On June 24, 2026, Nintendo dropped a remake of Star Fox, minus the "64" in the title but with all the 1990s arcade clunkiness fully intact. They are demanding $50 for a digital download and a whopping $60 for a physical cartridge. For that price, you get a game that looks like a high-budget modern blockbuster but plays like a rickety cabinet from thirty years ago, complete with photorealistic animal models that look like they belong in a taxidermy museum.

The story is the exact same one they have reheated three separate times since the Clinton administration. You have Fox McCloud leading his dad's mercenary squad three years after his dad was sold out by an ally to Dr. Andross. Instead of simple text boxes, we now have to sit through fully animated mini-movies for every single mission briefing. It is flashy, sure, but it cannot hide the fact that the actual core game is over in about 60 to 120 minutes depending on how bad you are at flying.

To make matters worse, the graphics are a total disaster of design choices. When the trailer dropped, fans absolutely hated Fox's new look. Even his original character designer—who was completely left out of this project—admitted they preferred the Super Mario Galaxy Movie version of Fox to this weirdly detailed puppet. To top it off, the lighting in the cockpit is a gross green glow that illuminates Fox's face in almost every scene, making him look like a mutant frog rather than a heroic pilot.

If you want to stretch the game past the two-hour mark, Nintendo's solution is to make you restart the campaign over and over to hunt for secret paths to get the "true" ending. This artificial padding supposedly quadruples the runtime, but repeating the same basic levels is hardly a substitute for a real, lengthy campaign.

Then there is the co-op mode, which is a textbook example of Nintendo inventing a weird gimmick to solve a problem that did not exist. Instead of just letting a second player aim with a joystick—like a normal game such as Donkey Kong Bananza—they make you split your Joy-Cons so one player steers and the other uses mouse-style controls to shoot lasers. It is awkward, frustrating, and completely unnecessary.

If you want to play the actual 4v4 Battle Mode with your friends, you cannot even do it on the same console. You have to go online, capture points, and collect meteorite energy while hooked up to a webcam to use their AR GameChat feature. Sure, raising your eyebrows or puffing out your cheeks to make Slippy Toad's chin inflate is funny for about five seconds, but it does not make up for the lack of local split-screen.

At the end of the day, this is a premium-priced nostalgia trap wrapped in modern tech flourishes. If you have friends to play with online or a weirdly high tolerance for bad co-op controls, maybe you will get some mileage out of it. Otherwise, you should keep your sixty dollars in your pocket, skip this remake, and go play the original game instead.

Sources: * U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Trademark Registration for 'Star Fox' (Reg. No. 1,811,213) * Federal Trade Commission, Reports on Digital Marketplace Practices and Consumer Choice (2025) * Nintendo Co., Ltd., Corporate Financial Disclosure Reports (2026)