Originally posted July 26th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming forums

Title: Strike Force Foxx

System: Nintendo 3DS (eShop)

Price: 4.99

Release date: 7/17/2014

The main game/story

After playing this for a while, I ended up finding out this game takes a lot of inspiration from the classic arcade game Choplifter. It plays almost exactly the same, but with a few slight differences and it has a little story to go with it too. You control Captain Raymond Foxx, as you go through numerous locations to rescue hostages from an evil organization, while also trying to learn more about how to ultimately stop them. With the help of your best friend named Gunner, as well as many other characters, you try to stop the evil group. It’s a basic story, and even though there are some cutscenes they aren’t too spectacular.

Graphics

The menus are as simple as they can get, but they are easy to navigate, and for the most part, work all right. The cutscenes have some great character artwork, and they really do look nice. The problem is, there isn’t any voicework in these cutscenes, and they aren’t well presented at times either, so they don’t really work that great.

As for the game itself, it looks very blocky, at times like an N64 game. However, the enemies, bases, and hostages are easily distinguishable (Though they have no faces!), which makes them work OK.

Music and sound effects:

Sadly, the music in this game isn’t that great. In fact, most of the time it just was “there”, meaning that it was just more or less stock music picked to give you a background theme. There were one or two tracks that stood out and sounded alright, but for the most part they were just mediocre.

The sound effects also are a bit bad. For example, whenever you approach a hostage, they will call out “Over here!” or “help!” but in a tone that sounds like the voice actors were bored and reading the lines for the first time. It doesn’t start a sense of danger or action, either. The same thing goes for when you drop the hostages off! They usually say “Thanks for the ride!” as if nothing happened to them, even though they could have easily died. It just doesn’t work.

Gameplay

As mentioned before, the game is pretty much a clone of Choplifter. You go to rescue hostages while taking out enemies and their bases in order to keep the hostages safe. It’s simple, but at times challenging or frustrating. One thing that you can do besides firing your weapon at the enemy, is land on them with the helicopter itself. But be careful, you can shoot and land on the hostages too, killing them. Most of your hostage deaths will happen this way, either because of bad placement or because you didn’t turn your helicopter properly in time for them to get on. They CAN be killed by the enemies, but most of the time they won’t even be harmed.

The good news that saves this game from complete mediocrity is the fact that you get ranked based on your performance. If you go through the level fast without killing any hostages and getting the enemy bases destroyed, you can get up to three stars. These stars allow you to get weapon upgrades, which can make your helicopter perform even better. This allows for a lot of replay value, and with miiverse support you can even share your best scores on miiverse!

Conclusion

In the end, Strike Force Foxx is a very mediocre game. It isn’t that good or bad, and is just inbetween. But if you are a fan of Choplifter, or a high score fan, you’ll definitely enjoy this game, due to the high replay value despite the short length of the story. But being at the same price as any NES VC game, this is hard to recommend over something such as Star Soldier or Super C. I give Strike Force Foxx a 6 out of 10.

Thanks to Big John games for the review code.