The Best Star Fox in 30 Years Is a Remake of the Last Good One

Star Fox returned on June 25, 2026, exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2, and it is the best-reviewed entry the series has had in nearly thirty years.

It is also a remake of Star Fox 64.

Those two facts sit uneasily together, and the space between them is the most revealing thing about how Nintendo now handles a franchise it is not sure about.

The numbers

Developed by Velan Studios and published by Nintendo, Star Fox landed at 81 on Metacritic across 128 critic reviews, with an aggregate around 82 and 84 on OpenCritic. The user score sits at 8.2.

Within the series, that places it second only to Star Fox 64 itself — the 1997 game it is remaking.

Critics converged on the same praise: gorgeous 4K visuals, tight controls, and a faithful recreation of the original. Nintendo's own framing was a "cinematic take" on the classic, expanding the level design, story and gameplay, with new character designs.

At $49.99 digitally and $59.99 physically, it is also priced below a full modern release, which matters to the verdict.

The criticism that lands

A vocal minority raised an objection that deserves more than dismissal: faithful is precisely the problem.

Star Fox had been dormant for roughly a decade. When a series finally returns after that long, the return is expected to justify the wait — to say something about why the franchise still matters. What arrived is a polished, expanded version of a game from 1997.

The counter-argument is real: Star Fox 64 is genuinely excellent, the on-rails shooter is an underserved genre, and most players under thirty have never had a good way to experience it. Rebuilding it properly at 4K with modern controls is a legitimate thing to do.

But "we made the good old one again, very well" is a strange answer to a decade of silence.

Why Nintendo chose safety

The risk aversion makes sense once you remember what happened last time.

Star Fox Zero, the previous attempt, tried something genuinely new — motion-based aiming built around the Wii U GamePad's second screen — and the control scheme was widely rejected. It is the entry that effectively ended the series for ten years.

Set against that, the 2026 approach reads as deliberate. Take the entry nobody disputes, rebuild it with modern technology, and do not experiment with the thing that broke it last time. The review scores say that worked.

It is worth noticing who built it. Nintendo did not hand Star Fox to an internal EPD team — it went to Velan Studios, an external developer previously known for Knockout City and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. That is a capable studio, and it is not the assignment you give when you are betting the franchise's future on a new direction.

The whole project is structured as a low-risk test: known-good design, external team, sub-full price, launch-window exclusive for new hardware.

What it is actually for

The commercial logic becomes clearer when you look at the timing rather than the content.

Star Fox arrived in the Switch 2's launch window, and it is exactly the kind of software new hardware needs: visually striking, short, easy to demonstrate, and instantly legible in a thirty-second trailer. An on-rails shooter at 4K with tight controls sells a console in a way a sprawling RPG cannot, because you can see the improvement immediately.

Nintendo has done this repeatedly. Early-generation hardware gets a technically impressive, mechanically straightforward title that shows what the machine does. That the game happens to be a beloved franchise revival is a bonus for the marketing, not the brief.

Which reframes the "is this enough?" argument. Judged as a franchise revival, it is cautious. Judged as a Switch 2 showcase, it is very well chosen.

The pattern across the industry

There is a broader context worth noting, because this is not just a Nintendo habit in 2026.

Halo: Campaign Evolved rebuilt Combat Evolved in Unreal Engine 5 and shipped in July. The Witcher 3 got a full remaster announced for September. The most confident-looking releases of this year are frequently games that already existed.

That is a rational response to an expensive, risk-averse market. A remake has a known audience, a known design, and a fraction of the uncertainty of a new title — and in a year when component costs and development budgets are both under pressure, certainty is worth paying for.

The cost is that a year full of excellent remakes is still a year light on new ideas.

Should you buy it?

Yes, if you have a Switch 2 and have never played Star Fox 64. You are getting a genuinely great game, rebuilt well, at $49.99. The 8.2 user score is not an accident.

Yes, if you loved the original and want to play it again with modern controls and 4K visuals, with expanded levels and story. It is faithful, and that is the point.

Probably not, if you were waiting ten years for the series to go somewhere new. This does not go anywhere new. It goes back, carefully, with better lighting.

The takeaway

The second-best-reviewed Star Fox game ever made is a remake of the best-reviewed one. Nintendo proved the series still works by rebuilding the entry nobody ever doubted, using an external studio, at a reduced price, in a console launch window.

That is a success on its own terms and an evasion on the franchise's. Star Fox is demonstrably still good. Whether Nintendo has any idea what to do with it next is exactly as unanswered as it was in 2016.