70%Nintendo DS

Not my favorite Star Fox game, but it's decent and Krystal joining Star Wolf is neat.

80%Nintendo DS

Underappreciated, but a solid game. Best Starfox after the SNES/N64 entries and Adventures.

How many free range fighter games do they make? Never really been a fan of Ace Combat, this is nice and simple to play, and if you like the Star Fox characters it really fleshed out that world.

90%Nintendo DS

Went for every ending in this game since I was enjoying it a lot! A lot of endings were good and wholesome and honestly felt like good real conclusions to a normal Star Fox story. Some endings had the energy of bad fanfiction, but like it gave me serotonin so it's all good lol. Helps I knew going in that all endings were non-canon as well. Controls were good, but they're definitely a learning curve to get used to them. I love how each ship functioned differently and each pilot had their own theme, especially Krystal's theme. The command portion of each mission was a fun twist on the usual formula to me. Had to think outside of the box to get through a few missions, especially early on. It's good that every character was just... themselves too. I hadn't heard the hottest things about this game going in, but I'm glad no one was out of place and it all felt genuine, as a fan of the series. In the end I was very pleasantly surprised with this game, to the point where I really just wanted to get every ending to play it more!

My only major complaint is that to me it was kinda hard to figure out from the get go how to get each ending. I used a guide to speed up the process, but going in raw and trying to find each ending just didn't seem like a good idea to me.

50%Emulated

Star Fox Command is essentially a second take on Star Fox 2, utilizing and expounding upon many of the same ideas and gameplay mechanics found in the previously unreleased SNES game. There are a lot of good ideas on display here: available for play are a plethora of pilots, each with their own ship designs, strengths, and weaknesses that introduce an extra level of tactical thinking to the strategy style gameplay, and the “choose your own adventure” style dialogue options leads to a total of nine different unlockable endings. Good ideas don’t make a good game however, and Command’s poor execution on nearly all fronts has cemented it as the worst game in the Star Fox series.

This is an early DS game and it certainly shows. Piloting your ship is controlled entirely by the DS stylus making it a constant struggle to keep your aiming reticle on target while maneuvering your ship. Boosting and braking are activated by double tapping the top and bottom of the screen respectively, but the timing required between taps is awfully specific for such an imprecise control scheme. Somersaults and U-turns are performed by tapping a respective button on the touch screen and the barrel roll maneuver is pulled off by swiping the screen left and right. All of these can pretty easily be activated accidentally just by steering your spacecraft. On top of this, the objectives are repetitive and amount to one of only three types of gameplay scenarios, those being an all-range mode mission to take out a specific enemy or enemy type, chasing a missile by following a beacon, or destroying a mothership which is a mixture of these two mechanics. These each take very little time to complete, sometimes mere seconds, and it feels like you are rushing through the game even when playing leisurely. Achieving the different endings will also see you playing through many of the same levels on top of the already dull and repetitive mission structure.

To round all of these problems off, there is a heavy focus on story and the scenarios are poorly conceived—none of the endings are canon and the branching plot lines feel artificial and arbitrary. Oftentimes, a character will express urgency in one action only for you to completely ignore them and hear no pushback to your decision, and both ROB-64 and the Great Fox will accompany you in whichever character’s story path you choose to follow with no explanation whatsoever, including Wolf’s story. This may keep the gameplay consistent, but it makes no sense in terms of narrative which to reiterate is a major focus for this title. Many before me have described the attempts at romance and drama between some of the characters as embarrassing and I won’t disagree.

Star Fox Command deserves its reputation. A better control scheme obviously would not fix the repetitive nature of the missions or the sloppy writing, but there is some fun to be had in Star Fox Command, even if you have to make an effort to find it. In a series where half of the releases are remakes of the original, this game took a risk and attempted to evolve what was established, even if it wasn’t all that successful in practice.

50%Nintendo DS

Didn't feel like Star Fox should have. I can still go back to Star Fox 64 and enjoy it. This? I can't. It's not a badly designed game, it's just not fun. I reserve scores below 50% for games that have glitches, errors, and problems.

70%Nintendo DS

Ever wondered what kind of furry drama Fox would get into if he got in a fight with Krystal due to his "you're a girl, so you should stay at home" attitude and they broke up? Me neither. It's a typical Star Fox game besides that.

60%Nintendo DS

Star Fox Command is a fun concept boggled down by some repetitive gameplay and poor writing. The switch to a more strategic approach with the gameplay, making you map out character movements across a map in a vein similar to Advance Wars, offers a fresh experience and allows certain characters to take center stage. It's cool seeing Falco or Slippy go off on their own mission, or achieve victory as Star Wolf for once. It's also simply a nice novelty to play as characters who have only been AI-controlled allies or rivals in the past. Unfortunately, little is done to elevate the idea of the game after the first few levels. Actual flight gameplay is entirely within arenas and centers around taking down certain enemies to fulfill objectives. There are only three types of missions to engage in besides when you take on a boss, two of which are pretty much the same thing but one has an extra step. There's not a lot of variety to the map design as well; they introduce the concept of fog early on but nothing else afterwards. The controls take some getting used to but are pretty simple once you become acquainted with the flow of the game.
64 is renowned for its branching paths; rewarding different approaches and making up for its short length with replay value. Command handles branching paths solely with narrative choices. You'll sometimes get to choose where characters go next or if you want to switch perspectives and follow a different character. It's fun to see different ways the plot can go or how different characters tie in to the grand scheme of things, but the plot is pretty dry and sometimes come across as fanfiction-like. It's not atrocious but not very engaging, although at times it can be comically goofy. Even if the execution isn't all there, branching paths is still a fun idea, and you're rewarded with one of nine different endings depending on where you go. They range from unintentionally funny to interesting concepts for future games, but overall are short and feel like summaries anyone could have written in the span of ten minutes. The game really could have benefited from a timeline of events to see what choices lead to what, something to give the game a bit more of a kick.
Overall Star Fox Command is one of the more blander games in the series but brings some neat ideas to the table, sadly not realizing the true potential in any of them. It's a good enough game for the DS. It's cool to see a lot of different Star Fox characters be used in the story and for them to try something new with the series, but it doesn't quite have that arcadey hook of previous games to keep you coming back.

50%Nintendo DS

The first few hours may seem like an answered prayer, where there is a Star Fox game that is actually Arwing combat-heavy. The controls perform fine and the game mechanics at their core are fun. However, the novelty wears off as the game does little to change up combat, or even provide interesting environments to play in.

Almost all levels are boxed in to a very small playing field (possibly due to the restrictions of the DS hardware) and missions begin to feel bland and uninspired. There are different enemy types and bosses that may require different approaches in combat, but there will be a point where eventually you'll notice that most of them behave the same way.

The story also tacks on the problem of having to watch yourself go through different alternate timelines, going through paths filled with forced story drama that doesn't necessarily work on characters that weren't fully realized in the first place. And nothing ultimately matters anyways as no single timeline is considered "canon" or the "true ending". Star Fox has never been one to put story first, so the fact that the developers are trying to make the player care for these characters through their conflicts with each other is confusing, to say the least.

In addition, the idea of replaying the same timeline (and cluster of missions) over only to hopefully unlock other branching paths is tiring. It's a trial-and-error method of figuring out what you should do in what order to unlock certain events, which lead to unlocking new planets and levels. It makes it mind-numbing guesswork as the game hardly gives you direction as to what you need to do to unlock said planets and levels.

Star Fox Command seems that it had a concept that was stretched too thin across different variants of the campaign. The game isn't unplayable, but it is certainly not an experience that justifies a playtime more than a couple of hours.

50%Nintendo DS

It's not terrible, but it's not a very good game. The controls are not very precise and are hard to use. Not as fun as I hoped.

80%No Platform Specified

It's a property with a shaky history, but it's one that I hold in high regard: the original Star Fox Super NES game is in my top ten games of all time because of the impact it had on me back in the day - it was, at the time, an amazing game to experience, both fun to watch and play. Its visuals don't hold up very well at all, but the gameplay can fight those battles in its place.

Star Fox Command might offer a new and different experience, but along with some key gameplay and presentation elements the feel of the classic SNES game is intact. The stylus controls might still need some work but the core idea is sound, with accuracy and precision that previous Star Fox games - and air combat titles in general - just never offered before.

It's at the very least a great start to the franchise. Bump up the difficulty, add some variety to the missions, bring back the forced-scrolling on-rails levels and the wingman-in-danger elements in a sequel and you'll have yourself the ultimate Star Fox adventure.