection of Corneria is the strength of Star Fox 2 and would make the experience worthwhile if the core-action gameplay wasn't an eye-straining choppy mess.

Star Fox 2 runs just barely around ten frames per second. It would be naïve to demand that it could be any smoother since the Super Nintendo was never really meant to render any 3D graphics at all. Fact of the matter is that Star Fox 2 was too ahead of its time and does not hold up the way something like F-Zero or Super Mario Kart which did not need an extra chip installed in their cartridges. Bearing in mind the 1990s did not have many games with polygons and this was selling itself purely on this gimmick. Much like Star Fox 64, this one attempts an all-range mode, but is so much choppier. It is playable, but just barely. It is a huge shame, too, because the pixel art and the overall design of the low-poly ships and style are actually very appealing.