The best action games like Star Fox 64 are Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, Panzer Dragoon Orta and Star Fox Zero. Below are 6, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to action costs you.
Filtering to action means you want the fighting to carry the game rather than the story or the map. It is the right filter when what you actually miss is how something felt in your hands.
What you get: Combat you get better at. Action games put their design budget into the moment-to-moment, so the thing you are doing in minute two is the thing you are still doing in hour twenty, only better.
What made Star Fox 64 worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the action part of that answer, and only the action part.
Treasure's rail shooter, and the closest thing to a spiritual sequel.
The other great rail shooter, and visually still remarkable.
The most recent entry, if you can get on with the controls.
Arcade-length space missions with the same replay-for-medals structure.
If the dogfighting was the appeal and you want it open.
Rail shooting on foot and in the air, with the same chatty tone.
Pacing and world. Action games rarely have the quiet stretches or the writing that the adventure and RPG picks bring, and a few of them are shorter than they look.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Star Fox 64 that are not action games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Star Fox 64 — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Sin and Punishment: Star Successor. Treasure's rail shooter, and the closest thing to a spiritual sequel.
No. Star Fox 64 released on the Nintendo 64, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A small set of verbs and a game that keeps finding new questions to ask of them. The weak ones add buttons instead; the strong ones make you better at the ones you already have.
No, and difficulty is a poor proxy for depth. Some of the hardest action games have very few decisions in them, and some of the deepest have a difficulty setting that lets you meet them halfway.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Star Fox 64 list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is action — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the action guide for where to start in the genre generally.