Bearing the franchise to Nintendo's latest hand-held (a dual-screen hardware revolution all its own), Star Fox Command combines classic shooter stages with a turn-based strategy game. The story picks up after Assault, except the team's been scattered. Initially fighting an army sprung from the toxic depths of planet Venom by your lonesome, you (as Fox) must eventually reunite your band of frogs, falcons and female love interests to battle increasingly difficult enemy onslaughts.

Those sorties initially play out on turn-based tactical maps. Using the DS' stylus, you draw flight paths from your battleship (the Great Fox, positioned in a corner of the screen) toward incoming waves of enemy fighters, end your turn and wait through the movement phase for skirmishes to line up. Hard barriers and effects like fog hinder your progress, which makes picking the order in which you engage enemies or grab power-ups (time bonuses, missiles) essential to dominating each map. You have only so much fuel per turn, and a limited number of turns to stop the enemy before they reach the Great Fox, which ends the game.

When you bump into an enemy ship, combat switches to a 3-D display on the top screen and a 2-D radar map at bottom. Using the stylus to steer (bottom) by indirectly guiding crosshairs up top and hitting the d-pad to fire, you pilot Fox and pals through ground- and space-based environments, collecting power-ups and time bonuses and gathering a requisite number of enemy cores (left by destroyed ships) to polish off a stage. Quick slides or taps let you speed up, slow down or perform shielding barrel rolls, and two side icons allow loops or U-turns. An alternate download play option lets you host up to six players in ad-hoc pilot-versus-pilot: shoot down a ship and a star appears, and the player who collects the most stars by match's end wins. If your friends are distant, you can optionally use the DS's Wi-Fi connection for Internet dogfights.

Unfortunately, it's a one-trick fox

Games like Star Fox Command are always tough calls. On the one hand, you're happy to see someone taking risks (though with hardware like the DS, it's virtually a requirement). On the other, you're forced to swallow the same tired industry problems: bad writing (kid-safe doesn't have to mean cliched); lots of doing the same thing with minor, irrelevant differences; and controls you'll either love to hate or learn to love.

Making 360-degree flying games work with gamepads was never easy, even with analog thumbsticks (your thumb is a fraction as precise as your wrist in sync with all five fingers wrapped around a flightstick, which is why we don't fly real planes with gamepads). Developer Q-Games' solution is as simple and straightforward as "where you point, you go." Some will love it, while others, like me ... won't. Why? Imagine using a pencil to move your computer's mouse pointer. We're all great at moving a mouse, but flip our interface from something general (like a big fat mouse) to a pencil-thin pointer and the tendency to overcorrect is huge. Some people ride the curve in minutes, while others, with rigid muscle memory, have a harder time getting past it. Maybe you'll love it, but just be aware there's a vocal population ready to testify they don't.

What's tragic about Star Fox Command, however, is that it takes a great concept (turn-based strategy lead-ins to 3-D missions) and turns it into a tedious little shooting gallery. Once you've nabbed your first time extender or missile on the strategy map, you've pretty much seen it all, and the 3-D missions just trot out the same zigzag enemies whether you're cruising some random planetscape or rolling around in deep space. Without a story to keep you involved, the game seems designed to be played in one or two matches a sitting—happy news for casual gamers, but disappointing for anyone who plays in more than 10-minute skips.

There's a great Star Fox game in the Nintendo DS, if Nintendo can bring us back to the dramatic elements and witty character banter that helped make Star Fox 64 a critical darling. Star Fox isn't Tetris or tic-tac-toe. If we wanted Star Pong, we'd ask for it. What we'd prefer is Star Wars with chatty furballs and multifaceted dogfights. Star Fox Command has neither, and that's really a shame, because the DS, more than anything else, has the potential to let this series soar.