Wild Blue Skies is not shy about the video game experience it is trying to emulate. You are Bowie, an anthropomorphic dog in a spaceship making your way through a series of levels, most on rails, some taking place in small open areas, to defeat the evil Grimclaw, an anthropomorphic tiger with a giant cyborg head. Developer Chuhai Labs and Vitei Backroom Inc. are transparently presenting their take on Star Fox 64 – a noble and welcome endeavor – but many shortcomings prevent it from reaching the nostalgic heights of its inspirational arcade action game.
Mechanically, controlling your ship feels okay, but it dips into slog territory more often than I would like. The perspective of the reticle makes it hard to see what you’re firing at (and there is no first-person option), and hitting the occasional wall bounces you around like a pinball. It can be especially frustrating on the open-ended levels that are not on rails. Locking on and firing your standard lasers are also mapped to separate buttons, meaning you have to choose between the two actions, which is limiting. Also, the range to lock on to fire an extra powerful homing shot is too short. By the time I locked on to enemies, it was often too late, and the enemy had disappeared off-screen.
The look of Wild Blue Skies is attractive, though, with bright colors and cool ship designs. I like the look of the main cast and their performances, along with the performances of all the bosses and secondary characters. Everyone’s characterization, however, leaves a lot on the table. The bosses all boast and yell with unfounded confidence, and I felt bad when teammates complained when I accidentally (allegedly) shot them. But even with the quality acting, everyone is undefined and generic. Dialogue could be swapped among the characters, I don’t think I would even notice.
The levels offer some visual variety, but are also generic. Moving from a desert level to an ice level is a nice change of pace, but little has been done to make them feel novel. Also, many of the on-rails levels begin with characters pointing out the limited visibility, whether in a storm or from snow. Narratively, I like flying through a hurricane in a game like this, but when the elements keep making things hard to see, it feels like a story excuse for poor draw distance. When you do make it through the hailstorm, or the tornado, or the lava flows, the bosses at the end arguably take too long to defeat.
Like its Star Fox 64 inspiration, there are incentives to replay the campaign to chase different challenges and see the alternate paths. Seeing the game to credits is completely doable, but I got frustrated by moments of unfair challenge. Health drops are infrequent, and deaths are often the result of running into a stray enemy, bouncing against walls, or getting overwhelmed by screen-filling danger that I didn’t feel equipped to avoid. It made many defeats feel like the game’s fault rather than my own, which is especially annoying when burning through lives sends you back to the beginning of the campaign.
Bowie and pals’ adventure successfully impersonates the Star Fox 64 experience, but it’s an underwhelming impression. Nostalgic moments and satisfying action appear occasionally, but it pays homage to a fault and doesn’t find space to present its own personality. It has the unfortunate timing of releasing and being compared to this year’s Star Fox on Switch 2 – an excellent remake of Star Fox 64. But even if I did not have that game in my immediate memory, I would be hard-pressed to identify anywhere that it has improved on the genre with design lessons learned since 1997, or even risen to meet the ones that already existed even 30 years ago.