Nintendo has released a remake of Star Fox 64 for the Switch 2, stripped the '64' from the title, polished it up with photorealistic animals and sweeping cinematic cutscenes, and is asking you for fifty dollars. The campaign takes between one and two hours to finish. That's the whole pitch.
What You're Actually Buying Here
According to NPR's review, the Star Fox campaign clocks in at one to two hours on a first playthrough, depending on how often you die. To reach the game's true ending, you have to replay the whole thing hunting for secret branching paths, which roughly quadruples the runtime. So somewhere between two and eight hours of content, for fifty dollars, or sixty if you want a physical cartridge.
For context, that's more expensive than a movie ticket, shorter than most movies, and significantly less fun than the best games currently available on the same console. Nintendo is betting very hard on your childhood memories doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
The Good News: It Looks Amazing. Mostly.
NPR reviewer James Perkins Mastromarino concedes that the environments are genuinely gorgeous. The planets and ships got a serious graphical upgrade, and the original clipped mission dialogue has been reworked into fully animated cinematic mini-movies. The opening sequence dramatizing Fox McCloud's father being betrayed into the hands of Dr. Andross is a proper Hollywood-style cutscene now.
But the visuals are a mixed bag. Fans weren't thrilled with Fox McCloud's character design when the trailer dropped, and the original character designer, who had no involvement in the remake, publicly admitted to preferring the Super Mario Galaxy Movie version of Fox over this one. Mastromarino's specific complaint is the cockpit lighting, which apparently bathes Fox in a persistent, unflattering green glow throughout the game. Fifty dollars for a protagonist who looks like he's been left in the back of a fish tank.
The Multiplayer Is Where Things Get Weird
Star Fox has a co-op mode where two players in the same room can split the Joy-Cons, one steering and one using mouse controls to fire. Mastromarino specifically calls this out as Nintendo sacrificing actual ease of play for the novelty of a new gimmick. He notes that Donkey Kong Bananza, another Switch 2 title, handles its two-player aiming with a regular joystick, which is an obvious and functional solution that Nintendo apparently did not consider here.
The Battle Mode is more fun, he says. Four-versus-four matches involving point capture and meteorite energy collection, which sounds chaotic in the best way. There's also an augmented reality GameChat feature using a webcam that tracks your face and puppets your character's portrait in real time. Raise your eyebrows and your character raises theirs. Puff out your cheeks while playing as Slippy Toad and watch him inflate his chin. This is either charming or deeply unsettling, and honestly it might be both.
Catch: you cannot play Battle Mode on the same system. Online only, or with a second Switch 2 in the room. So the most entertaining part of the game requires additional hardware or an internet connection.
A Franchise That Has Been Reheated Three Times Already
Mastromarino makes the point plainly: this story has already been reheated three times since the 1990s. Star Fox 64 was itself an upgrade of the original Super NES Star Fox. Star Fox 64 3D ported it to the 3DS in 2011. Now this. Same bones, different clothes every decade or so.
The question the NPR review opens with is a good one: did anyone actually want this? There are fans of the franchise who have been asking for a proper new Star Fox game for years. What Nintendo delivered is a prettier version of a game those same fans already own in at least one previous form, with a campaign shorter than most lunch breaks and a multiplayer mode you can't even play in split-screen.
The Verdict, Per NPR
The review lands with a clear recommendation: if you have friends to play Battle Mode with, or you can tolerate the awkward co-op setup, it might be worth your time. Otherwise, save your money for an original game.
Mastromarino's final framing is sharp: Star Fox has the production values of a modern blockbuster but the sensibility of a 1990s arcade game. That's not a knock on the 1990s. Star Fox 64 was great in 1997. The question is whether a faithful recreation of a 1997 arcade experience, dressed in 2026 graphics, is worth a 2026 price tag. NPR's answer is a polite but firm no.
The Dingo Take
Look, Nintendo has been selling people their own childhoods back to them at a markup for decades now, and they are extremely good at it. The Virtual Console, the NES Classic, the SNES Classic, the N64 games on Switch Online, the endless parade of Mario re-releases. This is not a new business model. What's new here is the audacity of charging fifty dollars for what NPR's reviewer clocked at under two hours of campaign content and calling it a full retail release.
The genuinely maddening part is that it sounds like there's a decent game buried in here. The AR face-tracking stuff sounds fun. The Battle Mode sounds like a good time. The cinematic upgrades sound like real craft went into them. Nintendo clearly spent money on this. But spending money on a thing is not the same as the thing being worth fifty dollars to the person buying it, and nobody with a working calculator should pretend otherwise.
The Star Fox franchise has been in a weird limbo for thirty years, bouncing between remakes and spin-offs and one genuinely disastrous experiment with a GamePad gimmick. Fans have been asking for a real new entry, a real new story with new characters and new ideas, for most of their adult lives. Instead they got photorealistic Fox McCloud in a green glow, doing the same barrel rolls he's always done, for fifty bucks. Maybe one day Nintendo will let this franchise actually fly somewhere new. Today is not that day.
