Star Fox Command takes the series into a new direction, but not far and not somewhere it should have gone.

Star Fox was a Super NES game that had a very love or hate quality. Armed with 3d graphics provided by the "Super FX" chip, Starfox's clunky vector graphics weren't very appealing. Those who looked past the basic shapes found a game that was fast, fluid, demanding, and a heck of a lot of fun. With the arrival of the Nintendo 64, Starfox got updated 3d textured graphics along with new gameplay mechanics, but the core was still the same. It was a rails shooter and flyer, demanding that the player not only fire at his enemies, but dodge through dangerous landscape as well. You could roll, boost, and manuever through asteroid fields to dangerous city-scapes. This in mind, it's hard to understand why Starfox Command basically threw away all these elements.

The basic gameplay style of Starfox Command is to eliminate a certain amount of enemies from a given map. There are a few different map types, all of which have you flying over land (or moons). The land itself is 3d but there is little to no reason to approach it, so it simply works as a backdrop and isn't something you have to worry about, except in the few city maps. However, even the city maps are sparse enough that you don't have to worry about it. Control is handled with the stylus. Quickly making a circle with the stylus will make your ship roll. A few buttons that you can click on will make you do a loop-de-loop or a 180 turn. Bombs are also dragged onto the map and launched using the stylus. Any other button will fire your guns. Holding down your gun button will let you lock on to one or more enemies and fire off a charged shot. Each different ship has a slightly different charge shot and some can lock on to more enemies than others. When looking at the control scheme as a whole, I really found that I didn't like it. Metroid Prime Hunters had a similar control scheme but as a first person shooter, I think it worked better because it just was controlling your viewpoint and not your actual ship movement. It also seemed to make my wrist hurt after 15 to 30 minutes (and I could unfortunately make the same complaint against MPH). Overall, this control scheme really strips out the manuevering that you could do (and were required to do) from the other games in the series. The missions themselves are practically identical, other than the city maps which at least make you worry about colliding with things. There also are enemy base missions, which involve, surpising, killing a few enemies on the map and then attacking the mothership. This attack is that you have fly through a flightpath marked with red rectangles and then do a roll as you hit the mothership. This gameplay mechanic is also repeated in missions where you have to catch up to an enemy missile and destroy it, although you have to shoot at the missile regularly while flying through the rectangle indicated flightpath.

The "command" in Star Fox Command comes from a "strategy" screen where you have a certain amount of turns to fly your ships and destroy all the enemy bases. You simply click and drag a path that you want your ships to fly. Any ship, missile, or base your ship touches on the way gives you the option for flying a mission. If a missile reaches the Great Fox (your mothership), you lose. If you haven't destroyed all the enemy bases and you run out of turns, you lose. You get more turns by destroying enemy bases. After finishing missions, you are shown story cutscenes as Fox meets up with his old crew of Slippy, Falco, Peppy, and his old love-interest Krystal. These stories are a bit humourous and do a good job of telling the story and putting some background into the characters. Each mission will have you flying with different characters.

I was disappointed with Star Fox Command for a few reasons. I didn't think it's strategy was deep enough, nor were it's missions interesting enough to keep me wanting to play. You get to pick different paths to go through the game during the cutscenes, and depending on the path you can unlock a good number of endings and characters. Personally, the short endings (which usually end with some sort of bad personal outcome for Fox) weren't enough to keep me playing. There also are deathmatch multiplayer modes that can be played on Nintendo's wi-fi service or locally amongst friends. For someone who bought a Nintendo 64 just so he could play the new Star Fox 64, this game was a major letdown and I can only hope that when Fox and friends make their way to the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo remembers what made this series a fan favorite and makes a game that honors that.