Ex-Zodiac is what you wish Star Fox was actually like

Ex-Zodiac is a modern retro Star Fox. And dear Lord, if you grew up with the Super FX chip, you’re going to want to spend some time with this one.

One of my favourite things about today’s gaming scene is the rise of “modern retro” projects. These work on the principle that if we have more powerful technology available to us today, what might games look like if we leveraged that technology to make them play and run better without necessarily making them look more technologically advanced?

Most of the time, the modern retro movement takes aim for 2D titles such as shoot ’em ups, platformers and top-down adventures, and we’ve seen numerous excellent examples of these over the years. Just recently, we’ve looked at Castle in the Clouds, Midnight Castle Succubus and Sword of Succubus, for example: three games that adopt a deliberately retro look about them, yet blend this classic aesthetic with both modern game design principles and the kind of adult content developers wouldn’t have been able to get away with in a commercial console release back in the 8- and 16-bit eras. Not in the west, anyway.

Ex-Zodiac, meanwhile, takes an approach to modern retro that is not quite as frequently seen, but which is nonetheless welcome any time it shows up: a modern take on an old-school, low-poly 3D title. In the past few years, we’ve seen some great successes in this regard, such as M2’s amazing update of Virtua Racing for the Sega Ages series, the enjoyable arcadey action of Hotshot Racing, and the classic Top Gear-inspired fun of Horizon Chase Turbo.

Those are all racing games, though; what we want is some good old-fashioned blasting action, and that’s exactly what Ex-Zodiac provides. Using the original Star Fox for Super NES as its main template and incorporating a few features from its Nintendo 64 follow-up, what we have here is a wonderful example of how classic game aesthetics, mechanics and structures are truly timeless — and how modern technology can really make them shine.

In Ex-Zodiac, you take on the role of a pilot named Kyuu, who is attempting to take back the Sanzaru star system from the clutches of the terrorists known as Zodiac. There’s a strong environmental message that runs throughout the game; whenever you encounter Zodiac, they are inevitably pillaging a planet inhabited by the player-protagonist’s ape-like race for its natural resources using heavy machinery, but an interesting angle is applied to this setup by making all the members of Zodiac anthropomorphic animals.

With that in mind, one could argue that there’s a sense of Zodiac representing the natural world taking its revenge on humans (or “the apes” in this case) — certainly a timely and topical subject for a game. Regardless, the members of Zodiac very much want to kill you, and they’re certainly not above using ridiculously sized pieces of industrial hardware to do so.

Each level in Ex-Zodiac unfolds much like one in Star Fox on the Super NES. There’s a linear progression through a level that is on rails, with you having freedom to fly up, down, left and right while the game pushes you ever forwards. You have limited control of your speed with boost and brake buttons, but it’s not possible to stop or turn around; it’s the 3D equivalent of a traditional vertically or horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up.

You can attack with your lasers (which can be upgraded with collectible power-ups) or lock on to multiple enemies at once with homing missiles. You also have a limited number of devastating bombs to make use of in particularly sticky situations — these can even be used to great effect in boss fights, but are quite hard to come by, so be sure to think before letting one loose!

There are a couple of checkpoints in each level, represented in a direct homage to Star Fox by being rings you have to fly through, and these allow you to restart at the halfway point of the level or just before the boss if you happen to lose all your shields and die. The checkpoints also restore your shields a certain amount, so it’s important to hit them if you’ve taken a few hits along the way.

The levels themselves are varied and imaginative, even within the limitations of the rail-shooter structure. The first stage has you flying through a low-poly cityscape similar to Corneria in Star Fox; the second features an ice planet with a strongly contrasting lava cave section; the third takes you through an asteroid belt; the fourth takes you to a desert world, complete with a pyramid full of traps that you fly inside of at one point.

The nice thing about the more dramatic sequences in Ex-Zodiac is that they all feel like things you know Nintendo would have wanted to include in Star Fox if it had been possible to get them working at an acceptable frame rate. There’s also some clear inspiration being drawn from the conventions of 2D shooters along the way, particularly with interesting miniboss-style enemies that occasionally show up for you to deal with before you can progress. In other words, it’s the perfect example of a modern retro title: a game that carries with it the look and feel of a classic game, but which uses subsequent developments in game design and technology to make it even better.

And boy, Ex-Zodiac really commits to that classic look and feel with a delightful array of options to customise your experience. Not only can you choose to play the game in deliberately pixelated, low-resolution mode, you can also optionally artificially limit the frame rate to 15fps for that true Super FX experience. At the other end of the spectrum, the game will quite happily whizz along at 60fps with blissfully sharp-edged high-definition low-polygon objects — or indeed any combination of settings that provides the perfect balance of playability, being aesthetically pleasing and tickling your nostalgia.

The whole thing is complemented by an amazing soundtrack by +TEK that really gives a distinctive feel to each stage. This is one of the areas where Ex-Zodiac’s developers haven’t felt the need to be deliberately constrained by past conventions; while the compositional style certainly wouldn’t sound out of place in classic shoot ’em ups, the overall sound quality, instrumentation, texture and overall orchestration of the songs is absolutely wonderful — with the desert stage’s Shantae-esque Arabian-inspired beats being a particular highlight.

On top of all this, if you happen to find hidden “Data” objects within each stage, you’ll discover that the game is not only a loving homage to Star Fox, it also has a considerable amount of appreciation for Sega’s classic Space Harrier also, with its bonus stages providing a delightfully smooth and slick take on the “3D flying man shooter” formula. Rather delightfully, the song name on the soundtrack for these stages is “Data Harrier”.

Overall, the game is paced well. It’s a tad tougher than Star Fox, but that’s no bad thing, because for all those classic games’ many wonderful features, they weren’t the most difficult games in the world — and the original game in particular lacked much in the way of incentive to replay beyond simply experiencing it again.

Ex-Zodiac, meanwhile, includes a fully featured scoring system that rewards rapid combos of enemies being destroyed. There are also significant bonuses to be attained at the end of each stage depending on the overall proportion of enemies you managed to destroy, the amount of damage you took and the time it took you to take down the boss — and there are letter-grade rankings to pursue as you take aim for a perfect performance.

On the difficulty front, most of the added challenge factor comes from the fact that it feels a bit harder to see and judge where shots are coming from than in the original Star Fox. Shots tend to move quite a bit faster than in Nintendo’s game, and many enemies — particularly bosses — have the ability to fire large projectiles that home in on your craft to a limited degree.

On my first playthrough of Ex-Zodiac, I felt a bit put off by this — but then it occurred to me that the game had simply been designed a little bit differently from its obvious inspiration. Whereas in Star Fox, many bosses could be defeated simply by constantly firing and occasionally jinking out of the way of incoming projectiles, Ex-Zodiac’s boss fights feel like they include much more clearly defined phases, some of which are designed to be nothing but periods of time where you need to dodge, rather than attack.

Once you get your head around this, the game becomes much more enjoyable — and it also stands out as being something more than a simple attempt to ape Star Fox with modern tech. While it’s very obvious that the original intention of the Ex-Zodiac project was “let’s make Star Fox”, it’s also clear that at some point along the line, the developers decided to take things a bit further and give the game its own clear sense of mechanical and structural identity also.

Ex-Zodiac is out now in Early Access on Steam. The current version will set you back £7.99 (£7.19 for its launch window) and contains six levels, plus six bonus stages. The aim is for Early Access to last for a year, with the finished version likely doubling in price on its release in 2023. The finished version will also feature at least 12 stages to play through, including hidden stages and branching paths, just for that true Star Fox experience.

Whether or not you want to jump on board with Ex-Zodiac right now at the time of writing will likely depend on your feelings about Early Access — but I will say that what’s already present in the game provides a satisfying and complete-feeling arcade-style experience. It’s a very promising start to something that will hopefully become very special in about a year’s time — so we’ll have to return to it when Early Access is over and done with and see if it truly lives up to its inspiration’s legacy!

Ex-Zodiac is available now on Steam.

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