Indie Highlight written by: Alexander Trapp
As of the time of writing this article, the Star Fox remake for Nintendo Switch 2 is mere days away from releasing. Before that, the last game in the franchise, Star Fox Zero, had released on the Nintendo Wii U back in 2016.
That’s a full decade of nothing for fans of on-rails shooters, a genre that, for whatever reason, the big studios seemed perfectly happy to leave collecting dust. So, as you might expect, several enterprising and talented indie developers took the Thanos approach and said “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
We’ll be looking at a few of these games that have taken the Star Fox style of featuring anthropomorphized animal characters and sticking them into the cockpits of advanced space fighters and zipping off to face the forces of evil. Let’s not bury the lead anymore as we begin our highlight of Ex-Zodiac!
Out of the games we’ll be covering here, Ex-Zodiac is both the most like its Nintendo predecessor while also featuring levels inspired by other games from the same era. The game was developed almost entirely by one person, Ben Hickling, who goes by the name MNKY, handling the code, design, art, and sound effects all on his own.
That fact alone is worth pausing on for a second, because once you actually see what this game looks like and how it plays, the idea of one person building it starts to feel genuinely staggering.
The graphics and style of the game are evocative of the original 1993 Super FX-Chip entry, featuring low-poly levels, ship designs, and no voice acting other than beeps and blips whenever character dialog appears on screen.
There’s also a 16-bit style soundtrack composed by +TEK, who used FM and wavetable synthesis to recreate that authentic early 90s sound. And honestly? It slaps. The music fits the game so well that you’ll find yourself humming it after you shut the game off, which is always a good sign.
Meet Kyuu: The pilot taking on an entire terrorist organization, solo
You are put into the role of Kyuu, who is not only a female pilot but also the only main character out of this group of games that happens to be a primate, an interesting inversion of Star Fox series villain Andross, who is also a primate but very much on the wrong side of history. Kyuu is tasked with freeing the Sanzaru Star System from the evil clutches of Zodiac, an intergalactic terrorist organization that has overrun its worlds and clearly has zero chill about it.
Zodiac will strike back at you with its mechanized forces and tough but fair boss battles across the game’s 12 levels. And I do mean tough. Each boss encounter is piloted by a different member of the Zodiac, so you’re not just fighting faceless drones, you’re going up against actual characters with their own ships and attack patterns. That gives each fight a little extra personality, which goes a long way in a game like this.
There are also hidden data cards scattered throughout the levels, and finding them unlocks bonus stages, more on those in a moment because they deserve their own conversation.
I am bad at this game and I had the time of my life
As I often say in my live streams, I am not a good gamer, and the levels in Ex-Zodiac chewed me up and spit me out, mainly due to the fact that I didn’t put all the skills to use that the game tries to teach you. For instance, you’re encouraged to do barrel rolls to fend off enemy fire and shield yourself while shooting back at everything trying to take you down.
Sounds simple enough in theory. In practice, when there are projectiles coming at you from seventeen different directions and a boss is doing something deeply unreasonable on screen, remembering to barrel roll is easier said than done.
It took me a while, but I began to master the use of the spacecraft and started actually progressing through the levels. It still took me plenty of tries to get through, as well as figuring out how to defeat each boss encounter, but I had such a fun time doing so. There’s something satisfying about a game that actually makes you learn its systems instead of letting you brute-force your way through everything. Ex-Zodiac is not interested in letting you off easy, but it’s also never unfair about it.
Beyond just surviving, the game also grades your performance at the end of each level. If you’re aiming for a better score, you need to be accurate, aggressive, and aware of everything happening around you all at once. I could only manage a C grade, which, look, I’m choosing to frame that as a personal challenge rather than a personal failure. Hopefully you will do better, and if you do, please don’t tell me about it.
Finding those secret data cards also unlocks bonus levels that play like Space Harrier, the classic Sega arcade game. I was so delighted to encounter these levels for the first time in my playthrough that I found it genuinely hard to keep up with everything that was coming at me onscreen.
There are enemies, obstacles, and projectiles flying at you from all directions in a behind-the-back perspective that’s completely different from the main game. And I may have died in the game while attempting to play these levels for the first time. Multiple times, if we’re being honest. But it just made me want to come back and try again, because you don’t see too many games not only lovingly recreating the style of Star Fox but also Space Harrier in the same package. That’s just a wild amount of content to include.
A game that deserves way more attention than it gets
To conclude this highlight, I have to say that I highly recommend buying Ex-Zodiac. The challenge is there for nincompoops like me whose reaction times have gone down sharply since he was a boy playing arcade games in the 90s, but the gameplay itself is endlessly fun as you travel across multiple planets and take on hordes of enemies in this fantastic space shooter. Even the on-the-ground sections will have you coming back for more as you try to earn a better grade.
It’s also worth mentioning that the game is still technically in Early Access on Steam, which means it’s still growing. The developer has been actively listening to community feedback, largely through the game’s Discord server, and the full release is expected to bring the total stage count up to 15, with branching paths and secret areas on top of everything that’s already there.
The current version already has more than enough content to justify the price, which sits at $11.99 on Steam. There’s even a free demo available if you want to try it before committing, which is exactly the kind of thing more developers should offer.
Over 900 user reviews on Steam sit at a 93% positive rating. That number reflects something real, this is a game that people find, fall in love with, and immediately want to tell others about.
Ex-Zodiac is available on both Steam and itch.io today.
Have you played Ex-Zodiac or any other Star Fox-style indie games? Tell us what you think in the comments, we’d love to know if you managed to beat that C grade!
Note: This is not a review. The purpose of this article, and future articles such as these, is to highlight the efforts of indie game developers and to let the world know that their games exist.