Every Star Fox game since 1997 has, in some sense, been chasing the same fox. The Switch 2 entry that Nintendo sprang on everyone in May 2026 makes no attempt to hide that. It is simply titled Star Fox, and underneath the plain name sits the most elaborate version yet of a very familiar mission: Fox McCloud and his wingmates, a branching run through the Lylat System, and Andross waiting at the end of it. What genuinely is new sits around the edges of that mission — in mouse controls, in a 4-vs-4 Battle Mode, and above all in a GameChat trick that replaces your face with Fox’s own. That trick is the reason a camera suddenly matters to a rail shooter. It is also the reason the most charming camera you can buy for the console is, for this one job, the wrong camera.
A real red fox, photographed face-on — stand-in art, and a useful reminder of what the game’s camera feature is trying to read: eyes, brows, ears and a muzzle, all moving at once. Photo: Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
First, the identification: this is a remake, and its name is just Star Fox
Because the May coverage used several labels interchangeably, it is worth pinning the game down precisely. The title is Star Fox — not a numbered sequel, not a brand-new adventure, and not a “Switch 2 Edition” upgrade of an existing Switch release, because there was no Switch release to upgrade. Nintendo announced it in a surprise, roughly 15-minute Nintendo Direct on 6 May 2026, presented by Shigeru Miyamoto and Yoshiaki Koizumi, and Nintendo’s own press release describes it as “an action-packed adventure based on Star Fox 64 for Nintendo 64.” In other words, the 1997 game — itself a reboot of the 1993 Super NES original, and known as Lylat Wars in some territories — rebuilt from the ground up for Switch 2. Reporting on the announcement consistently calls it a remake, and the finished reviews used the same word.
The rebuild is extensive rather than cosmetic. Nintendo promised a complete visual overhaul with overhauled, more lifelike character designs, freshly revamped stages, all-new cinematic cutscenes with fully voiced dialogue, and a sweeping orchestral soundtrack. The skeleton, though, is deliberately the 1997 one: the Arwing, the Landmaster tank and the Blue-Marine submarine all return, stages keep their layouts and branching structure, and the route you fly still changes according to objectives completed and enemies downed. Campaign Mode offers Easy and Normal at the start, with medals unlocking Expert; Challenge Mode replays cleared stages against fresh objectives on Normal or Expert; and the new Battle Mode pits Team Star Fox against Team Star Wolf in 4-vs-4 objective matches — holding a zone on Corneria, collecting energy crystals amid meteorites on Fichina, and retrieving cargo from pirates in Sector Y.
Two Switch 2-specific additions round out the package. Joy-Con 2 mouse controls allow more intuitive aiming in the solo modes, and if a second player joins — on the same machine or through GameShare via GameChat — one player can fly while the other takes gunner duties. GameShare itself lets up to four players play from a single copy, locally or online, with local sharing also reaching original Switch systems. The game launched worldwide on 25 June 2026, priced in the US at $50 digitally and $60 physically, and a free demo had arrived on the eShop earlier that month with progress carrying over. It was the series’ first release in a decade, following Star Fox Zero on Wii U in 2016.
The GameChat feature: your face, wearing Fox’s
GameChat is the Switch 2’s built-in voice and video chat, reached with the dedicated C button, and most of what it had been used for before June 2026 was ordinary: friends’ faces in boxes while everyone played. Star Fox gives it a costume. Nintendo’s announcement names the feature “GameChat Character Avatars and AR Filters,” and describes it this way: players can “appear as Fox McCloud or any of his crew while chatting with friends using an interactive avatar that mirrors your expressions and movements in GameChat.” Nintendo Life’s report of the reveal fills in the tracked detail — the avatar follows your head movement and facial expressions, including mouth movement, blinking and eyebrow movement. The lighter AR filters, meanwhile, add a pair of Star Fox-like ears or a Falco-inspired beak that moves when you talk.
The Milky Way over Oeschinensee, Switzerland — stand-in art for the Lylat System, the fictional star system the remake’s branching campaign crosses from Corneria to Venom. Photo: Giles Laurent, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Hands-on coverage after the reveal suggests the effect earns the attention. Gizmodo, which spent an hour with the game before launch, called the tracking “surprisingly one-to-one,” noting that the camera picked up head movements and brow expressions even with the writer’s head somewhat out of frame, and that making Fox narrow his eyes at a friend’s antics was immediately meme-worthy. The same report is honest about the ceiling: mouth fidelity is limited, with characters’ jaws opening like marionettes the wider the player grimaces. Reviewers at other outlets described the same pleasure in Battle Mode sessions — a chat full of Foxes, Slippys and Pigma impressions — and Nintendo confirmed the avatar can be worn in GameChat even while other players are in different games. Two requirements apply throughout, per Nintendo’s footnotes: an active Nintendo Switch Online membership for GameChat, and a compatible USB camera, sold separately, for the video features.
Read that list of tracked signals again, because it is the whole story of the camera warning. Head turns are big movements; any camera sees them. But a blink is a few frames of eyelid, a raised brow is a small shift of skin, and mouth shapes are fine detail around the lips. A face-tracking avatar is only as expressive as the smallest movement its camera can cleanly resolve — at living-room distance, in ordinary evening light, on a feed that GameChat may also crop and zoom. That is a demanding brief, and it is exactly where the popular alternative camera runs out of pixels.
The Piranha Plant problem: 480p trying to read a face
Hori’s Piranha Plant Camera is, by every account, a delight to look at. Officially licensed by Nintendo, it puts the lens inside the head of Mario’s chomping enemy on a flexible stem rising from a Warp Pipe base. The head detaches so the camera can plug directly into the top of the Switch 2 for handheld play, the base can clip over a TV, and closing the plant’s mouth covers the lens as a privacy shutter. It launched alongside the Switch 2 generation of accessories in June 2025 at $59.99 in the US, works with Switch 2 as well as Windows and macOS, and became one of the console’s most recognisable and best-loved accessories. None of that is in dispute. Its specification sheet is.
A generic USB webcam perched on a monitor — a stand-in photo, not Hori’s Piranha Plant Camera and not Nintendo’s official camera. It illustrates the job any GameChat camera has to do in Star Fox: sit at screen distance and read a face closely enough to animate someone else’s. Photo: Peter Placzek, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The Piranha Plant Camera captures 640 × 480 video — 480p — at 30 frames per second, through an 85-degree field of view. Nintendo’s own Switch 2 Camera, which actually launched slightly cheaper in the US at $54.99, captures 1080p with a roughly 110-degree field of view. That is more than four times the pixels, and reviewers who tested Hori’s plant were blunt about what the shortfall looks like in practice. GamesRadar’s review called the video quality “horrendous,” saying the 480p feed made its tester look like “a blurry, pixelated mess” no matter the lighting setup, and concluded the camera was better left on the store shelf. TechRadar likewise said the resolution made it impossible to recommend outright, and Tom’s Guide found the picture washed out alongside the same 480p ceiling. Later multi-camera testing added a nuance worth keeping: the Hori cameras frame and track a face effectively — movement registers fine — but faces stay blurry, details stay obscured and colours stay washed out, especially from a distance.
Now map that verdict onto Star Fox‘s feature. In a plain GameChat call, a soft 480p picture is merely unflattering; your friends still know it is you. In avatar mode, the picture is not the product — it is the input. The system has to find your eyes, brows and mouth inside that feed and convert them into performance. Feed it a face that reviewers describe as a pixelated blur at TV distance and the subtle half of the performance — the blink, the sceptical brow, the difference between talking and grinning — is precisely the half most likely to smear away, leaving the big head movements to carry a puppet whose finer expressions never arrive. Gizmodo noted that even the 1080p first-party camera loses quality when GameChat automatically detects and zooms in on a head, which only widens the effective gap for a sensor starting at 640 × 480. That is the whole of the May warning, stated precisely: not that the plant fails to connect, but that buying it for this feature buys the feature at its blurriest.
What the warning is not: the plant works, and the wider camera story moved again in September
Precision matters in the other direction too. The Piranha Plant Camera is not incompatible with the Switch 2 or with GameChat. It is an officially licensed GameChat camera; it works in TV, tabletop and handheld modes; owners have used it happily in games such as Mario Kart World and Super Mario Party Jamboree, where a recognisable face in a box — rather than frame-by-frame facial detail — is all the game asks for; and as a piece of Mario merchandise that happens to be a camera, its appeal does not depend on Star Fox at all. If you already own one, nothing here says to replace it for ordinary chat. The advice is aimed at the specific purchase the May headline was aimed at: do not buy this camera because of the Star Fox avatars, expecting the best version of them.
The status of everything else has also moved on since May, and by October 2026 the picture is complete. The game itself is out and reviewed well: Nintendo Life scored it 9 out of 10 and called it a sublime remaster, while the aggregate scores reported since launch sit at 81 on Metacritic — with the recurring criticism, even from admirers, being that underneath the new presentation it is Star Fox 64 again rather than a new adventure. Then, on 29 September 2026, Nintendo released the free version 1.2.0 update: three new Battle Mode stages (Katina, Sector X and Venom), new battle items, four-player split-screen on a single console, split-screen teams entering online matches together, lobbies that no longer disband when the host leaves, and camera feeds that now appear on the game screen itself at moments such as shooting down an enemy aircraft.
Buried in that update’s patch notes is the wider compatibility story, and it deserves quoting carefully because it is broader than one accessory. Nintendo said it had “addressed the issue of third-party USB cameras not functioning correctly within the Star Fox game despite working properly on the Nintendo Switch 2 console” — while adding that not all USB cameras are guaranteed to work, and that anyone whose third-party camera still fails should use the official Nintendo Switch 2 Camera. Note what that does and does not say. It confirms that, for a period after launch, Star Fox itself mishandled a class of cameras that the console handled fine — a software problem in the game, since addressed — and it gives no list naming Hori’s plant among the affected models. Camera trouble in Star Fox therefore had two separate layers in 2026: a genuine in-game third-party bug, patched in September, and the older, simpler arithmetic of 480p, which no patch can change.
The verdict before you spend anything
So the buying advice for anyone arriving at the game now is unusually tidy. If the avatar feature is what excites you — and hands-on reports say it is the feature most likely to finally make GameChat feel essential — start with Nintendo’s official 1080p camera, which costs less in the US than the plant does, or test a decent USB webcam you already own through the console’s Test USB Camera setting before spending anything, remembering Nintendo’s own caveat that third-party support is not guaranteed. Keep the Piranha Plant, if you buy it, for the reasons it is actually good: the look, the flexible stem, the handheld-friendly detachable head, the mouth that snaps shut over the lens, and games whose camera features ask for presence rather than expression. Fox’s new face deserves a camera that can see yours clearly. Do a barrel roll by all means — just do not make your eyebrows perform it in 480p.