Outside of some F-Zero related DLC in Mario Kart 8, the existence of the F-Zero hasn’t been mentioned much in the last couple of years. Sure, Captain Falcon is a famous character in the Smash Bros games, but not everyone knows who he exactly is. While I would rather have heard some news about a possible new F-Zero game, Nintendo has recently released F-Zero X for the Wii U Virtual Console.
F-Zero X, originally released on the N64, is the sequel to the successful F-Zero racing game. The gameplay is basically the same as any other arcade-style racing game, with a few differences. You race against 29(!) competitors on race tracks that feature hills, loops, tunnels and even corkscrews. Your hovercar is equipped with an energy meter, which serves two purposes. Firstly, it acts like a health meter, showing you how much more damage your hovercar can take before it’s wrecked. Damage can be inflicted by smashing your car against an opponent, or by attacking said opponent with a spin attack. Secondly, the energy stored in your car can be used as a speed boost. If your energy meter is depleted, you can replenish it by driving over energy strips, located around each track. The more time you spend in these strips, the more energy you receive.
There are in total 30 characters you can choose from, with each of them having their own unique hovercar. Every hovercar has different stats for body, boost and grip. You can also adjust the balance between speed and acceleration before every race. There are four difficulty levels: novice, standard, expert and master. I would recommend to newcomers to play on the standard setting since F-Zero X can be a challenging game. The AI controlled opponents can be pretty aggressive and receive an overpowered stat boost in the Master difficulty level. The heaviest and slowest opponent will overtake you with ease in this difficulty level, even if you have picked the fastest hovercar. While this can be frustrating, it’s not impossible to win races on this difficulty. The game encourages you to play aggressively and attack other players, instead of simply overtaking them. The key to success in F-Zero X is to hit every energy strip and eliminate every opponent as quickly as possible.
Visuals and sound
Visually, the game doesn’t look that impressive, even for a N64 title. Textures on the 3D tracks aren’t detailed and look muddy. The background scenery is mostly empty and consists out of single, bright colour. However, the low-quality graphics make the game run at a fast and stable framerate. Seeing 30 hovercars racing against each other at high speeds in a fast framerate is a joy to watch on screen. The soundtrack and sound effects fit the game perfectly. The only issue; it does tend to have is that overlapping sound effects, his can sound annoying since it becomes a blurred mess.
Two big issues
On the technical sides of things, two issues must be mentioned. The first one being the rumble function. Whenever you do something else than driving in a straight line, the rumble goes off like crazy. The second and biggest issue is that the joystick controls suffer from deadzones. For those who don’t know what deadzones are, these are the areas of movement on the joystick that the game doesn’t recognize. If you want to steer your hovercar, you have to move the joystick completely to the right or to the left. This makes it very hard to take hard corners in the more difficult tracks. The worst part about this is that this problem occurs on every type of controller this game supports. Racing games have to have tight controls in order to play the game like it’s meant to be played. Especially fast paced racing games like F-Zero X, in which the slightest steering error can result in losing the race. Hopefully this issue will be fixed by Nintendo, but as of right now it is still a major issue in the game.
Conclusion
F-Zero X is a fun and challenging racing game, that deserves to be played by fans of the arcade-styled racing genre. The WiiU version, however, is flawed by the deadzone issue it has. Losing a race because the controls don’t work is incredibly frustrating and simply make the game not fun to play. The score below is focussed on the WiiU version, other versions of F-Zero X don’t have the deadzone issue so their score would be several points higher.
