When Star Fox Adventures originally released back in 2002, I skipped out. If you read my review on Star Fox, this might surprise you, given how much I love the series. But Adventures wasn’t really a Star Fox game, it was the Rare N64 game, Dinosaur Planet. It got an awkward Star Fox coat of paint, some poorly executed Arwing sections, and was dumped into the Star Fox universe, thanks to Nintendo leadership.

I was pretty annoyed by that back then, so I decided to pass on it. Eventually, I grabbed a used copy on the cheap, but despite my intention to play through it, I bounced off of it immediately. At this point in my life, I couldn’t tell you why that was, but after playing through the whole game, I’m guessing younger me sensed what a mess this game really was.

If you take a look at the reviews for the game from the time, I’d say they’re pretty forgiving - in some cases, they’re absolutely glowing. I suspect this is due to the game’s graphics, which hold up surprisingly well. I played the game in handheld mode on my Switch 2 via Nintendo Online, in widescreen, and I often would forget just how old the game was because the graphical fidelity was so good.

Funny enough though, from a gameplay perspective, Star Fox Adventures still feels like the N64 game it started life as. For instance, many of the game’s functions are placed on the right C-stick (now the right analog stick). This absolutely feels like a holdover from the N64 C-Buttons, as the primary intent is to navigate a set of real-time menus to activate staff powers or issue commands.

With the right stick dedicated to menu inputs, you totally lose control of the camera, which is quite unpleasant. You’re forced to continuously tap the left shoulder button to center the camera behind Fox, which never feels intuitive or appropriate. Back when it was released, this was probably a lot less troublesome than it is now, but at this point, it just feels unintuitive in the worst way.

This wonkiness is endemic to the entire experience. While the game clearly sought to emulate the gold standard at the time, Ocarina of Time, it falls woefully short of that goal. At first glance, it’s hard to suss out exactly what feels off about the experience, as it seems to feature all of the trappings and more from the Zelda series. But as the game opens up, it becomes more and more obvious.

Despite incrementally unlocking new power-ups that open up new sections of the game, it still ends up feeling incredibly linear, rather than a world you’re exploring somewhat blindly. After each major objective you complete, you’re given pretty exact instructions on where to go next. Within the areas, you certainly have some more freedom to explore and discover, but that’s actually where the problems start to set in.

While the game is happy to direct you on exactly where to go at the macro level, on the micro level, they are constantly assuming you understand the task at hand. A room I encountered comes to mind where there were a few statues with buttons near them that needed to be shot. When I arrived in the room, I apparently had missed a step and the timer that should’ve activated did not, but when I shot the buttons, they would turn green for a limited time and I thought I needed to activate all 4 buttons before the first went out.

This was not the case. As it turns out, when I successfully activated the room based on another action, there was a platform spinning in the middle of the room and shooting the buttons would cause the statues to bend forward and spray cool air (or water, not sure) on the flames and you needed to douse them all in the given time limit.

These types of weird, esoteric situations came up constantly and never felt intuitive or obvious. You do learn some of the game’s design language over time, but to put it bluntly, the design was poorly executed. Other challenges were actively maddening to complete.

Since shooting buttons is something the game loves to have you do, this section required stopping fire being sprayed by statues by shooting buttons on the wall. A transport device was moving an explosive barrel and if you didn’t stop the fire in time, it’d blow up and you’d need to start over. Here’s the catch - controlling the ability to shoot a projectile works so bad, I think it’ll give me nightmares for years to come.

You use the right stick to aim, but you’re constantly fighting it from springing back to the center of the screen. Also, the smallest of movements sends the reticle careening across the screen. Thus, trying to hit three buttons in a timely manner without messing up is way harder than it seems.

Star Fox Adventures also LOVES button mashing. There are a number of challenges in the game that require the hardest mashing I’ve done in years. If you don’t mash to perfection, you’ll be starting over again. Some of the challenges had me mashing for almost a minute straight as hard and fast as I could. I think it’s something I’m actually good at doing, but even this was giving me trouble.

Then there are the ridiculous difficulty spikes where you need to shoot waves of enemies down over a ridiculous span of time without dying. I had to resort to making save states just to get through some of them because starting over at the beginning meant I wasn’t getting through it. You have to be too perfect, take practically no damage, all while fighting some of the worst shooting controls imaginable - in a Star Fox game.

Amazingly, the game’s side kick character, Tricky, is probably the least annoying part of the game, despite requiring constant babysitting. You often have to give him commands to perform certain actions, and quite frequently, those are done while you’re on a timer. Like most support characters that follow you around… he doesn’t do a great job of tagging along.

This creates its own frustration, but it’s further exacerbated by the fact that Tricky can only perform five actions before you must feed him mushrooms. As a result, you need to literally babysit his health meter throughout the game, collecting mushrooms when you find them and feeding him frequently (all done via the terrible right stick menu).

Fox also needs to refill his action meter all the time by picking up gems in the overworld - another needlessly tedious task. Just like running around everywhere mandatorily. There’s no fast travel on Dinosaur Planet, you must go everywhere on foot. I can’t begin to tell you how much time I wasted hoofing it around the world. This lack of respect for your time also extends to cutscenes, which are unskippable, as well as character interactions, which are so slow, especially the shopkeeper.

When you do travel to other spots in the game, you will take your Arwing, but these sections don’t even begin to feel like real Star Fox. It feels like a shallow imitation that has all of the component parts, but none of the quality that the mainline games feature.

I wish I could name even one redeeming quality of this game outside of the graphics, but there’s just nothing. It’s so bereft of fun, playing the whole thing just felt like a chore. Eventually I found myself pushing to the end just so I could write this review and dump on the game, it’s that bad.

Between the poor controls, poor world construction, poor gameplay challenges, poor direction, and the cringeworthy voice acting and dialog, this game is one of the biggest duds I’ve played from Rare and Nintendo. It’s like they set out to make the worst possible combination of the original Dinosaur Planet and Star Fox, because I don’t know how you make something worse than this. Even saying that, I still feel like I didn’t explain everything about the game that I hated, but I just have to stop somewhere because I could rant for hours about this one. If you were considering playing (or replaying) this game on Nintendo Switch Online, just don’t. You’ll thank me later, I promise.