Star Fox Guard’s class of tower defense is an exemplary validation of its platform’s unique hardware. Like Super Mario Maker and Splatoon, it proves the Wii U’s gamepad isn’t a superfluous novelty, but a prudent force against an entrenched position.
Tower defense is a genre defined through two opposing forces. (1) Parades of chaos marching against a limited offense that demands careful and efficient planning. (2) It requires a strong appreciation for improvisation because, inevitably, all of those plans will be evicerated. It’s the human desire for order against the world’s fondness for chaos. It’s the 100% situational awareness of shoot ’em ups combined with the thrilling planned-execution of real-time strategy. It’s, oddly, all bundled inside of a Star Fox game.
Star Fox’s connections to Star Fox Guard are tenuous—Project Guard, a prototype shown at E3 2014, is the foundation for Star Fox Guard—but it doesn’t suffer under the conversion. Slippy, the secret most competent member of the Star Fox team, stumbles upon his uncle Grippy’s mining operation during a routine sweep of Corneria. Nefarious robots are plaguing his business, and he needs someone to operate his laser-equipped cameras and blow up any invaders. Slippy pops back in from time to time to provide some pointers, a few sound effects are carried over, and there are some appreciated references but, really, Star Fox Guard doesn’t have much to do with Star Fox.
It’s fine, really, because Star Fox Guard happens to be really good at being its own game. The crowded visual load-out is a bit untraditional and anxiety inducing but it’s also secretly the thing and a tower defense game has needed since its inception. Your television has a live feed of eight different cameras positioned around a base with multiple different openings and pathways. In the very center of the screen is your active camera, and in the very center of the base is the one-hit-and-it’s-dead tower you need to defend. The gamepad has an illustrated map representing the field and location of all eight cameras. Tapping a camera on the gamepad brings it to the center as your active camera. From there you can shoot anything inside your visible range.
This is madness and this is awesome. Paying attention to eight different live feeds is tough but totally doable, especially after you start to gain familiarity with the layout of a base and its cameras. There’s a neat little effect where all inactive cameras have a kind-of stop motion aesthetic, making them feel like real low-fi security cameras (or possibly dropping frames to sustain the Wii U’s modest hardware). Seeing a robot waltz in on multiple different cameras creates an active sense of panic that can only be soothed by lasering them to death.
Robots come in two distinct categories. Chaos bots don’t directly attack the tower, but perform actions to interfere with your cameras. Combat bots, as the name implies, come up with a bunch of different ways to strike at the heart of your base. They’re all unloaded in a kind-of wave-based succession, not dropping in at regular intervals but rather deployed with a gross sort of unpredictability. Distractions are everywhere and it’s a challenge to effectively prioritize a path of destruction.
Star Fox Guard starts off easy and satisfies the player by obliging their expectations. It’s not long before it starts preying upon those same expectations. Before a round starts each camera can be physically picked up and moved to any desirable position. I always assumed the default positions and angles were the most intuitive, so I never adjusted it. About halfway through the game I noticed robots arriving just outside of a camera’s viewing range, cleverly skirting both my cameras and my assumptions. Intense micromanagement isn’t required—only the bonus missions demand ruthless precision—but an investment in Star Fox Guard’s finer mechanics will pay off.
Opposition and options escalate as Star Fox Guard unfolds. Combat robots, once a roving band of R.O.B.’s, evolve into yellow mecha-gorillas with enormous armor, bouncing matryoshka balls, robot-snails that climb over walls, and lightning fast jerks riding on rockets. The Chaos side is even more of a hassle, with UFO’s that kidnap your camera, walking box fans that blow your camera toward the sky, magnet robots that loosen control, and ghosts that obliterate your camera. The worst of all has to be the Shieldtrons, whose entire front section is blocked off, usually requiring you to rotate another camera 180 degrees to assault its backside from across the map. Especially in later levels, Star Fox Guard isn’t afraid to mix it up and unload varied combinations of robots for the specific purpose of driving the player insane.
The player gets a couple of tricks to help keep pace. Winning a match results in collecting a bunch of scrap, which is eventually converted into a game-encompassing rank. As you rank up you’ll open up extra bonus missions and optional offensive cameras. There’s a camera that locks-on and targets bots, one that slows down time, and another that hovers in the air and is immune to chaos bots. Initially you can only use one at a time, but as your rank increases so does the number of special cameras you can place inside the map.
As soon as you’ve got a map solved Star Fox Guard blasts off to a new one. Five different planets each have three different bases, and each of those bases has a both story and bonus missions inside of it. Each planet also has a boss encounter, though in practice these felt out of step with the main game. Certain tower defense elements are incorporated, but three of them just feel like giant action boss battles. They’re great as a change of pace, but slightly incongruous with the remainder of Star Fox Guard. In any case, I finished every story mission and 80% of the extra missions in a little under ten hours.
Normal missions simply require you to vanquish all of the combat robots. Extra missions are where Star Fox Guard experiments with its formula. One gives you single-hit kills on all robots, but only with a limited amount of available ammunition. Another starts with only one camera and challenges you with knocking cameras off of combat robots and positioning them strategically around the map. Variation to enemy size, environmental hazards, and other modifiers are in play, but my favorite had to be the Squakiebox missions; cameras are mounted on top of two Clucktrons (giant robo-chickens) who move around the arena independently. Switching between the two and rotating the camera 360 degrees is an obtuse and yet challenging way to play.
If there’s any fault, it’s with the cheap-ish nature of the Wii U gamepad’s touch-screen. It couldn’t keep up with extra missions that demanded I quickly transport cameras around the arena. Trying to pay attention to the television and the gamepad at the same time is Star Fox Guard’s intended challenge, but it sometimes felt unnecessarily obfuscated by poor feedback from the gamepad. I couldn’t reliably double-tap a camera, causing me to look down at fully press the exact spot of the camera on the gamepad’s map. This only cost me a few moments, but a couple seconds is huge when you’re trying to manage an onslaught of angry mechanized chickens.
Star Fox Guard’s multiplayer options are deeper than expected. While you can’t design your own arenas, you create your own squad that can be deployed against other players. You simply select a load-out of available bots for your map, and then dictate their entrance along a timeline. Presumably these are the same tools available to the development team, as the player can view the same timeline after every regular mission. Once your squad is finished it can be uploaded and available to other players. I found multiple different “rivals” each with their own squads, and vanquishing their maps adds points to increase my rank.
Fifty main missions, five boss battles, fifty of extra missions with zany ideas, and the variety of your opposition makes a tiny idea feel like a huge game. The closest point of comparison is Captain Toad Treasure Tracker which similarly spun a mini-game off into its own $40 title. This is a skill unique to Nintendo, one of the few developers to somehow exercise restraint and creativity at the exact same time. They mine an idea until they’ve made off with all the gold, but they don’t leave the place a wreck in the process. Star Fox Guard, like the best of Nintendo, finds a natural point of termination and doesn’t push through it with junk.
On a personal level, Star Fox Guard recast my conception of a tower defense game. I play and review dozens of games a year and most of them, regardless of quality, are slightly different versions of the same idea. Star Fox Guard isn’t immune to this, its genre subscription is pure if nothing else, but it did fundamentally alter my approach to its challenges. I wasn’t used to giving 100% of my available brain space to solving an escalating series of problems. Star Fox Guard’s excels at creating panic and providing all of the necessary tools to tranquilize it. All it needs is your complete attention.
