Starlink: Battle for Atlas

Genre: Space Combat Game / Open World

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

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Review:

Starlink is at least nominally a Space Combat Game, but more than this, it’s an Open-World game, and that’s where you’ll be spending most of your time playing this game – exploring one of numerous worlds and completing a number of tasks on these worlds.

You’ll be doing this exploration from within your own personal spacecraft, brought down to the planet’s surface in a “hover mode”, and the tasks you’ll be working on will take one of multiple forms – there are tasks involving taking down an enemy fortification, delivering an item to a specific place, scanning local wildlife, retrieving a piece of equipment from a fortified location… in the end, it mostly amounts to go somewhere, fight some enemies, come back when you’re done.

This sort of gameplay can get a bit repetitive at times, but there’s something satisfying about building up your presence on a planet by completing these tasks, and to the game’s credit it finds interesting ways to break up the action, such as a massive boss battle on one planet, and an underground racing league on another.

Graphically, this game is solid. The environments look good, although not extremely impressive, but there’s something absolutely cool about being able to seamlessly take off from one planet, enter space, enter hyperdrive, get to another planet, head down into the atmosphere, and start exploring an entirely new world, all with no load screens.

The game does have a 2-player split-screen co-op mode, which is really cool for an open-world game… until you find that both players are basically tethered together and can’t freely explore very far on their own without being forced to reunite.

Of course, I’ve gone this long without talking about the two big elephants in the room, so let me get to it. Firstly, Starlink is the one game on the Nintendo Switch that I actually own a hard copy of. This is because the physical copies of the game come with actual toy ships you hook up to the game to scan in their respective parts to get different weapons and abilities in-game.

The Nintendo Switch version of the game famously comes with a Star Fox Arwing that separates into multiple pieces that can be mix-and-matched with other ships in the product line, as well as figurines of Fox McCloud and one of the game’s new characters. These connect to two Joycons via an included custom Joycon grip. The ship itself looks fantastic, with nice details, some points of articulation, and especially now with the game selling on discount, I’d argue buying the game would be worth it for the toy alone.

In theory, you can change your ship on the fly by swapping out parts. In practice, more often than not when I tried to do this, it was an awkward process that would be too distracting to do during the heat of battle, and usually booted me into a pause screen while the game tried to figure out what was going on. On top of this, the toy stuck on top of the controller feels heavy and cumbersome, and your fingers will bump into it… this isn’t really an ideal way to play the game. Thankfully, you can simply use the toys to unlock the content and swap things out as you need to in in-game menus instead.

However, there’s a downside to getting the physical version of the game – this version requires a 7.4GB patch in order to play, which kinda’ defeats the purpose of getting a physical copy of the game for many people. On balance, I’d still say that the included toy makes it worth it, but I could easily see many deciding otherwise.

The other noteworthy thing I already touched on a bit, which is the Switch-exclusive inclusion of Star Fox and his crew in the game. While this certainly isn’t a full-fledged Star Fox game, Fox and co. aren’t just an afterthought – They’re worked into the game’s story, more or less, and the Switch version includes exclusive missions and conversations between Fox’s crew and the game’s main characters.

The Star Fox characters are given a lot of love by the game’s designers, too – they look great, are well-written in keeping with their established personalities, are well voice-acted, and their inclusion here stopping to help some folks in need while they try to seek out longtime nemesis Wolf seems plausible, even if human characters chatting with an anthropomorphic fox, toad, bird, and hare seems a bit less plausible.

In the end, the Switch version of the game is the one to get because of these exclusive additions, and even though you won’t find much use for the toy’s interaction with the game, it’s worth it to get the physical version of the game just so you can have the cool thing to put on a shelf.

As for the game itself, Starlink can be a bit repetitive at times, but it’s fun to play, has an impressive scope, and is fairly unique. It’s well worth adding to your game library.

tl;dr – Starlink is an Open-World game masquerading as a Space Combat game, and while it can get a bit repetitive, it’s still enjoyable and well-crafted. The exclusive Star Fox content here makes the Switch version of the game the one to get. As for whether to get the physical or digital version, don’t expect the cool toys to do much to improve the gameplay, but they’re nice enough that you might want to get the physical version just to have them as, you know, cool toys.

Grade: B+

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