Thorium Wars: Attack of the Skyfighter attempts to fill the void left by the lack of a new Star Fox game. As a sequel to the DSi-Ware game Thorium Wars, it boasts full-scale aerial-combat with a variety of different aircrafts and levels. While the game occasionally shines with its fluid framerate and satisfying combat, the slow, clunky controls, boring level design, and graphical glitches make it hard to recommend.

The story is as generic as it gets: an alien race is bent on destroying the human race and taking over the galaxy, and it’s up to you, and only you, to stop them. Each mission is presented in pages of plain text. There’s no voice acting or character art, so the writing is just as generic as the overall story. However, you do get a variety different aircrafts, all having their own strengths and weaknesses. All three of the aircrafts felt exactly the same in terms of speed, so there was no reason to pick a ship other than the Indra, which has the highest armor and firepower.

The levels themselves are your basic level designs: red deserts, frozen caverns, a city filled with skyscrapers, and more. None of them feel very inspired, but they all look nice for what they are… most of the time. Since the level design is so dull, it’s really easy to get lost when certain areas have more than one route. Because everything looks the same, it’s easy to accidently backtrack. And due to the extremely large turning radius and no way to easily make U-Turns or sharp turns, you end up having to make long treks back to open areas just to turn around, or else you’ll risk taking damage or dying due to crashing into the walls.

From a technical standpoint, the game runs at a constant 60 frames-per-second, and it does feel really good to blow stuff up. I’ve not had any trouble locking onto or hitting enemies. Though if you run into an enemy, it’s a one-hit kill, which makes playing the game quite annoying as it barely gives you any windows of opportunity to avoid ramming into someone if you see them coming.

In the end, there’s nothing in this game that isn’t done better by other games in the genre. A generic story, generic writing, generic enemies, generic music, repetitive objectives and level design, and no multiplayer modes make this game feel like a waste of time and effort. If you’re itching for an aerial-combat game on 3DS, stick with Star Fox 64 3D, or try and hunt down a copy of Star Fox Command for DS. Otherwise, give this game a pass.