Developer Ubisoft Toronto wants to tell us that it's okay to love the toys-to-life genre. Although Starlink: Battle for Atlas suffers from some typical open-space problems and some minor design oversights, the lovingly crafted game is fun to play and the toys are awesome to collect.



Starlink: Battle for Atlas starts on a rather dramatic note. A few minutes into the game, your mentor, St. Grand, is kidnapped and you are left to search the wide open space for him. The story does have some great beats to it, cliche as they might be, and is written to a degree that will keep you engaged from start to finish. The story is helped along by a cast of great crewmates and NPCs that you meet on your space odyssey. The missions fleshing out these characters were my favorite by a space-mile. Most missions have you transporting items from point A to point B, kill enemies attacking a base, or completing simple puzzles to unlock a door. Make no mistake - these missions are repetitive. These are the open-space problems I mentioned in the opening paragraph. With such beautiful planets, great NPC's and variety of weapons, it's a shame to see the repetitive mission structure hinder an otherwise great game.

The story is helped along by a cast of great crewmates and NPCs that you meet on your space odyssey.

Missions take place on seven distinct planets and the space between them. Each planet was made to look and feel different. The atmosphere, fauna, flora, and biomes all vary vastly between each planet. Traveling between them is seamless and a blast for the first couple of times.

Outlaws and space pirates occupy the space between and will lay traps for you. When triggering these traps for the dozenth time, things tend to get a bit tedious. I ended up using the fast travel function between planets for the most part of my playtime. It's not that the dogfights are bad, it's just that they boil down to equipping a weapon with homing capabilities and firing in the enemies general direction. Imagine doing this every 2 minutes on a 10-minute journey - and you can understand me resorting to fast travel.



Combat on planets takes pretty much the same approach, although you won't have a need for homing weapons. Most enemies in the game suffer from the pesky reskin disease. Take the Cyclops, for example. These enemies come in the same design, only with different colors and attacks. A purple cyclops will attack you with a gravity field, while a blue cyclops will attack you with an ice-based blast. Again, a game boasting with such beautiful worlds and creature design should have enemy designs to match. Combat on planets, in general, is great. It is here where the mods you collect truly shine. These mods are divided into tiers of rarity, where the higher rarity items provide better boosts and benefits. Mods can give you better elemental resistance, faster recharge rates, better handling, and higher damage, to name a few. Looting, comparing and equipping mods will satisfy that RPG craving most of us have. On the subject of collecting things, let us take a look at the
actual toys.



The build quality of the various toys is great. The body of the ship, in particular, is sturdy and doesn't feel cheap at all. The weapon and pilots are also well made but suffer a bit in the quality department. Some parts bleed into each other and form a mash of colors. This isn't something you will immediately notice, only upon closer inspection will it be evident. From the start, not of this game but of the toys-to-life genre, if you expect a Hot Toys quality toy - you will be severely disappointed. The completed ship, mounted on a controller, looks pretty cool. On the subject, when playing with the physical parts (and not the digital version), your controller needs to be permanently connected to your console. A lengthy cable is included in the Starter Pack but it's still a bit of an annoyance. Another problem, at least for those who use the audio jack on their DualShock 4, is the way the controller mount blocks the port. If you want to play the game with a pair of wired headphones, you are tough out of luck.

In the process of making the game as accessible as possible, the developers created a situation where they disadvantage customers who prefer physical items.

One thing to note, and this is probably a first for the genre, is that the developers have shortchanged the customers who opted for the physical version of Starlink. The Starter Pack comes with 1 pilot, a controller mount, 1 starship, and three weapons. This is fine for a starter back, but the digital version comes with even more goodies. The digital standard edition, which is cheaper than the physical, comes with the following: the game, 4 ships, 6 pilots and 12 weapons. Sure, you won't have tangible items to show, but you will have all the weapons, ships and pilots from the get-go. In the process of making the game as accessible as possible, the developers created a situation where they disadvantage customers who prefer physical items.

At the end of the day, Starlink: Battle for Atlas provides a great space simulator and an awesome entry into the toys-to-life genre. The core mechanics - shooting, flying, and story beats - are fun and engaging, but the open-world repetitiveness drags an otherwise good game down. If you are looking for a fun, arcade-y space adventure game, with toys to boot, Starlink is the game for you. However, if you are looking for the ultimate space simulator experience, you might want to look elsewhere. With everything said and done, Starlink is still a fun game and will definitely be enjoyed by fans of the genre.



Check out our coverage of everything Starlink: Battle for Atlas right here. If you want to grab the game and some extra physical parts, well, you're already in the right place.