I have to say that my overall feeling about this game is probably best described as "disappointment". It isn't that it was a bad game, really, but that it was just so thoroughly unspectacular. It's certainly my least favorite in the series, falling even behind the original SNES game. It simply did not excel in any area, and even its new elements really didn't feel that exciting and new, with pretty much everything else just feeling recycled and overall uninspired.
The original SNES Star Fox game featured only the Arwing fighters, but Star Fox 64 brought them back and then tossed in the Landmaster tank and the Blue Marine (a submarine of sorts), not to mention that it started off the move to force feedback in console games. Star Fox Assault tossed in the ability to travel on foot armed with weapons and the ability to go from one vehicle/mode to another, like from Arwing to foot to Landmaster.
These new play elements should have made things a bit more interesting, but they didn't. They might have had the level design been a lot better, but the ten levels just seemed a bit on the generic and uninspired side. There were even times that I was stuck wandering around trying to figure out how to get to a target that, according to the radar, I was right next to but yet could not see it (in one case, it turned out to be in a cave underground, but I had no way of knowing that until I accidently stumbled upon it). Actually, traveling on foot blasting with my guns felt more tedious than entertaining, to be quite honest about it.
The levels did seem a bit larger than those of previous games, or at least they seemed so to me, but there were moments where that wasn't a good thing. One of my favorite things from Star Fox 64 was the free-roaming dog fights, particularly with Star Wolf. In a dog fight in Star Fox Assault, however, my rivals were often a great distance from me, forcing me to do a lot of traveling around trying to get to them, which really slowed the pace and made things a lot less interesting. On the plus side, multiplayer returns and with plenty of maps that are unlockable.
The previous Star Fox and Star Fox 64 titles never were big on storyline, and Assault seems to have made some effort of tossing in a few more story elements, but none of it was really interesting and made even less so by the horrible voice acting. One of the neat things about Star Fox 64 had been all the chatter throughout the game, with hundreds of lines of voice acting, which was especially neat for something packed onto the limited space of N64 game carts. In Star Fox Assault, however, the voice acting was terrible and lines were poorly written to the point of being cheesy. Audio further suffered by having forgettable tunes throughout. Though some familiar classics return, their remixes were bland and, like the rest of the game, uninspired. What new tunes do appear are even more bland and unmoving. This games sounds just as great with the television muted as it does with the sound on.
It isn't just the audio that stunk, but the graphics weren't overly impressive, either. It isn't that they were bad, but it just didn't boast anything noteworthy and didn't even sport any graphic bells and whistles found in other major GameCube titles. This is especially evident, I felt, in the world of Sauria, which returns from Star Fox Adventures. Adventures, while not going over too well with many gamers, did look wonderful, but the world looks much less amazing when it returned for Assault.
One last time, it isn't that the game was bad, but I think it would have been much better had it come from Nintendo's capable hands.
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