Nintendo has spent nine years pretending Star Fox never happened. That silence ended on Thursday.
Star Fox on Switch 2 Is a Remake That Refuses to Argue With Itself
Star Fox arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 on 25 June 2026, the first entry in the series since 2016, and the most interesting thing about it is what it does not do.
Velan Studios had every excuse to reinvent
Handing Star Fox to Troy-based Velan Studios, the team behind Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit and Knockout City, read like a signal that Nintendo wanted weirdness. Velan builds gimmicks. Radio-controlled karts. VR pinball. Dodgeball as a competitive sport.
Instead the studio pointed all of that machinery at fidelity. Star Fox is built in VIPER, Velan’s in-house engine, which the studio says let it “bring Fox and his crew back in higher fidelity than ever before,” with gameplay at 60fps and every cinematic rendered in real time.
That last detail matters more than it sounds. Star Fox 64 was a game of hard cuts between flying and talking. Rendering the cutscenes live erases the seam.
What is actually new
The additions are careful rather than bold. Campaign Mode keeps the branching paths and adds local co-op, splitting one ship into a Pilot and a Gunner. Challenge Mode layers objectives onto cleared stages. Battle Mode runs 4-vs-4 aerial combat online across three stages, and Mouse-Controlled Targeting maps aiming to the Joy-Con 2.
None of this is a reinvention. All of it is a refusal to repeat Star Fox Zero, which limped onto Wii U in 2016 and split fans with awkward motion controls before the series went into cold storage.
The verdict is warm, not hot
The game sits at 81 on Metacritic and 82 on OpenCritic, with 92 percent of critics recommending it. VGC’s hands-on caught the tension neatly, noting that for all its faithfulness the remake is “fundamentally different from how you remember”.
That is the trade. Nintendo gets a low-risk revival inside the Switch 2 launch window. Velan gets a shot at a marquee franchise. Fans get Corneria again, at 60fps, for $49.99 digital or $59.99 physical.
The barrel roll survived. The question of whether Star Fox has anything new to say is still parked
