Ask anyone who played last year's Star Wars: Rebel Strike for GameCube what they thought of the game, and the answer is likely to be the same every time: the aerial battle scenes were amazing, but the ground-based missions were terrible.

It looks like history may repeat itself sooner than later on Nintendo's console, because the limited-play version of Star Fox 2 on display at E3 suffers from the exact same problem. In Nintendo's two-level demo, the space battle section was absolutely incredible, while the part that featured hero Fox McCloud on foot was... not incredible. "Underwhelming" would be a better word. "Frustrating" would work as well.

Star Fox 2 has had a long, convoluted history. The original version was slated to be a Super NES game making use of an enhanced upgrade of the SuperFX 3D chip that made the original so eye-popping at the time. Somewhere along the way, Nintendo decided not to release the game (although a nearly-completed version has surfaced illegally on the Internet); some of its features were eventually rolled into Star Fox 64. The game currently being touted as Star Fox 2 is a Namco/Nintendo venture that draws a lot of inspiration from the abortive original but cranks all the dials way up to the high end.

There's no question that Star Fox 2 is a fine-looking game. The space battle demo opens with the sort of large-scale combat sequence that that developers have been trying to capture in video game form for years -- Raystorm did a pretty decent job of it back in the chunky days of the early PlayStation, and Factor 5's Star Wars games aren't too shabby, either. But this looks nothing short of amazing -- enormous capital ships engage one another with streams of laser fire blazing through space as smaller fighter craft wind their way in and out of the melee. There's a definite Star Fox feel to the Robotech-like madness; the attacking craft will be familiar to fans, and of course the radio is constantly buzzing with your wingmen's chatter (wingwoman's, too -- Krystal from Star Fox Adventures takes Peppy's place as the fourth member of Fox McCloud's squadron). As soon as you enter the fray you're saving Slippy's squealing amphibian arse. In other words: classic Star Fox.

Combat control in space is straightforward and intuitive; your standard blaster is augmented by a powerful charged beam that's nearly enough to take down a bulk cruiser in a single blast. Also on tap is a limited supply of area-effect bombs and the traditional rolling evasion maneuver. It's all standard stuff, but it's accomplished with an amazing level of detail, polish and sense of scope.

Were Star Fox 2 nothing but aerial battles, it would be pure classic quality. Unfortunately, there seems to be an equal emphasis on ground-based action, which doesn't come off quite as well. To be sure, what's being shown is a far sight better than last year's demo -- the control is vastly better, and the epic atmosphere of the space battles carries over to the ground level. Swarms of fightercraft hover in the sky and swoop to harrass Fox, who can choose to fight either on shank's mare or with the aid of a battle tank. The environment is somewhat interactive, with some pleasantly destructible bits to keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, the ground section just isn't as fun as the aerial portion of the demo. Your squadron mates bark out instructions which seem largely irrelevant; worse, you're frequently given commands or advice which can't immediately be acted upon. The constantly respawning enemies slowly chip away at your stamina, and massively overpowering weapons can make short work of Fox. Strangely enough, his life bar seems to be about the same whether or not he's currently in a vehicle; the demo's end boss can wipe out Fox in three hits, and it can wipe out his tank in three hits. So it's either a preposterously weak tank, or Fox is wearing his armor-plated fur.

As annoying as these oddities and inconsistencies are, the biggest issue with the ground stage is that it lacks the clear focus of the space battle. It's easy to become bogged down running around and trying to dodge the endless enemy hordes. It's also possible to exit the base complex in which you've become trapped by jumping over the wall, at which point you're instructed to return to the battle. The fighting doesn't follow you outside the base's perimeter, despite the abundance of air-based enemies; if you do stray outside the combat zone, you're forced to run across a dull landscape for several minutes with nothing to do but look for a door through which you can return to combat. Boring, and a huge letdown next to the high-energy space battles.

On the plus side, controlling a tank is nearly as much fun as controlling the Arwing. The multi-modal gameplay is handled competently; moving from spaceship to foot to tank is perfectly natural, and each style of action works via a comfortable and reasonably intuitive control interface. If anything, the modality doesn't go far enough; SF2 would probably work better if the vehicle portions were third-person sequences while the on-foot sections took place from a first-person perspective. Sure, it would inspire complaints of "Halo clone," but it's probably better to have a good game than a different game. As it is, the whole thing seems like it almost works but for a few crucial design flaws.

The ground action comes off more effectively in split-screen battle mode, which allows up to four people to go about the important business of deathmatching via foot, tank or Arwing fighter. It might seem unbalanced to pit a little guy against a spaceship, but there's actually a rock-paper-scissors balance beneath the action. The footsoldiers are vulnerable to tanks, the tanks to aircraft, and the aircraft are somewhat weak against footsoldiers. Of course, it's most fun to take the control yoke of an Arwing and strafe your foes into oblivion, but the vehicles are ultimately tools, and the battle ends only when you're defeated on foot.

Overall, the demo gives the impression that not enough thought has been put into the design of the foot-based mission. It's possible that Nintendo has simply chosen a poor stage to demonstrate the gameplay and that subsequent stages are less like slogging tedium and more like real action. But what's been shown so far suggests that, like Rebel Strike, Star Fox 2 is a phenomenal space shooter being dragged down by its split personality. There's enormous potential here, though, so let's hope Nintendo and Namco can work out the kinks before the game's release.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in 1UP.