I'm not really diggin' it.  Call me crazy, but I wouldn't mind if Nintendo gave us an upgraded version of StarFox 64 for our DSes.  And after playing Command for a little while, I'm starting to wish they would have.

The problem for me so far is that they've made this game too story-driven.  With a talking fox, a giant talking toad, an oversized old hare, and a skinny, bipedal, nigh-wingless falcon as the main characters, it's difficult to take them as seriously as this game's story might want you to.  The more the game points out that the main character in StarFox is, well, a fox, the more it makes me think "why's this dude a fox?"  Point is, I never thought about any of this before, because the gameplay was so good.  That could only mean. . .

Yeah, the gameplay this time around is bland to the max.  It's so bland, if vanilla tasted it vanilla would say "man, that's blaaaa-aaand."  In the days of good StarFox, you pretty much just got in an Arwing and soared through levels picking up powerups in hard-to-reach areas and tagging lines of enemies with your lasers.  In this StarFox, missions start with an advance-wars-esque map on which you have to plot your characters' courses to engage nearby enemies.  Said enemies make a beeline for Great Fox (your mothership), and you must destroy them to protect it.  Powerups like missiles and refuel canisters dot the air, and you can pick them up as you go on about tracking down the bad guys.  When you and an enemy collide, you finally get to fight them StarFox style.  Only now, it's boring.

On the overworld map are these little icons that represent certain numbers of enemy ships.  So, once you engage them, you only have to shoot down three or four enemies, pick up their "cores" (a spinning, floating star they leave behind when they 'splode--has something to do with the boring, pointless plot), and you're done.  You then go back to the overworld screen and do it again.  For reals.

I'm sure once I get further into the game it'll be more challenging than all this, but the truth is that at this point, I don't even want to get further into the game.  Besides being too plot-driven for its own good (which opens the game up to a bunch of eye-rollingly trite dialogue...), the gameplay itself is only so-so. 

You do everything except shoot with the stylus.  Every other button, (save for start, select, and power) shoots--even all four directions on the d-pad.  The controls are comparable to the FPS feel of Metroid Prime: Hunters.  There's a touch-button for doing loop-de-loops, another for doing the famous StarFox U-turn, and another "B" icon that is probably supposed to shoot bombs, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. 

To hit the brakes, you have to double-tap on the bottom of the touch screen, causing the ship to slow down and quickly drop in altitude, and to speed up you double-tap the top of the screen.  Again, this causes you to speed up and suddenly climb, so you have to get used to double-tapping then recentering your stylus in order to keep your bearings.

Barrel-rolling is a problem, since performing it requires you to quickly scratch back and forth with the stylus.  If not for the fact that moving the stylus on the touch screen is how you steer, that wouldn't be so annoying.  But, thanks to this needless mechanic, barrel-rolling and accurately shooting/flying is an excercise in futility.  Why didn't they just make the triggers do the barrel-rolls and let the direction of spin be determined by which way you're turning?  Do we really need ten "shoot" buttons?

Don't run out  and go buy this, especially if you're looking to relive the glory days of SF 64.  It's a pretty okay game with a few hints of fun here and there, but it's shaping up to be marginally fun at best.  StarFox might be better left as a memory.