Star Fox hands-on preview – Nintendo’s Star Wars barrel rolls again

GameCentral goes hands-on with Nintendo’s latest Star Fox remake, complete with furry GameChat avatars and a new multiplayer mode. 

How do you solve a problem like Star Fox? Ever since 1997’s Lylat Wars on the Nintendo 64, Fox McCloud has been awkwardly saddled with gimmicks and adventure spin-offs in an attempt to modernise the unfashionable rail shooter. None of these experiments have been particularly successful, to the point where the character – and series as a whole – has remained relevant largely thanks to Super Smash Bros. above any mainline game over the past 30 years. 

Of course, that changed with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Fox’s fresh redesign, enhanced by the voice of Glen Powell, became an unexpected highlight of this year’s highest-grossing film. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto might want you to believe the character’s involvement came about as an organic creative decision from Illumination’s side but, just two months later, we’re on the precipice of the first new Star Fox game in a decade. 

The long absence, combined with the clear attempt to boost Fox’s popularity with a young audience, puts extra pressure on Star Fox’s Switch 2 debut. If the backing of a blockbuster movie, and a graphically slick re-do of the series’ most iconic game, can’t course correct the franchise, maybe McCloud should be taken out back and given his final barrel roll. 

Thankfully, based on our hands-on session, Star Fox looks destined to hit a sweet spot for fans old and new. Another remake of the same game from 30 years ago (technically the third, if you count 2017’s Star Fox Zero) might seem like a tired joke for a franchise stuck in time, but Star Fox’s high production values make this the best realisation of Nintendo’s Star Wars fantasy.

If you haven’t played Lylat Wars, or any other game in the series, Star Fox is predominantly a rail shooter where you gun down enemies, collect power-ups, protect your anthropomorphic allies, and rack up high scores. You’re mostly flying in an Arwing, whether in linear corridor runs or open arenas where you freely fly in a 3D space. However, certain levels see you hop into other vehicles, like the grounded Landmaster tank. 

You can technically ‘complete’ Lylat Wars in a couple of hours, but it’s designed so repeat runs are necessary if you want to see everything. The main incentive for repeating the campaign aside from high score chasing is to see new stages by meeting certain criteria, which unlocks new routes on the planetary map. For example, on the opening stage of Corneria, if you rescue your ally Falco from gunfire and fly under a sequence of stone arches, you’ll unlock access to a different second level you wouldn’t otherwise see if you beeline to the finish.

For those who remember these quirks, Star Fox will feel familiar because it is – for better or worse – the exact same game. For the purposes of this session, we were guided across three levels: Corneria, the asteroid-riddled Meteo, and the icy battle of Fichina where you face Team Star Wolf in an open battlefield. As someone who grew up on Lylat Wars, the muscle memory of blasting down clustered ship formations with bombs, lining up charged shots, doing overhead U-turns, and performing barrel rolls to deflect bullets soon became second nature again. 

Crucially though, this familiar gameplay loop is amplified by the excellent presentation. The orchestral soundtrack in particular is sublime and, when paired with the stunningly crisp visuals and overhauled environments, it all goes a surprisingly long way to making Star Fox feel like the closest the franchise has ever come to fulfilling its space epic ambitions. 

This carries over to the new cutscenes and character designs, which possess a cinematic quality you don’t typically expect from Nintendo. The furry designs might prove divisive, but we grew to appreciate their freakish, realistic bent because their absurdity balances out the dramatic, straight-laced tone of the universe. Our only reservation were the voices for Falco and Wolf, who felt slightly off when compared to the rest of the cast – but it might be a case of not hearing them enough. 

Star Fox is shaping up to be a faithful high-quality remake, but it packs some new features. We tried out the co-op mode, where flying and shooting duties are split between separate Joy-Cons – with one steering the ship as normal using the sticks, while the other aims and shoots using the mouse controls. It was surprisingly fun, and we imagine it’ll work well as a way to introduce younger kids into the series if they’re intimidated by the idea of juggling both responsibilities. 

We were less sold on the new online multiplayer battle mode, where two teams of four compete in dogfights to control zones to earn points. It’s perfectly fine, and its chaotic nature and reliance on power-ups offers a different kind of speed in comparison to the campaign, but we can’t see it being anything beyond a brief distraction you’ll quickly forget about.

Surprisingly, if you have the necessary Nintendo Switch 2 camera, we imagine the multiplayer mode might become a mere vessel to mess around with the goofy interactive avatars. We got to test these out (although, notably, not while playing a match) and they’re the most appealing reason we’ve seen to actually pick up the console’s camera. 

You can become every character in the game – ranging from Slippy and Peppy to Wolf, Andrew, and General Pepper – through these avatars, and while the technology has some limitations in how expressive you can be (it registers movements in your eyebrows, eyes, head position, mouth, lips, and, quite wonderfully, if you blow out your cheeks), it’s silly enough where you’ll want to mess around and see what other faces you can unlock. Beyond full blown avatars, you can just sport headgear too like Fox’s visor, ears, and our personal favourite, Falco’s beak. 

It’s a silly diversion, but it’s a promising sign that there’ll be more incentives to keep playing this iteration of Star Fox. There are three difficulty levels to the campaign, but the main question we have surrounds the promised Challenge mode, where you’re tasked with completing specific objectives on the same levels. We didn’t have time with it during this preview, but if it is an engaging expansion on the campaign with compelling unlockables, it could address the original game’s key shortcoming of having limited replay value. 

Overall, while the fundamental bones are exactly the same as Lylat Wars, we came away from Star Fox more excited to jump back in thanks to the transformative facelift of its presentation. It remains to be seen if a new generation of players, who might have different expectations based on the trailers, will latch onto the rail shooter gameplay in quite the same way, but for longtime fans, swooping through space in the Arwing has never looked or played this good.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £41.99/£49.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Release Date: 25th June 2026
Age Rating: 7+

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