Ubisoft's late-stage toys-to-life entry is pretty, derivative and slightly lacking in charm.
My favourite moment in Starlink: Battle for
Atlas occured when, muddled and in the heat of a fight, I attached a
weapon the wrong way around. Ubisoft's latest is a very late entry into
the toys-to-life marketplace: when you play it, your controller houses a
little mount upon which you slot a pilot, a star-fighter, and various
weapons that then appear in the game.
This being 2018, everything
on that mount is a repository for levelling. Those pilots come with
their own special abilities and their own skill trees, while ships have
their own handling and stats, and can be modded, as can the weapons, to
gain all kinds of incremental boosts and flavours. Fine. But you can
also put the weapons on backwards, in which case - and to the game's
infinite credit - they will then shoot backwards.
Not just that, you can remove a ship's wings and slot on the wings
from another ship. And you can even slot wings into the first set of
wings' weapon slots, until you're going into battle with four wings
hanging off each side of your craft and weapons slotted in only at the
very edges. You can make real Frankenstein's monster stuff. It's all a
bit pointless to do this, sure, but it's quietly pleasing nonetheless.
The
wider game is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster itself. Building on its
toys-to-life core, Starlink chucks in Starfox style dog-fighting and
racing-over-planets-blasting-everything (along with Fox himself and his
Arwing if you're playing on Switch). And then it grafts on the
Instagram-friendly planet aesthetics of No Man's Sky, along with that
game's endlessly thrilling planet-to-space transitions as you boost from
the surface of some colourful globe and zip off to explore a compact
start system of seven planets.
Travelling
between planets, the baddy outlaws will force you into dog-fights by
playing a variation on the classic Dale Winton show Hole in the Wall. I
will always love you, Dale!
Underneath all of that, though, the most surprising revelation is that
Starlink also finds time to be a classic Ubi-game. There are maps to
uncover, resources to collect and spend, buildings to place and upgrade
and MMO-style mission markers and missions to complete as you take out
surface Extractors, and then the waddling mecha-scorpion Primes that lay
them, and then, in space, the floating Dreadnoughts that lay the
Primes. This is a game dog-fighting and shooting-the-glowing-weak-spots,
certainly, but it's also about a plucky and generic team of space
heroes taking it to an evil empire out there in the wilds of the cosmos.
Outmanned and outgunned, you spend a lot of proceedings in Starlink
grinding your way across the surface of the different worlds available
to you, winning over the local population one new outpost or one other
interchangeable task at a time, and pushing your enemies back on an
influence metre. Seven planets, then, but after a short while they all
start to feel rather similar.
The fiction may not be particularly inspired, but the toys are nice:
chunky starfighters that snap pleasingly into place and look gloriously
weird when you mix and match the parts of them. My favourite is the
squat and bulbous ship belonging to Judge, a top-heavy alien with a
fishbowl helmet. His ship, which is a bit of a tank, has a fishbowl
component to it, too, and when it's in position you can peer through
this rounded dome and see good old Judge at the controls. The back part
has fins made of flexy plastic. Another ship is zippy and bright red and
looks like an F1 car. You can mix and match on the fly, swapping out
everything from the pilot upwards and the game will accommodate you
pretty much instantly.
The
solar system is left wide open for you after the final boss fight.
There are plenty of hours left if you want to bring all planets to 100
per cent and finish off every dreadnaught.
Judge, who's probably also my favourite pilot, has a neat special
ability that allows him to slow down time, but everyone has their uses.
(Fox's special allows him to summon a member of Starfox to back him up
for a minute or so - he's OP, in other words, but nostalgically OP.)
Weapons and enemies are elementally flavoured and the game's pretty good
at telling you when to trade fire for ice, say, to make the most of the
forces you're up against.
In the heat of the game, I find all
this stuff quite interesting and clever, but I'm also aware that my
review code came with a box of spaceships and pilots and different
parts, and the prices for this stuff online are actually pretty
shocking. Even skipping the checkout as I am, I think it's a bit gross
that when you take too much damage in battle you can stay in the fight
if you snap on a different ship - if you bought one, mate. Some battles
see me working through a fleet of four ships before I grind out a
victory. That kind of design adds up, as does that fact that if you buy
the base game and no more, you're going to be pretty lonely out there.
Fox's own questline is a real highlight - in a game that's made from repeatable fun, it feels a lot more bespoke.Is
it worth the investment? Not really, I would argue. I want to love
Starlink because it's so weird and audacious to go all-in on
toys-to-life just as the market elsewhere seems to reject it - and to go
all-in with a fresh new IP too! But the IP isn't actually that fresh -
after hours of play, the entire campaign behind me, I can't tell you too
much about any of the characters in Starlink, even Fox himself, who
rather sticks out as the graft he is. And the universe here really is
the universe of No Man's Sky in terms of its palette, in terms of its
cloudy space-scenes and in its lumbering beasts that slowly crawl across
the gorgeous horizons. Beyond all that, the action is pleasantly nippy
but the structure is a bit of a slog, and the levelling and
character/ship/weapon progression is fairly standard stuff.
There
are moments, though, where it flickers to life a bit. The first time I
won a majority of a planet's population over to my cause and planted a
final outpost structure while the sun rose overhead. The first time I
took on a huge dreadnaught in planetary orbit and chugged through waves
of primary and secondary defences before sweeping inside the vast ship
itself and ducking laser arrays as I headed for the explosive core? That
was quite a thing, and it was genuinely weird to see my ship weaving
and dodging on-screen, guns on backwards and too many wings obv, while
it was also sat on my controller.
So there's something here,
alright. There's a nice mindless blaster with lots of colour and energy.
But it's a bit hidden by busywork in the menus, endless upgrading and
meter-watching on the planetary surface, shameless creative borrowings
in the art department - and hefty bills at the Amazon checkout.
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