Welcome back to Save State, where we ruminate on things in the long past. A long time ago, back when I still lived with my grandparents, I enjoyed showing my Grandpa new games that I was enjoying at the time. We didn’t have a lot of money and the games were expensive, so a lot of times it would be me showing him the same titles multiple times for months on end. One time he came to my room thinking I was watching a movie, only to see a Nintendo 64 controller in my hand—I was playing Star Fox 64. Back in those days, it was still relatively uncommon to have games with large amounts of voiced dialogue, so even just hearing, “You’ll never defeat Androoooooss!!” was impressive to my ten-year-old self.
To this day, I’ve never been able to find a good replacement for Star Fox 64. It was special in a myriad of ways, being both an accessible rail shooter but also challenging enough that it was worth revisiting time and again for multiple years. It was one you’d play over and over again just to try and do different routes and score medals to unlock Fox With Sunglasses (unlocks were simpler back then too). Even Nintendo’s own efforts to revive Star Fox like Assault, Command, and Zero, were ones that I had enjoyed to some extent, but always had some drawbacks that made me continue to pine for Star Fox 64.
Clearly, I haven’t been the only one missing Star Fox 64, where a bunch of space creatures take on cybernetically enhanced beings all across a solar system. Whisker Squadron: Survivor, a title I found entirely by chance and purchased on a whim on Steam, isn’t that spiritual successor to Star Fox 64 that I have been dreaming of for over 15 years. However, what I did find is an amazing roguelite that does a lot more than I ever expected it to, given its price tag of 15 bucks. This is an on-rails space shooter roguelite with leveling mechanics to augment your ship, and it’s better than it has any right to be.
Story isn’t what Whisker Squadron: Survivor is primarily concerned with. It literally starts with your character waking up, being told to “Get in the robot, Shinji,” and then is immediately thrust into battle against combat machines that are controlled by an artificial intelligence called The Swarm. You’re given a pretty brief tutorial of how to fire your weapons as well as how to boost and barrel roll. That’s right, you can do a barrel roll in this game, and it functions just like you’d expect in that it deflects enemy projectiles should you time it right, just like Star Fox’s G-Diffuser system.
Both shooting, boosting, and rolling to deflect shots use your energy gauge, which quickly recharges when you’re not shooting. This effectively means you need to avoid shooting so much you completely empty the meter because you’ll be left without any defensive options to protect yourself against Swarm homing projectiles. Thankfully, you do have a little bit of shields which can absorb small impacts and regenerates automatically, but damage done to your hull needs to be recovered by hitting up repair shop nodes, using the default pilot’s ability to recover some health by completing a stage, or leveling up and taking an augment that lets you recover health by doing specific actions.
As you defeat enemies in Whisker Squadron: Survivor, they drop blue crystals called scrap that you can pick up by flying through, which levels up your ship and gives you the choice of 3 different augmentations. Each augment gives you bonuses, some are as simple as powering up your primary or secondary weapons, while others may be significantly more involved. My first successful run was mainly due to the fact that I received an augment that recovered ship health when I landed critical hits, which combined with the starting pilot’s ability to recover some health after clearing a stage, and meant I was beginning most stages with full health, even if the last level I cleared put me through the ringer.
As of this writing, there’s only 3 different pilots and 3 different ships, and each has their own benefits. Whisker Squadron: Survivor is still in Early Access, so it’s unknown as of yet if the developers are planning to include more pilots and ships in the long term, though they have said they’re adding even more pools of augments. Which, you’ll need all the levels and augments you can get because the enemies can get absolutely crazy in Whisker Squadron: Survivor. Many of the enemies will fire rapid shots in your direction, but some lob highly damaging bombs, explosives that can completely disable your ship’s guns for a time, or sniper-like lasers that will tear through your hull and kill you in about 2 hits. There’s a decent variety of enemies, though some are more challenging than others and appear in larger groups in later stages.
Similar to Star Fox 64, you kind of choose your own path with Whisker Squadron: Survivor. There are three maps, and your goal is to defeat the boss at the end of each map, but you have some control over which nodes you visit on the map since you can choose between doing an action stage, or stopping by a repair depot to recover some health if your ship is racked with damage. Once you reach the furthest node on each map, it’s time to fight a boss, which… I don’t really have anything to say on the bosses. They’re extremely easy once you figure out their mechanics and are incredibly easy to clear without taking a single hit once you’ve encountered them for the first time. The only real exception to this is the final boss, and that’s solely because it spawns regular Swarm mobs who can fire homing projectiles and lasers at you while you’re gunning it down.
Once you clear your first run, you unlock the ability to apply difficulty modifiers to gain additional VP, which is the currency that you use for permanent upgrades for your ships that persist between runs. You also unlock the combo system, which gives you bonuses and works with powerful augments the more enemies you kill in quick succession. It doesn’t take long before you’ll have enough upgrades under your belt that clearing the game becomes a simple task.
The visuals of Whisker Squadron: Survivor mesh the blocky landscapes and retro futurism from titles like Star Fox or Star Fox 2, while maintaining the smoothness of Star Fox 64. The music is pretty great as well, since many of the tracks have a delightful use of synthesizer and other instruments like piano to maintain a bright sound the whole way through. A lot of the OST has a very techno kind of style to it, which should make perfect sense since… you know, this is a spaceship game in a retro-futuristic landscape.
The only downside with Whisker Squadron: Survivor that can be thought of immediately is that there’s no voice acting, yet the pilot and your supporter will converse while in an action stage, which is a time when you can’t look at the lower left and right corners because there are more bullets and lasers on your screen than the number of disgruntled employees at Bungie now that they’ve laid off 17% of their work force. The voice acting in Whisker Squadron: Survivor is scheduled for an update, but for right now I simply cannot tell you if there’s any dialogue worth anything going on during stages because much of the time, especially past the first few stages, I cannot afford to even look.
All in all, Whisker Squadron: Survivor is a solid roguelite rail shooter that takes inspiration from one of the best games of the late 90s but manages to utilize new mechanics in a way that makes it completely fresh. This is a title I will absolutely be monitoring the development of because the developer is not only willing to make overhauls when they feel necessary, but they are adding to and improving it all the time.
I actually got Whisker Squadron: Survivor for around $10 due to a bundle sale that combined it with Ex-Zodiac, another game that’s been mentioned in this column in the past. But even for its standard asking price of $15, there’s a good few hours of action in Whisker Squadron: Survivor.
With that being said, that brings this entry of Save State to a close. Join us again in a couple weeks when I will likely find another indie title to bloviate on about to a ridiculous degree. Until next time!