Wild Blue Skies review: Just a tribute

There's homage, and then there's what Wild Blue Skies has to offer.

Chuhai Labs’ Wild Blue Skies might be the most brutal victim of bad timing in video game history. For years, a certain sect of the gaming world has yearned for More Star Fox. Nintendo struggled to figure out More Star Fox across multiple console generations. Several indie developers have taken up the challenge over the years to varying degrees of success (and crucially, production value). Meanwhile Nintendo published a glorified ROM hack of Star Fox 2. Wild Blue Skies looked like it had the chance to be the real deal, with its bold, colorful 3D visuals, striking character designs, and cool, distinct theming (air planes instead of space planes! sick!). But before it could reach its August 13 release date (happy birthday to your boy, the author of this review), Nintendo finally smashed the More Star Fox button. Now, you might stop me, saying, “but it’s just Star Fox 64 again!” Sure, that’s true. But here’s the thing.

Wild Blue Skies is also “just Star Fox 64 again.” To a major fault.

We've been here before

With few exceptions, Wild Blue Skies is Star Fox 64 with the serial numbers filed off. Even down to the story’s premise, which may as well be the result of a Star Fox-themed Mad Libs page. Everything you can think of is a facsimile of the Nintendo 64 classic, from the UI, to the basic controls, to the voice direction, to almost entire level layouts, to specific cinematography and dialogue beats. Small details are changed, almost like someone learning how citations and paraphrasing works for the first time in high school English class. Several times playing this game, I thought “oh, there’s Corneria. There’s Fortuna. There’s Bolse. There’s Zoness.” So on and so forth. Even the ending sequences are a few visual elements short of a DMCA issue. It’s kind of astounding, especially with the cosmic gag of having a fresh, new remake of Star Fox 64 to sit this right next to for comparison. This doesn’t have the bad faith energy of a deliberate rip-off mobile game or AI slop or anything like that. But the whole experience reeks of taking the concept of “homage” far beyond its productive limits.

Due to Wild Blue Skies so aggressively inviting direct comparison to its inspiration, its own flaws in relation to the original work are much more apparent, like a red-flashing weak point on a boss vehicle. The planes in this game aren’t nearly as nimble as an Arwing despite having the same controls, with weird lurches during tilt turns and awkward juking during barrel rolls making precision an avoidable challenge. Basic lasers are also noticeably weak, making even the least threatening of enemies feel like bullet sponges. That part is especially compounded by a lack of elegance in this game’s encounter design, in which the screen is often filled with enemies without concerns for spacing, timing, or distance. You get very little time to react to things or choose routing, and a lack of opportunities for healing, power-ups, or defensive maneuvering work at odds with the important conventions of rail shooters.

The forest for the trees

I liken rail shooters to roller coasters. These things take you on a ride, not just to challenge you, but to invite you to an experience. You’re meant to take in the sights and sounds, and engage with each twist and turn as they come into view from afar. Star Fox 64 is such a legendary game because, even when it gets hectic, it nails this balance between arcadey “stuff on the screen” action and the spectacle of it all. You’re given clear rules, and choices to make based on those rules. Enemies are spaced and grouped together in such a way that you can either get through them, or clear them, with score bonuses as a reward to learning and smart play. It doesn’t just vomit stuff at you and expect you to react to everything at once, which Wild Blue Skies all too often does. Perhaps part of this isn’t intentional, as those lasers do be bizarrely weak. Either way, I spent much of these stages scrambling and distracted, having trouble keeping up with and reacting to what was being thrown at me. If I messed up and died, sending my lasers back to level one, I was better off abandoning the run and starting over. Star Fox 64 let me fail forward and try to clutch out a win anyway, even if my wings were blown off. Not here.

All the above doesn’t feel like a difficulty thing. It was more like running into roadblock after roadblock due to things just being… off. There were times when I couldn’t see enemies or bullets coming at me, either due to the bulk of my own ship, other visual elements, the distractions of enemy placement I’ve already described, or what seemed like a game-wide struggle with draw distance (often explained away in dialogue about weather, which was cute until it got on my nerves). My teammates also seemed way too susceptible to being gunned down by random enemies, something I couldn’t do much about, and an antithesis to having keeping your teammates alive being a mechanical element. Some small enemies seemed too accurate for what the level called for (or was calling back to), and moments like the first Not Star Wolf encounter were hamstringed due to my crew being almost all dead already, and I never had a tense moment when my one remaining crew member was being chased down, calling for me to come help them. They were just there for me to chase and shoot regardless of what else was happening.

This is not... the greatest game in the world, oh no

That brings me to another big issue here, which is that Wild Blue Skies is retroactively applying the Rule of Cool to elements from Star Fox 64 that had actual narrative and gameplay purposes. Here, it just feels like stuff that is present because it was in Star Fox 64, but without the purpose being served. Why have teammates if they don’t help me out in any way, or meaningfully interact with the bosses in dogfights? Why have spotlights in the Not Zoness level if they’re just things to shoot at? Why do all range mode levels without somersaults and u-turns? It’s all very surface level stuff, homage work that feels like copying without critical application.

Wild Blue Skies showed a lot of promise, and I was super excited to get my hands on it, especially with all the recent fervor over Star Fox. Rail shooters are a great time, and this particular brand of rail shooter really lends itself well to having fun at different levels of play, across many runs. But after one run, I was ready to be done with this game forever. I wasn’t expecting such uncreative reverence to Star Fox 64, the extent of which wore down my shields further and further which each new, unoriginal stage that went by. The few times Wild Blue Skies showed some ideas of its own were legitimately neat, and showed hints of that promise peeking out from behind the curtain of derivative nostalgia. It made me wonder why the need to just do what was already done before was apparently felt so strongly. We’ve already had a few different versions of Star Fox 64 as it is. We didn’t need another one. Especially not like this.

Wild Blue Skies is available on August 13, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with a Nintendo Switch version coming in the fall. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Wild Blue Skies
5
Pros

• Solid production values with lovely visuals, solid voice acting, and cool art and characters
• High level of polish
• Responsive controls

Cons

• Leans on Star Fox 64 way too much for its own good
• Does said leaning while missing the fundamentals and cohesion
• Balance issues with obscured visuals, weak lasers, haphazard enemy placement, etc