Wild Blue Skies

It's a Starfox 64 clone through and through, with objectively worse controls and an overall lack of personality. It lifts the story and lines straight from SF64. Even the stages and level chains are suspiciously too close to the source to call it its own thing. I'd rather play Starfox Zero than this title and that had the uniquely bad Wii U controls. Also, why is the squad called the "Blue Bombers" they pilot neither blue aircraft nor bombers. I'd best describe their Wind Cutters as Attack aircraft. It's consistent with an East Asian clone of a successful title that tries to capture some segment of the existing market through nostalgia. What the devs failed to realize is that Star Fox fans don't want another Star Fox 64 remake, we want something, anything that expands on the genere. Save yourself the $15 there are other On-Rails shooters that are much better experiences with more character and story than this one. Also why is there no frame rate limiter built in? You can run this title on a potato but my 7900XTX pulls 1000 fps and dumps heat like we are at risk of global freezing.

Let me preface this review by saying: If you are a Highscore Hunter that doesn't mind that the game will make you learn the stages inside-out, you might be more okay with this game. As a casual experience however, this will just kinda frustrate & infuriate. And to adress the big anthropomorphized elephant in the room: Yes, this game is so heavily inspired by Star Fox 64, it takes some of its concepts - some of them even wholesale. That's not necessarily a bad thing, a lot of games are inspried to various degrees from others after all, but I think Wild Blue Skies would've fared better if it had stuck to the Star Fox formula even more, because the times it deviates are actually some of its worst aspects Some examples of this: - Just like Star Fox, you have two Blaster upgrades, but unlike its big brother where the Upgrades stick with you until you lose one of your wings, it is incredibly easy to lose them just by taking hits - and the game is a little opaque on how much damage you can actually take before you'll be affected. And the regular Blaster just kinda... sucks. Having to fall back on it during a bossfight can turn a 30 second steamroll into a 3 minute slugfest. This also makes the mid-mission checkpoints very unappealing since you'll respawn with the default Blaster and the Upgrades are sprinkled across the levels pretty rarely - Similar to the Blaster upgrades, the healing rings also feel kinda scarce and don't really heal you for all that much, given how uncommon they are. - You have a boost and a brake. While the former works as you'd expect, the brake actually stalls your plane and allows you to take tight turns - this works great in the open field missions to turn around quickly (especially since looping & turn maneuvers are absent from this game), but also makes the brake unusable in normal missions since it actually makes it harder to maneuver around obstacles - Your allies attract trouble in the open field missions - but they also don't call for backup. They'll just quietly suffer enemy fire until they have to retire. I wonder if this was born out of the Internet memeing Star Fox' Slippy's helplessness to death, but the distress calls actually serve a purpose! And then there's even more, smaller nitpicks that just add up: - The characters or the story are basically nonexistant. They're missing all of the connections to their world that made the Star Fox Squad so endearing. You can just barely make out the Wild Blue Skies' character archetypes by the way they talk, but that's about as deep as these characters get. - Just from a visual perspective, it's hard to see what the damage radius of your Smart Bombs actually is - Your ship takes up so much screen real estate it can actually make it hard to see oncoming enemy fire, especially since the game is also overwhelmingly colourful in some areas Is Wild Blue Skies bad? No, not really. The visual design of the stages is great and colourful, even if it is a little basic. The voice acting is fine to good, with the bosses appropriately hamming it up. Some of the game can even be fixed with post-launch support, but overall I feel like Wild Blue Skies really banked on being a nostalgia trip for Star Fox fans looking for a challenge and got caught off-guard by its actual inspriation coming back with a stellar remake earlier this year, making the ideas they've taken and the ideas they've changed that much more obvious. If anything, Wild Blue Skies made me appreciate the tight design of its predecessor even more

The only thing "worth saving" about this game is your money. Look, let's be real here: everyone wants to compare Wild Blue Skies to Star Fox 64, and for good reason: it actively does everything it can to remind you of its pedigree, and references the game very often in myriad ways. But it's unfair to compare a game to one of the all-time greats, because that's a losing battle. However, Star Fox 64 is 30 years old, and Wild Blue Skies seems to have not learned anything from its game design. The blaster feels bad. The lock-on charge shot is fine but lacks punch. The boost feels fine, and the side-to-side movement on the roll is actually kinda neat. Forcing you to pick between safely dodging and firing your blaster is a good choice for moment-to-moment gameplay, but it doesn't really pay any dividends. The brake sucks. Not only do you basically never need to use it, you lose altitude because your sci-fi planes apparently still abide by regular flight physics? It feels bad to use any time you do try to use it, so if you do try to play Wild Blue Skies, you can safely avoid the left trigger. Here's a shorter list of Pros and Cons: Pros: - The art direction is very nice (minus the way enemies and bosses flash white, which hurts my eyes) - I like the Cloudcutter ship designs - The animated intro is neat Cons: - No Loop or U-turn makes the game feel very boring to play. With no fun tricks to pull off, it just feels like something is missing from the game-- and this is so evident that hitting the edge of a free-flight zone doesn't turn you back into the arena! You just sort of rub against an invisible wall. - The music is basically only there so there's no dead silent moments. I can't think of a single track that I heard that left any impression. - The "writing" in the game is boring as all hell. The characters have no discernible personality and the pre- and post-mission dialogue is canned and does nothing to add color to the game. - The bosses are all, unfortunately, very lame. They mostly are just bullet sponges with very little to see in terms of combat, which is what makes it more annoying at how much time they take up. - Speaking of time, the stages are short! Really short! There's nothing to really sink your teeth into, and every set piece is over and gone before you get to see anything interesting with them. - The final boss is just Andross (phase 1) from Star Fox 64 but with a mouth laser this time. The second phase is basically the first phase but with a new bullet to dodge. - The characters have basically no attachment to the events of the game - THE OPENING CUTSCENE THAT EXPLAINS THE GAME IS UNSKIPPABLE??? - Whenever you unlock the conditions for a new path, you are never awarded with a new boss fight, which is kind of sad. I feel bad that I have to come down so hard on a $15 game because it's evident that the team really cared about this project, but unfortunately it misses the mark so much that I can't in any way recommend this game to anyone. There's really, genuinely, no sauce to this game that I can't find elsewhere or better. It is so dead set on reminding you of Star Fox 64 that it doesn't remember to set itself apart. I don't know a damn thing about Bowie, Chuck, Thorne, or Roe-- except that Chuck used to fly with one member of this game's Star Wolf. I was really excited for this game, but it just isn't worth your time. There's a lot of ways this game lets me down, and if you're playing this game because you like games like Star Fox 64, I think you're going to want to look to bluer skies.

I didn't think I'd be leaving a review so quickly, but I've played the demo previously and now I've seen the rough edges and unrefined aspects of a clearly still in-development game make it through to the full thing without change, and I'm incredibly disappointed. I'm an OG StarFox fan from all the way back in the SNES days, and I've been appaled at how Nintendo has treated the franchise after the N64, with lackluster games and repeated remakes and ignoring what people have actually asked for. So I was fully onboard for a "Fine, we'll do it ourselves" fan-developed homage game released commercially. But this? It ain't it. First off, it's less an homage and more of a "legally-distinct" clone of StarFox 64. Same plot, similar layouts, even some of the lines are identical (well, swap out "Andross" for "Grimclaw.") It looks and feels like a SF64 remake by an East Asian mobile game developer. SF64 has been remade enough. We don't need another, even worse version. And it's worse because while they copied pretty much everything else, they left out crucial parts. No U-turns or loops. No upgrading shields. A braking system that makes sense and isn't frustrating (being able to sharply turn while almost standing still is unique, but you literally LOSE ALTITUDE and start plummeting to the ground when you start braking.) A weapon upgrade system that isn't frustrating because you lose them if an enemy randomly farts on you too hard. Multiple camera views you can switch between. It's like they copied a recipe but left out a third of the ingredients. The gameplay keeps frustrating you. Things like cannon fodder enemies that are tanky AF and even if you hit the brakes to maximize time on target they can still just shrug off your damage and fly by by you. Meanwhile the incoming damage is ridiculously large. One of those same small enemies can shoot you from behind (which you won't even see coming most of the time) and 15% of your shields are gone instantly. And you barely get any replenished between stages. Your teammates will more often than not fail to alert you that they're in trouble and you find out because they say they're bailing. When an alternate path comes up good luck actually going down it, it's like the game intentionally ignores you OR the required sequence is thrown at you so fast you need to know it in advance and be split-second precise. The fixed camera angle makes actually seeing targets difficult sometimes. The first time I encountered Star Wol- I mean, Team Whoever I Forgot Your Names Already, I had trouble actually hitting them because my own ship and targeting reticle was in the way. Spray-and-pray and attempting lock-on and still failing to actually take one down while they blast all my teammates out of the sky is frustrating as hell. And that's a reoccuring theme with this game. It's like the developer never actually played StarFox 64 but they watched a bunch of videos of people streaming Expert Mode speedruns and that's what they think the default experience was for everyone back in the day. The game needs selectable difficulty levels. And the presentation is also flawed in several ways. The intro/outros can be skipped but it still takes time to do it. I don't care to see the same thing fifty times in a row, just let me skip straight to the mission by pressing SKIP instead of making me do it one-by-one. At the end of a mission you have to hold a button to skip three times in a row to actually exit the stage if you don't want to sit around and watch. And when a mission starts you get an obnoxiously large mission/team status splash that covers a good portion of the screen. And why this is important is because in some stages, particularly the dedicated all-range ones, you START in combat and THINGS ARE SHOOTING AT YOU and this thing is blocking your view for several seconds. Then there's the comm portraits that are literally just two frames, one with mouth open the other closed, rapidly flipped back and forth. It looks like unfinished placeholder graphics from a game still in beta. I don't expect full 3D model heads with highly-detailed facial animations but at least put in another frame or two. Oh, and you can't remap the controls. Which is beyond stupid these days for any game. The team is another point. I'm fine with the species they picked, especially the deer. You rarely see deer characters in games. But the names are incredibly uncreative. A bull named Chuck(steak), a Roe deer named Roe, and a thorny lizard named... Thorn. I'm surprised the main character isn't named something like "Bark" or "Growl." (Wait, wait a moment... Bow-wow-wow... Bow-wow... Bow... Bowie... ARGH.) And why is their team name the "Blue Bombers" when their ships are red and white? Maybe there's some unlockable alternate skin for the ships that uses blue, but they should've featured blue elements by default. Will any of these issues be fixed? Maybe. I doubt it, but maybe. And if they are I will probably update my review. But as it stands, this is a definite do not recommend. The graphics are great, the voices are decent, but everything else is varying levels of disappointing and/or frustrating. There was so much potential that went to waste here and so many issues that should've been caught and fixed in playtesting (I question if it had any at all), you're left with a game that's more often frustrating than fun.

I really wanted to like this game. It's got a lot going for it. To understand why I'm leaving a negative review I'd like to go over what it's doing right, and what it isn't. I'll change my review in the future if and when these problems get fixed. The Good: It feels like a Star Fox game. It's got great graphics. It's a solid engine and framework for these games on modern platforms. The Bad: It feels like a 1:1 copy of Star Fox 64 with different branding. Even some of the lines they say in the game are copy and pasted. While it's great it's so close and so in line with what Star Fox is, I would've loved to see some variety in the missions. Star Fox fans have been begging for something, anything new while nintendo has continued to re-release the same game with the same missions over and over... and this feels no different. The controls... to quote a famous bird "This is horrible." There is *No Somersault* and *No U-Turns* so if an enemy is chasing you... good luck, instead it's replaced by the brake which slows you to a stop so you can turn around fast... and that in itself is a problem. When you're trying to turn a tight corner to fly through somewhere, you can't slow down at all. Using the brake completely stops you and doesn't allow your ship to turn in the way you need it to. You also have charge shots and normal laser fire on a different button. Fair enough, might be good for some people... but you can't change it. Despite the fact that you can disable continuous fire, holding down normal shots do not charge a laser... I don't understand why anyone would want that option otherwise. L/R Brake and Boost while ZL/ZR rotate the ship to turn, it feels slow to me and I'm not personally a fan of them. I would've loved to be able to rebind those controls, maybe Y slows, A boosts, B fires, X answers calls. L/R rotate while smart bombs are put on the back triggers or left stick in. Throughout the missions you collect letters W-I-L-D... what these do is never explained to you... and collecting them all doesn't appear to change anything... so I still have no idea. Gaining health in some missions is just non-existent, as well as laser upgrades (especially after checkpoints) If you run out of lives, you restart the whole game. It's 2026 and yes, there's still no continues or level select. Maybe if you beat the game once you unlock one, but with the controls and no health spawning, I gave up trying to find out. There's no alternate camera angles, no cockpit view, no zooming out to check for enemies, nothing. So if an enemy is chasing you, you'd never know until you're dead. You have brake and turn around to look behind you... and if someone is chasing you... well then I guess you're dead because you stopped. While chasing enemies, sometimes they just go through the wall. Hyper lasers are definitely not balanced. Beating the first or second boss feels like it takes 5-10 minutes without a hyper laser, and with it you can beat them in under a minute. **TL;DR For the devs. How I would fix the game: Re-do the brake mechanics and let people bind their own control scheme. Improve turning to be tighter, or let people use different fighter classes to tune the game to their playstyle. If you're set on the controls, you like how the fighters feel you can add an easy mode. Make normal shots do more damage. Add somersaults and u-turns. Re-do the 1:1 missions, give players something new they haven't tried before and add the old variants as bonus missions. Add additional camera types. Make running out of lives restart the level, not the entire game or add difficulties to let players tune it to their liking.** I think you have a solid foundation for a game, it just needs some refining and polishing. If you need playtesters, I'll do it for free and give my feedback. I think you have great potential and when you fix the issues present I think you'd have something amazing. I'll change my review once that happens, and if you release a physical copy on switch I'll buy it there too.

This is a painfully mediocre indie title, especially when you compare it to Star Fox. When you're making a game that "reimagines the classic on-rails adventures of the 90s", expectations have to be met, if not exceeded. The characters are completely one dimensional, the story is very bare bones, the flying controls are too slow for my liking, there's no indicator for when your teammates are in trouble in the all range sections, and I don't care if you want to differentiate from what you're supposed to pay homage to; no game like this should have two different inputs for laser fire and charged shots! Sorry, folks. Wanted to like this one, but as is, I cannot recommend it.

[b]This game does the most important things right[/b]: The game is fun as heck to play with super-smooth and responsive controls, polished gameplay, and visuals that are worth the price tag alone. While the soundtrack isn't all that memorable, it's serviceable and seems designed to be undistracting. The voicework is stellar, too. Level design is solid, though some more telegraphing for the "hard route" would have been nice to have. The character designs are great. I have no notes on any of the surface-level elements of the game. Therefore, I recommend it. I think you'll enjoy it, and that's the main thing. However, it has a lot of shortcomings that are mostly connected, and I think they're exacerbated by the fact that we were all jump-scared by a sudden Star Fox Switch 2 remake that came out just months before this could release. [b]In short: this game lacks identity.[/b] It feels like the videogame equivalent of a parrot sitting on Long John Fox's shoulder. Rich with character, and very pretty, but ultimately only there to repeat what's said. We get little to no development on any of the characters, and it's as if you were supposed to do your reading via the Star Fox games. Given this is aimed at Star Fox fans - who WERE starved of a decent game for generations - that might have been a safe bet, but unfortunately the game's depth suffers for its reliance on standing in Star Fox's shadow. Every character in this game is an echo of one from the Lylat universe, and that's not really a good thing. I found myself wanting to know more about the characters, their rivalries, the relevancy of our unnamed Boss battles, but we don't get much more than fleeting dialogue and a brief slideshow introduction. The game is good, but it could have been great, if they focused more on getting it to stand on its own two feet. Leaning back on Star Fox has made it feel like it only ever aimed for 2nd best, and that's a shame - it's lovingly crafted by extremely skilled developers. No element of the game is 'bad' whatsoever. It just feels like they didn't think it could fly by its own merits.

I was really looking forward to this one, but after doing my first run through the game, I really can't be bothered to play another route. This review is only based on the experience of one route through the game, so keep that in mind. First, some positives. I think the character designs are pretty good, and the voice acting is generally excellent. The graphics are colorful and pleasantly cel-shaded, if not a little generic. Next, I'm going to list some of my issues without comparing it to Star Fox (which is very hard): - The on-rails levels are very slow, and only go straight forward. There aren't really any interesting setpieces or events that happen mid-level to mix things up. You and the camera are both on a slow march straight forward until you get to the boss. - Somehow, the free-flight levels are even slower. The brake-drifting is useful for turning around, but you're a sitting duck if you're not constantly boosting. - Your squadmates do very little and die very quickly. I'm not sure if this is a bug or what, but when Thorne asked for help in the first level, I shot down his enemy tail within 2 seconds, and Thorne had already lost 75% HP. - Although I liked the voice acting, the characters didn't say much to get me invested in their personality or relationships. The banter is pretty weak, which is unfortunate when the game already has so little story, and so little level-specific narrative. - I would have loved more level variety. All the levels take place on one planet, and the main distinction between them is the biomes they take place in, though multiple levels share a biome. I kinda thought there'd be at least one space level, but maybe that's on me. Finally, I have to compare it to Star Fox 64. I'm fine with it copying a lot of the basic mechanics and tropes, but so much of what it copies takes it from "inspiration" to "cheap uninspired knockoff" territory for me. - The exact same setup and story, but less. The country exiles their genius engineer (not to be confused with a certain genius scientist), who later amasses an army to take over the world. Your squad of 4 furries (and one non-furry by technicality) is sent out to deal with them. - The exact same presentation style. You select the next stage from a map that's laid out nearly 1:1 with SF64. Before each level, the commander on the left side of the screen says one sentence about the level, and the squad leader on the right side of the screen responds. During the level, a squadmate will ask for help and you need to shoot an enemy that's chasing them. At the end of the level, it says Mission Complete, and the squad members check in one-by-one before you zoom off. Same ordering, pacing, everything. The character models in the ships even bob their heads instead of moving their mouths, just like in SF64. - Even on the one route I played, there were multiple levels that were just SF64 levels (each of these is going to be a separate bullet point to make it more readable). The first stage, Archipelago, is just Corneria but with less going on, and really weird scaling (the buildings are tiny - almost the same size as your ship). One of your squadmates flies through a few obstacles and challenges you to follow them, and if you do, you go down the "better" path. If you don't, you get taken to a boring all-range-mode boss. There are even a number of enemy placements, movements, and formations that are ripped straight out of Corneria. - Mines is exactly Fichina with desert theming. You fly around a base in all-range mode shooting lazy enemies for a while until you plant a bomb in the base (in SF64, you instead discover that a bomb has been planted in the base). At this point in the level, the Star Wolf equivalent comes in and fights you, exactly like Fichina. It's exactly the same level. - Foundry is exactly Bolse with lava theming - it's even in the same spot on the level-select map, on the bad path right before the final level. It's a slowly spinning platform where you take out stationary targets, and once you do, it exposes the slowly-spinning cylinder core, which has little weak points all over it. Once you expose the core, the Star Wolf equivalent comes and attacks you again, just like on Bolse. It's really blatant. - Final boss spoilers: [spoiler] It just Andross again. It's a giant head and two hands. [/spoiler] Because of all of this, the game unfortunately felt like an uninspired rip-off of Star Fox 64 with higher graphical fidelity, but worse level design, bosses, music, and banter. After my first run I had to ask myself why I wouldn't just play SF64 again and have a better time. Sorry, dev team - I'll keep an eye on your work, I hope I have a better time with your next one.

So...I gave it a shot. It sure is Star Fox 64! Sorta. They copied everything except, you know, the parts of GOOD game design that made Star Fox 64 GOOD. * Your ship is super fragile and only takes a bit of fire before its on the verge of death. Also, why in the high holy ♥♥♥♥ do I lose laser upgrades after only taking a few shots? I don't even lose wings from that but nah I just lose my better blasters because NOW they want to be "alternative." Meanwhile in this game's senpai Star Fox 64 you only lose laser upgrades if you lose a wing and on that game's Normal mode you almost have to be doing that on purpose. * Even when I'm banking a ship it feels mega sluggish. And why does braking cause the ship to drop? This is a fantasy game with talking animals piloting starships but in this instance suddenly they want to be realistic? MAKE IT MAKE SENSE. Oh and because of this bad decision, tight turning is basically a no-go unless you wanna repeatedly smash your ship's undercarriage through no fault of your own * Normal fire and charged shots are on different buttons, but if holding the normal fire button down with Continuous Fire off doesn't charge a shot...why not just have Continuous Fire on by default? Why can't we more organically choose between rapid fire and a powerful homing shot? * Speaking of fire, enemies take way too much fire. Not just the glowy ones with Donkey Kong Country letters int hem, regular enemies feel way to tanky for anything except a Charged Shot. Yeah even the Not Smart Bombs We Swear feel weak and barely seem to work when I use them. Even upgraded your standard lasers feel pathetically weak and can barely take down a common enemy ship. * Gotta love even indie games getting into modern weapon sound design where weapons sound embarrassingly weak. The lasers now sound like I'm just spitting, and I might as well be with the damage I do, and the explosions barely sound even noticeable, let alone life-changing like how other games have them. Good job making me feel powerful guys! * There is virtually no indicator for when your wingmen are in trouble. The only warning you get that your wingmen are taking fire is when they've already taken enough fire to ♥♥♥♥ off for the duration of the level and all of the next. In Star Fox 64, your allies would say something to clue you in and in an all-range mode section, you'd get a big S.O.S on-screen marking telling you what's up and what direction to go in to save them. There is nothing like that in this game of course, naturally, so you only realize Roe's in trouble when she's already left the battlefield. These guys were already sauceless marble pillars so thanks for the extra reason to not give a ♥♥♥♥ about them, guys! * Gotta love bosses that feel stupidly durable even with fully upgraded lasers. Again, SF64, I felt like I was doing damage even with the first laser upgrade. Here, if I don't have continuous fire on, I feel like I'm trying to bring down a brick wall with my piss. * Health doesn't regenerate between stages and I have no idea why. Or if it does it regenerates by such a pitifully small amount it might as well not bother. Also, health upgrades! Through my one and only playthrough of this I could count the amount of health rings I found on one hand, and STILL have ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fingers left over. Why are they scarce? Yeah, this game wanted to copy SF64 but when it came to GOOD game design suddenly it wanted to be this edgy alternative rebel who broke all the rules. All it did was establish WHY we have those rules in the first place. Also, petty complaint but if they're called the Blue Bombers, WHY ARE THEIR SHIPS *RED?* You know why people call Mega Man the Blue Bomber? BECAUSE HE IS ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BLUE. Do we call Falco of Gento Koken the Golden General because he's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PERIWINKLE?