Starlink: Battle for Atlas

“How many wings can I put on to one ship?”

“Up to three-“

It’s too late. There are six ships laid out before me in meatspace, and I rip the wings off every one available to mash onto the ship connected to my pad. Because I’m a bastard, I make sure to angle the wings as awkwardly as possible, to the point where I can’t easily press the buttons on the right side due to how they now jut down. Placing it back on the table, my monstrosity topples forward under the weight and the game asks me to remove the extra wings (though it has rendered them on screen).

I laugh gleefully as I take it apart again.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas enters the marketplace at an odd time. The famous mainstays in the toys-to-life game genre of Skylanders, Lego: Dimensions and Disney Infinity were all discontinued over a year ago now. The team at Ubisoft seem to be confident that they can bring something fresh to the table for the genre, priding themselves on their modular toy interactivity as you play through a mix of dogfighting space combat and hovertank-like planetside combat.

As I’m still relishing in smashing bits together and ripping them off after only a few hours of play, I concede they have a good reason to be confident.

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Everything can be swapped at any point in the game; the weapons, the wings, the ships and even the pilots. Though it’s possible to play through using the starter pilot, ship and two weapons, you’ll be missing out on most of the fun this game has to offer in madly kinetically clicking bits on and off, depending on the challenge or boredom. Each ship has its own strengths and weaknesses, wings help either mitigate these or allow you to lean more into a focused build and weapons can be combo’d together to create different elemental effects. Vortex missile and a flamethrower? Boom, fireball. An ice gatling gun into a ramming flame weapon? Enemies shatter on impact.

Each pilot comes with their own skill tree to level and a special ultimate ability of some kind. These can vary from putting all enemies into slow-motion to suddenly playing through a rhythm action game to do a damaging area of effect musical wave. Nearly all the pilots so far are characters specially created for the game, apart from the Nintendo Switch exclusive Fox McCloud.

Most of the mainstay crew of the Starfox series is merged into the main storyline of the game for the Switch version. After feeling comfortable with how it controlled, I veered off the main quest and started following the Starfox specific mission chain. It came as a surprise when I had to remind myself I wasn’t actually playing a new game in that series, and it showed that the team had really done their homework on everything fox and star related.

Suspecting their old nemesis Wolf is at play, the mission chain has you hot on his, uh, tail. Though featuring a fast-travel system to explored planets, the game is big on having you be in control as much as possible. It transitions seamlessly from ground to air and even space and hyperspace travel without a loading screen.

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Some of the toys you’ll use to play Starlink (pic: Ed Fenning)

After scanning a relic on one planet, I pointed the nose of my butchered three-wing Arwing up into space and left the planet, heading out deep into an asteroid belt. There I stumbled across a floating fortress of one of Wolf’s lieutenants. Like most people I bump into in life, he wasn’t very happy to see me and sent out multiple squadrons to take me down.

Feeling very outgunned and outmatched with this development I hit Fox’s special ability, which does two things. The first thing it does is to call in one of Fox’s traditional squadron mates as a wingman, the second is to instantly start playing the Starfox Corneria theme. As Slippy came zooming in to help me dogfight, the punchy beats of that recognisable song pulsing through me as I desperately barrel aileron rolled, flipped and dodged my way through a hail of fire, I instantly knew that Starlink had successfully captured everything that made the original Starfox series’ space dogfighting great.

As I won the battle, Slippy bid me adieu and it seemed time to relish the victory when the Lieutenant came out of his fortress, accompanied by several wingmen of his own. Fox’s special ability was on cooldown and I had low health. “Well, hell” was my entire thought process as my ship was suddenly destroyed.

Losing a ship here isn’t game over, it merely gets retired till you take it somewhere to fix. What you can do in the meantime is rip your destroyed ship off the pad then slam a new one into place to carry on where you’d left off. At this point though, I had forgotten that I had switched off automated pausing when you wanted to add new wings or weapons because it felt more satisfying to see these elements changing in real-time and to feel that my physical actions were tied into the challenge of the game.

This backfired, as my next model ship had no weapons or wings attached so was left awkwardly floating infront of my grumpy enemy. Trying to fly and dodge with one hand, my other hand scrambled madly around the table to pick up what wings were easily grabbable. I found the wings for the Arwing, which if you don’t have a weapon slotted on have a fire mode of their own. They seemed perfect in my desperation. I clicked them in, brought my full attention back to the screen and hit fire. Only, I’d slotted the wings on in reverse, so they proceeded to fire harmlessly in the direction behind me in a literal backfiring situation.

Once again, I found myself laughing whilst playing.

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Most of the game outside these mission chains has you exploring planets and investing in their ecosystems, taking over points and watchtowers by clearing out nests of enemies in what seems to be a staple of Ubisoft Open World map design. As the toys-to-life aspect feels inspired by Skylanders and the fighting seems influenced by the Starfox games, the actual planets’ colour pallets and fauna might have taken heavy notes from No Man’s Sky to create some beautiful vistas.

There didn’t seem to be much to do on the planets, outside of clearing the points and the mission chains, but there was often the option of several different paths to tread at once if anything ever started to become truly boring in my several hours of play. The inclusion of split-screen co-op also kept things fresh, where a friend/sibling/parent can have their own pad and ship to join in the action of the main player. I can easily picture how much I would have enjoyed it with my brother growing up, and the idea of picking out our own pilots and swapping bits of ship around would either be tremendous fun or lead to terrible punch ups if, say, one of us started stealing bits from the other’s ship mid-play.

First Impressions

The game has a slow start and though the fighting and modular swapping is amazing, the investment in a few ships and several weapons to get the most out of it seems like a very big ask. Even with the amazing addition of Fox McCloud (and perhaps in spite of him), I found it hard for the rest of the cast to make a big enough impression, enough of an impression at least to buy their model. If Ubisoft can manage to make it over this hurdle of people wary of that initial investment, Starlink: Battle for Atlas could grow to be a great addition to the toys-to-life genre.

The post Starlink: Battle for Atlas appeared first on Trusted Reviews.

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