Much like the original two titles, Star Fox Zero isn’t meant to be played through once. A series of branching paths and alternate encounters based on the path you take open up over the course of a playthrough, giving the experience a solid, if limited aspect of replayability after your defeat Andross for the first time. It also encourages multiple playthroughs in single levels in order to try and get all three medals each stage has to offer, which can be obtained by both scouring the map to find them and by reaching a score threshold. Playing through a level again becomes more detail-oriented, trying to discern where the path splits and how you can access different areas than you did initially. It’s not really complex, but it does add a layer of life to the experience that would likely feel a little too short if it wasn’t there.

The game also adds a few levels over the course of the experience that call you to pilot two other kinds of vehicles: one an entirely new addition to the series, and one being a new variant of the Arwing itself. The first is the Gyrowing, a slow-moving helicopter-like vehicle used in a couple of stealth-based missions. In it, you can drop a small robot to hack doors or other devices, and the pace and general clunkiness I encountered with it made those missions my least favorite of the campaign. Thankfully, for future playthroughs you can unlock its abilities for use with the Arwing, which is especially helpful in its new mode introduced in Zero: the Walker. Inspired by a similar concept from the unreleased Star Fox 2, you can engage a bipedal walking mode when needing to traverse chasms or corridors inside bases or larger spacecraft, and while the controls are more well-suited to flight, the Walker sections were generally far more fun than the Gyrowing segments.

Overall, Star Fox Zero tries to bring a lot of new additions to the table of the wider Star Fox series, and the gameplay element of this title feels far closer in-line with what a series fan wants – and indeed expects – from a game with Star Fox in its title. Whether these elements add up for you personally is, of course, going to be solely up to you. For what it’s worth, though, this generally hit me in the right places.