6/30/2021

Review of F-Zero Climax
Developed by: SUZAK
2004, Game Boy Advance

Menu select screen.

I like the style in F-Zero Climax. The menu select screen looks like an old casino. The portraits in the character select screen are cartoonish. I love the 3D cars moving around amongst the 2D backgrounds with large, detailed objects.

The driving feels different than other F-Zero games I've played. In F-Zero X, for the Nintendo 64, you tried not to drift. The faster you went, the more challenging it was to intuit the razor's edge sized margin between drifting and not drifting. Since you always wanted to go faster, it felt like a fun tension pulling in your brain. In F-Zero Climax, your car looks like it's always drifting, but I don't think it slows you down at all. It makes the driving feel less precise or deliberate than in the original F-Zero, but in place of that, F-Zero Climax has a side attack ability you can use to make turns.

Drifting, big ships in background

To side attack, you tap the L or R button twice. That makes your vehicle jolt to one side and can damage any car next to you. If you side attack multiple times while you're in a turn, you'll be able to keep most of your speed and make a sharper turn than normal. It seems to always be a better option than letting go of the acceleration or braking before a turn. Constant, semi-requisite side attacking makes the driving unique compared to other games.

A unique control scheme in a driving game reminds me of Mario Kart DS. You can play that game like any other Mario Kart, or you can use snaking. You snake by alternating between drifting left and right in succession. When you snake in that game, it gives your car a physically impossible boost of speed and lets you go twice as fast as anyone else.

Snaking back and forth across a Mario Kart DS track gives the driving a fun, snowboarding kind of feeling. I'm not sure side-attack-turning in F-Zero Climax feels as fun or as interesting to pull off, although I do like that it makes you play the game in its own, particular way. Instead, it's a little closer to the peculiarities of the controls in F-Zero GX, on the GameCube. One example from F-Zero GX is when you hold the L and R buttons down at the same time. All F-Zero games use L and R for making sharper turns without breaking your traction, but it decreases your speed. In F-Zero GX they work the same way, but you can additionally hold both buttons down at the same time and it lets you turn even easier than using L or R alone, and you lose much less speed. It doesn't make intuitive sense, and it makes the turning feel weightless. In a similar way to side-attack-turning, the game is made less interesting because it negates the other ways of turning and replaces them with one that doesn't feel as good.

Some of the tracks are too busy, and it's difficult to understand the best way through them at a glance. And that's another way I think it's similar to F-Zero GX, where they tried to do too much with some tracks and they end up confusing more than fun.