He had a glass jaw in that game. Like, the guy with glass bones and paper skin in Spongebob Squarepants glass jaw or Zelda 3 heart run glass jaw.
He basically was a glass cannon in Assault.
In Assault multiplayer, speed is the most important stat so having low health basically balanced himself out.
High speed meant getting to weapons first, it let you escape from opponents trying to attack you with strong weapons, let you chase retreating opponents, and let you run circles around your opponents and shoot them while keeping yourself mobile.
Obviously his low health hurts him regardless, especially with vehicles on, but his speed lets him get to them faster, and escape to shelter faster so there's that.
You can even run circles around land masters and take down the whole tank without losing any health if you're good enough thanks to his speed which can help with his low health weakness.
At high levels, Falco is one of the best characters in the game, but also one of the most advanced.
Especially 1 vs. 1 matches.
Source: I actually played competitive Assault Multiplayer.
I wished his running animation was like in Assault or 64 since his Brawl-introduced one just looks silly, especially compared to Sheik who runs fast and then you have Falco strolling at an unreasonably slow pace. Wolf's limp run was also weird, it not as stupid-looking as Falco's and then you have Fox and his ninja airplane run. Wolf could swap his running animation with Falco's and have it modified to look like he has one arm ready to gouge someone and it would look fine. It would basically be a running version of his idle stance.
Star Fox: Assault's run looked goofy since Falco was all lanky, but it's nothing compared to whatever the hell he's doing right now.
At least he runs more naturally in Assault.
Like, just moving his arms like that shows he's putting effort/energy into running if nothing else.
I'd be good with that idea for the run animation swapping though.
Bowser got a new run so it's possible. (Maybe)
Also, his Adventures design was baller. If only he had that alt. Fun fact: General Scales was supposed to have a boss fight and Falco was involved. Could you imagine what they could have taken from that and applied it to Falco's moveset? The below gif has Falco's 64 3D run which looks normal compared to his current run. If they really had to make it look like he was always ready to pull out his Blaster while running, they could have still done something that didn't make him look dumb as hell.
That explains why you "fight" him for literally 1/2 a second. That's some good info. That (probably) would've been a great boss fight.
He also "stole" James McCloud's shades in that game.
Why doesn't Fox have a shades costume?
It's funny, with his 64/Assault run, his arms go near/past his waist so he could pull out his gun while running if needed I suppose.
Everything about me is about Falco isn't it?
Yep. Not a bad thing though.
I'm pretty similar, just with a different character.