Star Fox 2026: The 5 Toughest Expert Challenges, Ranked, With Tips to Beat Them
Star Fox on Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for a month, but its real test isn’t the campaign, it’s Challenge Mode. The remake, developed by Velan Studios and published by Nintendo, packs 192 optional objectives across the game’s 16 stages, split evenly between Normal and Expert difficulty, and a handful of those Expert tasks are brutal enough to make even veteran Star Fox 64 players grind for hours.
The game holds 192 optional missions spread across all 16 stages, with each stage containing exactly 12 challenges split into six Normal and six Expert tasks. Expert challenges only unlock once all six Normal challenges for that stage have been cleared, and once you’re in, the safety net disappears. Fox loses his signature Expert Mode sunglasses from the original games, but crashing still costs a wing on every single hit.
Star Fox launched worldwide on June 25, developed by Velan Studios and published by Nintendo, priced at $49.99 digitally, with a $59.99 physical edition. It’s a hard Switch 2 exclusive, with no plans for the original Switch, PS5, Xbox Series or PC. Kiwi and Aussie players got the same worldwide release window, meaning local shooters have had a full month to hunt these objectives down.
Aquas Turns the Blue-Marine Run Into a Pacifist Nightmare
Top of most players’ misery list is Aquas, the only underwater stage in the game, flown in the Blue-Marine submarine instead of the Arwing. Its Expert challenge requires reaching the boss Bacoon without firing a single laser or torpedo, and it’s considered one of the hardest tasks in the entire game.
The catch is the submarine’s own weapon system. Clearing it demands a full pacifist run with no laser fire or torpedoes at all, which means taking a lot more incoming damage since you can’t thin out attackers. The Blue-Marine’s auto-lock torpedoes make the task feel almost impossible at first, but memorising enemy positions and relying purely on movement to dodge damage is the real key. Expect several restarts before muscle memory kicks in on where every mine and enemy sub spawns.
Fichina Demands a Three-Minute Star Wolf Clean Sweep
Fichina’s Expert roster throws a strict timer at Star Wolf’s entire squad. Once the rival team appears, players must shoot down all four members within three minutes while in All-Range Mode. Knowing enemy AI patterns matters as much as raw aim here: Leon chases Falco, Pigma chases Peppy, and Andrew chases Slippy, while Wolf always goes after Fox himself.
Charged shots aren’t fast enough to hit the deadline reliably, so the smarter approach is a two-step combo. Treat the fight like a classic Pokémon battle: weaken the target with steady laser fire, then finish it off with a homing bomb. Save Wolf’s Wolfen for last once the other three fighters are already down, since he’s consistently the toughest kill of the four.
Sector X’s Wingless Speedrun Punishes Every Wrong Turn
Sector X is already one of the trickiest stages to memorise thanks to its branching interior and exterior routes, and its Expert speedrun challenge removes any margin for error. The stage has three separate paths to learn: the intersection choice between going inside or outside the base, and the warp gates found within the base’s interior.
Because a single collision costs a wing, which makes the Speedrun challenge especially difficult, players effectively need a clean, memorised route with zero clipped walls or stray asteroids. Depending on skill level, expect to restart the whole stage many times before a wing-perfect run lines up with a fast enough clock.
Meteo’s Asteroid Field Leaves Zero Room for Error
Meteo forces players through a dense asteroid corridor where collisions are practically a design feature, which makes one particular Expert task feel almost cruel. One of Meteo’s challenges specifically instructs players to avoid crashing entirely, in a stage where clipping debris is otherwise routine.
Pulling off a clean run while still hitting bonus targets means being selective with ordnance. Only the asteroids caught inside the stage’s warp dimension count toward the bomb challenge, so it pays to save bombs for that pocket and unload everything once the stage’s final asteroid cluster appears.
Corneria’s Hit-Count Gauntlet Rewards Constant Barrel Rolls
Even the game’s opening stage isn’t a pushover on Expert. Corneria’s later challenges lean on sustained hit counts against waves of Venom Fighters and Tripod units, and the margin for taking damage all but disappears. The most reliable route is defensive spam: treat the run like a Medal attempt by barrel rolling through incoming laser fire, saving charged shots for enemy groups, and prioritising Garudas and Ski Bots for safe bonus hits.
The broader lesson across all five stages is that Expert Challenge Mode isn’t just Normal mode with tougher enemies, it’s a set of hand-built constraints — no weapons, strict timers, zero collisions — layered onto stages players already know by heart. That design choice is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in stretching a 29-year-old campaign into dozens of extra hours of post-game content.
Velan Studios’ Second Nintendo Project Leans on a Deep Post-Game
Velan Studios, the studio behind the remake, is based in Troy, New York, and was founded in 2016 by brothers Guha and Karthik Bala. Star Fox marks the team’s second collaboration with Nintendo following the motion-controlled racer Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, and the sheer density of Challenge Mode content suggests the studio leaned heavily into replay value to justify a full-price remake of a game many players have already finished multiple times on N64, 3DS and Wii U.
For anyone still chasing a 100% Challenge Mode clear, the pattern holds across every stage: learn the route first on Normal, then treat the Expert unlock as its own separate discipline entirely, since Expert Mode itself only opens up once every Normal Medal in the campaign has been collected, making the medal grind a genuine prerequisite before Expert Challenges even become an option.
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