AI Summary

The "fine, I'll just do it myself" approach has served indie developers well, capitalizing on the hunger for games that emulate beloved classics. Indie metroidvania games, boomer shooters, and retro-style platformers all owe their rise to the same trend of homage for underserved genres. Wild Blue Skies isn't the first game that aims to fill a Star Fox-shaped hole in gamers' hearts, but it is the one that feels most like pure homage. It could practically be an expansion. Wild Blue Skies follows the formula set by Star Fox 64 incredibly closely, down to even specific details like including alternate paths through the map, all-range mode stages, and a rival company of evil pilots who hound you throughout the story campaign. The very first alternate path is revealed by one of your copilots challenging you to follow them around tricky obstacles, just like Falco in SF64. Even the world map forms a similarly tilted oblong oval with stages jutting out from the easy, medium, and hard paths. The stage design reflects the classic Star Fox sensibility impeccably well, as a fast-paced rail shooter with swarms of enemies and tight spaces to maneuver around and through.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdRggRKhNMk Stop me if you've heard this one: A group of hotshot anthropomorphic animal pilots thwarted the evil plans of a megalomaniacal scientist, who then went into hiding for years. Then suddenly the scientist reemerges, declaring war on the peaceful society, and it's up to a new generation of the pilots to stop him. This time, your fighter crew is called the Blue Bombers ( no relation ), headed by a German shepherd named Bowie, who fights alongside Roe (a deer), Chuck (a bull), and Thorne (a frilled lizard). The evil villain is called Grimclaw, and your own army leader is a toad, I think, named General Harding. It's all very familiar. There are a few key differences, though. Wild Blue Skies takes place on one world, not a series of planets, and so your ships are built to look more like fighter jets than spaceships. Moving through the map takes you across a series of different biomes, so functionally exploring a cold area of the map is similar to exploring an ice planet, but it does feel nicely cohesive here. And even though you aren't actually in a starship, there are moments when your fighter jets make clever use of the space, like in a canyon stage where you pull up hard and fly vertically up a waterfall while dodging boulders falling from the cliffside.  Wild Blue Skies Other differences are less superficial. Your regular fire and charged shot are mapped to two separate buttons, as compared to Star Fox using just one, which is an adjustment I found actually worked really well once I got used to it. The control change required a little more split-second planning to decide when I wanted to use one fire mode versus the other, instead of just holding down the charge shot, but it also made a cleaner division of those responsibilities and less accidental charging. I also turned on the auto-fire from the settings menu so that my regular fire rate was a continuous stream, to differentiate it from the more deliberate charged shot. Similarly, the brake and dash functions are mapped to the trigger buttons, giving them a feeling more akin to a racing game's brake and acceleration. The change feels a little more natural than mapping these controls to face buttons by default in Star Fox, and allows for a little more fine control to adjust your speed while you're also firing your weapons. Like Star Fox, each stage has a number of medals to collect, on top of your regular score multipliers. These stages are meant to be plumbed repeatedly and extensively, as in the game that inspired them, so there are lots of secrets to find and score challenges to unlock for expert pilots.  And that brings me to one last major distinction. Wild Blue Skies is hard . In a year without a remake of Star Fox 64 , I would have assumed I had simply lost my touch, but having recently played Nintendo's title, I feel confident this isn't a skill issue. Instead, Wild Blue Skies is like Star Fox got juiced up to hard mode. Even trailing Thorne to open the first alternate path in the first stage took me several tries. The maneuver takes you through a series of waterfalls, and hitting the exact points where you can pass through, without bumping into the nearby rocks, was difficult to do without very precise maneuvers that took practice.  Wild Blue Skies Your allies are also extremely vulnerable and will fall to enemy fire quickly, so it takes a few times through a stage to know exactly when they'll need bailing out. The all-range mode stages would almost always result in at least one or two of my wingmen going out for the following stage.  This year's Star Fox was a treat for longtime fans looking for a nostalgic fix, but it was a remake through and through. For veterans, all of the old skills translated and the map layouts were identical. If that game left you wanting new maps to memorize and an even tougher challenge, Wild Blue Skies is it. This is about as close to a Star Fox 64 expansion as it's possible to get, with a few smart tweaks to help finesse the expert-level difficulty. It's a very straightforward homage, but in this case, that's to its credit.

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