Star Fox 2 Is a 21 Year-Old Technological Marvel

Blowing open the time capsule.

By Samuel-IGN

Though completed in 1996, Star Fox 2 was shelved for over two decades, until Nintendo decided to include it as a bonus game in the SNES Classic Edition.

The thrill of playing a lost first-party Nintendo game, let alone a Shigeru Miyamoto-produced one, is by far the most appealing thing about Star Fox 2. Its clunky, primitive 3D action felt dated even alongside the Nintendo 64 launch lineup, which is precisely the reason Nintendo shelved it as a late-run SNES game to begin work on Star Fox 64.

Historical significance aside, is Star Fox 2 fun to play? After playing the first two stages, my feeling is... Kind of. Perhaps the biggest upgrade to Star Fox 2 is a welcome one. The map now allows you to choose any target: One-on-one dogfights, Star Destroyer-like mothership takedowns, and classic battles above planets. Each time you pick a target, the enemy icons on the map also pick their own, moving ever closer to Star Fox's home planet, Corneria. This adds a layer of strategy missing in the first Star Fox: Do you go on the offensive above the skies of Venom? Or hang back and defend Corneria from incoming missiles? At some point you’ll need to do the latter, as Corneria has a life bar of its own, and we were told that losing it means losing the game.

Star Fox 2’s 3D polygons, despite being slowly rendered and nearly texture-free, have an abstract quality that I love, but that others will find laughably dated. It doesn’t help that those polygons are rendered so slowly you can barely keep track of the target in your crosshairs. But consider what Star Fox 2 is doing for a moment: It has open 3D spaces where you break free of the rails to dogfight or run around on two robot legs. On the SNES! That’s incredible. It’s kind of like running a PSVR on a PlayStation 2.

Star Fox 2 may be a historically significant technological marvel, but I’ll have to kill a few hundred more space pigs to find out if it’s a good game. Stay tuned for our full review alongside the Super NES Classic next month -- and check out Brian Altano's take on the SNES Classic console hardware that we also put up today.

Samuel Claiborn is IGN's Managing Editor and both fixes and breaks pinball machines in his garage. TCELES B HSUP to follow him @Samuel_IGN on Twitter.

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