There's three levels...
Needless to say, the game does provide for fans of the series (the people who are rating it so high) there's a story mode, effective gameplay, and Wi-Fi play as well. The story mode even has a multitude of endings, more on that later.
Lately, I've noticed that none of my reviews have broken the '8' barrier, I believe it's not possible to rewrite reviews though, because after giving the game Pirates a second chance, I fell in love with it.
But I have to say, yet again, this game deserves the score given by Gamespot, maybe even less.
But let's start with some positive points, so as to make sure everyone knows that I honestly gave this game a try. First, the controls are quite unique, and depend heavily on the stylus. It's almost like you're controlling the Arwing with a mouse. Another cool thing about this game, is that you get to control other ships besides that of Fox, and surprisingly, I thought just about every other ship in the game to be better then Foxs'. Even Slippys'!
The story is straight forward, apparently I missed some details in the last two Star Fox games, but whatever. Once you beat the game, you are given the option to go back choose different paths, thus creating different endings.
But what do I not like about the game?
The level design.
Gone is the rail shooting design I know from the 64 game, this time, every level is an open area that you go around accomplishing goals within a set amount of time. This would be interesting in some ways, but what happens is you repeat the same three missions through out the whole game, it's idiotic. The missions are, kill a certain kind of ship, stop a missile, and do a barrel roll through the alien mother ships, that's it. Yeah, you're not shooting down the same guys all the time, but it's very redundant.
What I liked about the levels from previous games was that the levels built up the tension as they went along, sure it was free, and you were always on a set path. But it was cool flying through an enemy fleet blasting their battleships as they went by. This time, you're just flying in circles looking for who you're supposed to kill.
The Missiles are always the same, and the mother ships are always the same, towards the end, every now and then, you'll fight a boss, and all you ever have to do is simply not let off your lasers.
The Wi-fi is also very simplistic, there's a free mode, and a ranking mode, the first few times, I never found any ranked players, once I did, I realize, it's not that great. The object is, of course, to shoot over players, but that's not where the points come from, the points are from collecting the stars they drop, which, anyone can get. It doesn't matter if you have all the kills in the game as long as someone can get to the kill before you, it's totally lame, and there's no other mode of gameplay. At least Mario Kart required you to have some degree of skill, and plus, on top of that, Mario Kart allowed you to customize an avatar, I've not noticed that in this version.
And another thing, the story is crap. I swear it was written by a twelve year old doing terrible internet fan fiction, and that's saying something because just about all internet fan fiction is terrible.
As for the visuals and such? Well, you're not going to enjoy any of the levels, as you would have in the previous titles. Not to say they look ugly, it's just that in the older games, it was like, "Hey, check out this awesome city you're in," in this game it's like, "Hey, um... Yeah,".
The voices are gone, back in favor of the character sound effects, and cutscenes are filled in by poorly drawn furry characters.
I don't mean to be harsh, I just found this game to be not all that great. I'm definately trading this for Mega Man.