There’s a definite joy to be found in scooting across the sands or weaving your way through the vivid fauna on the planets of Starlink: Battle for Atlas. Ubisoft Toronto’s space exploration shooter mixed with toys-to-life plaything is a strange combination at first glance. You put together the toys in real life, and it’s represented in the game world. It’s something that seems like a childlike novelty, but in fact offers a game with a surprising amount of ambition and depth.
It begins with the carefully constructed appendage that teeters on top of your controller. This device allows you to link up to the game’s range of figures: the pilots, ships, and weapons that will represent who or what you’re playing in game.
It’s impressive tech just to mess around with as you change different weapon loadouts with ease and surprising responsiveness. On the other hand, swapping out your ship or pilot is a slightly more cumbersome disassembly task but never feels like it too drastically interrupts the game.
All the same, you can see how a fair chunk of time can be lost here in the right hands, fiddling with different ship parts and attachments to make something that’s truly your own bonkers blueprint for space travel. Seeing that creativity then instantly represented in the game as the components morph onto the screen is sure to inspire some minds and encourage a greater fascination with video games.
Let’s Talk Gameplay
Speaking of the game itself, Starlink: Battle for Atlas is looking like a rather good one too. From the vast expanse of space you can pick which planet you want to visit in the Atlas system by simply pointing your ship at it and holding down the accelerator. It’s the same sort of thrill captured by No Man’s Sky as you seamlessly descend upon your destination of choice and the new environment steadily comes into view.
It could be a planet like Haven, a diverse place made up of calm, snaking rivers and peculiar bright trees of the most unnatural shapes and sizes. In an early section of the game you’ll visit Haven to help a faction of industrial prospectors who are finding ways to gather resources from the world.
They’re under threat, though, from the Forgotten Legion: a group of crystalline creatures led by a cult leader named Grax who you must fend off at every turn.
That’s where your ragtag gang of pilots come in. It’s a diverse cast that’s just as enjoyable to listen banter between each other as it is sending them into combat. From boisterous metal-heads to moody fighters, there’s sure to be someone in the crew of The Equinox who you’ll be drawn to. Each one has a degree of freedom to their playstyle too, through skill trees, special abilities, and their preferred ship.
Ship Customisation
In the end, though, combat all comes down to those guns attached to your ship. It’s good that these customisation options aren’t too clunky to manage with the toys, as switching up your weaponry can give you huge advantages in battle.
Different enemies in the Forgotten Legion have vulnerabilities to certain damage types, so having the right equipment can mean you chew through whatever’s in your way much quicker. The fast and scuttling hordes of imps are no match for a burst from your flamethrower, for example, whereas impactful siege weaponry might be best suited to larger targets.
It’s also a blast discovering how you can combine the elemental effects from different weapons to create more spectacular attacks. A quick go-to favourite we found was to fire off a gravity weapon to create an area that would pull enemies in and then follow that up with a ice missile to create a large frost vortex.
A battering ram attack that you can wind up before dramatically crashing into targets to send them flying through the air with a satisfying whoosh came in at a close second.
And that’s where a lot of the potential lies in Starlink: Battle for Atlas. There is clearly a breezy and enjoyable action adventure game at its core that’s bolstered by the toys-to-life element, rather than simply existing to support the other side of the formula. It’ll be interesting to see how much more the game opens up later as you tackle various side missions and flashing hotspots that have come to define so many Ubisoft games.
For now, though, the small taste of the opening moments has drawn us in. Whether we’re simply cruising through space, barrel-rolling through another dogfight or seeing some of the weird and wonderful nature that makes up each planet, there’s definitely a reason to spend more time in this world.
