Star Fox Returns on Switch 2 With the Series' Second-Best Reviews. It's Still a Two-Hour Game.

Star Fox is back tonight, and the reviews say the wait was worth it. Sort of.

Nintendo and Velan Studios put out a ground-up remake of Star Fox 64 on Switch 2 at midnight local time, and the critics got there first. It sits at 82 on Metacritic across 25 reviews and 84 on OpenCritic. That makes it the second-best-reviewed game in the 33-year history of the series, behind only the 1997 original it is rebuilding, which holds an 88. For a franchise that spent roughly a decade in the wilderness after Star Fox Zero, that is a real comeback.

Here is the part worth sitting with before you pre-load it: this is Star Fox 64. The same Lylat War, the same branching path across 15 stages, the same beats. Velan rebuilt how it looks and feels, not what it is. Whether that is worth $49.99 digital or $59.99 physical depends entirely on what you are buying it for.

What Velan actually built

The studio is Velan Studios, the team behind Knockout City and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. Credit them by name, because this is their rebuild, not a contractor port. They ran it on their in-house VIPER engine, written mostly in C, and the headline number is 60 frames per second in docked mode. The Nintendo 64 original ran at 15 to 20fps. The 2011 3DS remake hit 30. WCCFtech clocked the Switch 2 version at roughly 1440p docked, likely with some upscaling help.

The technical trick that matters most is the one you will not notice, which is the point. The 1997 game rendered its cutscenes in real time to compete with the pre-rendered FMV that PlayStation games were showing off, and it lost that fight on looks every time. Velan's pipeline renders the cinematics and the gameplay through the same engine at the same fidelity, so the seam between "movie" and "playing" is gone. Original character designer Takaya Imamura said in June he was struck by how far the graphics had come since the N64 days, when the team had "aimed to create demo scenes and presentations" to keep pace with Sony's hardware.

On top of that you get fully voiced cutscenes between stages, a new orchestral score, expanded character writing (Fox as a roguish mercenary, the Falco rivalry dialed up, Slippy actually competent at his job), and a "Holoviewer" codex for enemies and planets. There is a new Challenge Mode with stage-specific objectives, and an online 4-vs-4 Battle Mode pitting Team Star Fox against Team Star Wolf across three maps. Battle Mode needs a Nintendo Switch Online membership. The campaign and Challenge Mode do not.

The Joy-Con mouse thing

The most interesting new toy is Mouse Targeting. You lay the Joy-Con 2 flat on a desk and slide it, and the optical sensor reads that movement the way a PC mouse does. It moves the reticle one-to-one, no dead zone, no velocity curve. That is genuinely different from stick aiming, which has capped console precision for thirty years, and on a rail shooter where the game flies the ship for you it makes a kind of sense.

It is not universally loved. CGMagazine flagged that the mode forces a first-person view and pushes both ship movement and aiming through the mouse at once, which gets awkward mid-maneuver. It only works in Campaign and Challenge modes, not Battle Mode, and it needs a non-reflective flat surface, so a glass desk is out.

Where the reviews land

The praise is consistent: best the series has ever looked, Velan's best remake, a real showcase for what Switch 2 can do. Gamereactor closed its 9 with "You've done your father proud, Velan Studios."

The criticism is just as consistent, and it is the same point from two directions. Nintendo Life, which gave it a 9, summed it up as Star Fox 64 made better than it has ever been, which is both the best thing about it and its ceiling. Game Informer said the remake mostly throws a spotlight on how overdue an actual new Star Fox has become. VGC was more pointed, knocking the rerecorded voice work for changing the emotional tone of some boss moments and noting a lack of tactile punch in those fights.

So should you buy it

The base campaign is around two hours. The branching paths and grades give it replay value, and a full clear of every route runs longer, but nobody should walk in expecting a 20-hour game. At fifty to sixty bucks that is a fair thing to weigh, and you do not have to guess. There is a free demo on the eShop, live since June 9, covering the tutorial and the Meteo stage, and your save carries into the full game. Play that first. It will tell you more than any review score, this one included.

East Coast players can jump in at midnight ET on June 25. West Coast unlocks at 9 PM PT on June 24.