Star Fox Guard arrived in April 2016 as a strange bonus: a tower defense game co-developed by Nintendo and PlatinumGames, bundled as a separate disc with the first print edition of Star Fox Zero and sold afterward as a digital download on the Wii U eShop. It is a small game with a narrow job, and it does that job well.
Trailer, via Wii U News.
Grippy Toad’s Bases Need Defending
The setup is pure Star Fox comedy. Players protect bases owned by Slippy Toad’s uncle, Grippy, from waves of oncoming attackers. The television shows footage from every available security camera. The Wii U GamePad shows an overhead view of the base.
That split is the whole game. You watch the monitors, spot movement, then switch control to a camera and fire its weapon to defend the core.
Combat Robots and Chaos Robots
Enemies come in two classes. Combat robots must all be defeated to progress. Chaos robots do not attack the core directly — they tamper with your cameras, obscuring the view or feeding you fake footage.
The Chaos robots are the smarter design choice. They turn the camera system itself into the threat, so a game about watching becomes a game about trusting what you see.
100 Missions and an Editor Mode
Star Fox Guard ships with 100 missions and an editor mode that lets players change enemy behavior in levels and share those levels online. The editor gives the package a second life past the campaign, and it is the reason the game outlasts its own gimmick.
A Wii U Game to Its Bones
This is a game built around hardware that no one else used this way. Two screens, one for surveillance and one for command, make the camera-switching feel physical rather than menu-driven. Nothing about the design is accidental.
Star Fox Guard is a 2016 tower defense video game co-developed by Nintendo and PlatinumGames for the Wii U.
The Limits of a Pack-In
Seven outlets aggregated to a 7.1/10 score, and that number reads honest. Star Fox Guard is inventive but thin — a handful of ideas stretched across 100 missions, with the Chaos robots carrying more invention than the mission structure around them.
What Star Fox Guard Gets Right
The camera mechanic is the part worth remembering. Nintendo and PlatinumGames took a genre built on placing towers and rebuilt it around looking, then made the looking itself unreliable. On a console whose second screen was often a map, that is a genuinely clever use of the hardware.
Key facts
– Released: April 2016
– Platforms: Wii U
– Developer: Nintendo, PlatinumGames
– Publisher: Nintendo
– Modes: Single player
– Missions: 100
– Critic aggregate: 7.1/10 (7 outlets)
Star Fox Guard is not a reason to own a Wii U, but it is a reason to keep the disc. A tight, funny, hardware-specific experiment that understands its own best idea. 7.1 of 10.
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