Starlink: Battle for Atlas Starter Pack Featuring Star Fox - Nintendo Switch

I'm old enough to say the first video game I played was Pong. The home version came out for Christmas back in 1975 through Sears. Boy has time changed things quite a bit since then. Starlink: Battle for Atlas is an open-world space saga that features modular toy technology that allows players to assemble and customize real-world physical starships, link the starships to their game controller, and launch into an epic adventure across the Atlas star system, either in single player or with a friend in two-player split-screen local co-op mode. It is available on the Nintendo Switch, the PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. To get started with Starlink: Battle for Atlas, you purchase a platform-specific starter edition. In addition to the game, you get a spaceship that can connect to your gaming controller as well as a couple possible pilots and some weapons. Who and what is connected to your controller has a real effect on what is shown in the gaming screen. In addition to the starter edition hardware, you can purchase additional startship packs which have other space ships and additional pilot and weapons packages which allow you to add more abilities and powers to the game. All of these attach through a set of connectors so the game can detect what it should show on the screen. If you look at the attached picture, you'll see a connector on the back of the different elements which fit into a slot like the one on the controller up top. The pilot will sit inside the cockpit while the two weapons will sit on top of the plane. The wings are even interchangable, too, if you like the wings from one spaceship and the body from another. Once the spaceship is configured as desired, you're ready for exploration in the game. The world your child plays within in Starlink is an open world with an enormous amount of areas to explore. The environment is rated E for everyone, with a target market of roughly 8-11, so it is a safe place for them to explore, and not a kiddie environment, so they feel more "grown up" playing the game, though without any blood and guts spread around with all the shooting. And, you always have a marker in the game to help tell you where you can go explore to fight the dreaded legion. They'll enjoy the puzzles to solve and the interplanetary quests. While the Switch starter kit comes with a Fox McCloud pilot, Arwing ship, and an exclusive mission, part of the enjoyment of playing Starlink: Battle for Atlas is the ability to swap out your weapons, wings, and pilots to create all kinds of interesting contraptions, even placing elements backwards or upside-down. The ability to do all this swapping does add to the overall cost of playing, but you can spread out that cost over time and not get everything at once. My eleven year old is probably at the upper age really for playing. Starlink is still fun for him, but at least for now, Fortnite keeps his interest more due to its online cooperative game play. There is a cooperative mode with Starlink, but players must be in the room together playing splitscreen vs. being online. I'll have to wait and see how much his friends want to play together when they visit. Surely a fun game to entertain, especially for someone with an interest in space and rockets.

Starlink: Battle For Atlas hit us as a bit of a surprise. As a toys-to-life game, it’s easy to write this one off as focused on a younger audience. But the core gameplay loop of this multiple-open-world space adventure is one that will satisfy both kids and adults, with adults potentially getting more out of the deal than the kids might. Yes, at its core marketing-pitch premise this is a game where you buy (awesomely designed) spaceship toys and snap them together in whatever configuration you can dream of to build a ship in the game itself that you then take off blasting through space with and wreaking havoc on planets below. But what isn’t immediately obvious from the box art is how deep the customization gets in terms of unlockable power-ups, item upgrades, and skill combinations within. There’s a pretty meaty Action-RPG-esque system here that allows you to get to a place where you’re developing custom builds that fit certain battle situations better than others. And when the kiddos go to bed, rest assured you can grab a standard controller and blast off with your ships, swapping gear without needing the toys attached whenever you want. I played a lot of this game with my 6 year old son in what ended up being a fantastic split-screen couch co-op setup. At first I was a bit concerned, because he wanted to play but kept getting lost. Quickly I realized that as first player, I could enable an option that kept my second-player son tethered to me at all times, so that he was never outside a certain radius of me without being teleported over to the action. This essentially made him like one of those kids you see at the Mall on a leash, but with the freedom to blow stuff up to his heart’s content. At first he was confused why it kept making him move, but as soon as he realized it meant he got to blow stuff up more he was thrilled and kept telling me to hurry up and get to the next battle or find the next quest location. This option for couch co-op made took this game from an average experience for us as a Father/Son gaming duo to an absolutely outstanding first-rate experience. Of course, my son’s favorite thing to do is swap pieces out on the real life toys, move wings to places they shouldn’t be, aim weapons backwards, and then see how that translates to his in-game space ship. Normally this cracks him up, although occasionally he realizes the practicality of 3 wings on one side of the space ship, all pointed varying directions, doesn’t pay off. As a result, this game even ends up a mini-lesson in physics! This was a major help in justifying the extra time he and I spent playing this game to his Mother. Physics lesson, Mom. Physics. Starklink: Battle For Atlas is available for Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One. We played our adventures on Switch, and if it’s an option we highly recommend that platform for the additional Star Fox content. Quite honestly this might be the best Star Fox game made since Nintendo 64. Gorgeous graphics, fun combat, tons to do, and carefully crafted couch co-op make this game a must buy this Holiday Season.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas is an all-new action-adventure game developed by our friends at Ubisoft Toronto. It combines fast paced outer space vehicle shooting with large explorable environments, and an interesting story. The game follows the template established by the StarFox series. StarFox is one of the flagship franchises for Nintendo, and while Starlink is not an official part of it, the Nintendo Switch version of the game includes Fox McCloud as a playable character, and it captures the spirit and fun of that series extremely well. Since we invested in the Switch during a Best Buy promotion earlier in the year, we’ve had nothing but good things to say! Now with the special Starlink additions we are even more thrilled! Starlink: Battle for Atlas is an in depth adventure that transports you from your typical living room to an interplanetary adventure! This open-world space saga features modular toy technology that allows players to assemble and customize real-world physical starships and launch into an epic adventure across the Atlas star system! Another promising feature is the local co-op! It’s rare to see this option these days, and works great considering both myself and my partner are huge gamers. Players can enjoy Starlink in single player or two-player split-screen co-op. The personalization is pretty unreal and probably my favorite part about this game. The characters, ships, and weapons are all customizable. They are separate from the base game, and can be purchased additionally, both in physical toy form and the less expensive and storage friendly digital versions. The length to which you can tailor-make your experience is so high, that you can even decide what type of wings your ship will have! Just simply attach your modular component to the controller, and it appears instantly in-game, allowing players to directly affect the course of their battle in a meaningful way. Talk about personalization at the next level! Like in the StarFox series, gameplay mostly involves running into enemy spaceships and doing your best to blast them away before they blast you. What makes this such a different and immersive experience is the freedom of exploration granted to the player. You are playing in a galaxy of planets and solar systems, and while StarFox games mostly used a rail shooter style, where as a player you are on a fixed track and just shoot at whatever comes toward you, Starlink gives you control of where you go, whenever you like.

First of all this isn't really a Starfox game, but the Starfox characters integrate into the story seamlessly. There are some Starfox side missions, but I haven't gotten to them yet so I cant comment on them. Anyway, I'm please to say that Starlink: Battle for Atlas is a very fun game. I've only played a few hours so far, but I've had a lot of enjoyment with the game. The nice thing is there are several difficulty choices so everyone can enjoy the game. So far the main things I've found to do in the game are complete quests, scan new lifeforms, take down enemies and enemy bases, and upgrade your ship/weapons and the Equinox which is sort of a home base. The game takes place completely from the ship you choose to use, but there's no real reason to leave the ship and walk around anyway. My biggest complaint is that the only way to use digital weapons is to remove the joycons from the toy ship's cradle. This is annoying because it means you either play all digital or all toys. I wish you could mix and match. The toys are fairly well made. I really like the design of the Arwing. The wings of the ship and weapons are easy to swap out, which is nice if you have multiple weapons and are in the middle of a fight. The back of the Arwing lights up while the game is running, which is a nice touch. The figures aren't quite as nice looking as I had hoped, but they aren't bad for the small size. Overall this is a great game with nice toys. I highly recommend it.

While I bought this version just for the Arwing--which had one of it's wing broken out of the box--it's blatantly obvious it's Ubisoft using the same rinse repeat format. The game boils down to the same few missions. Go to new area, fight robots to clear an area, upgrade satellite to view more of the planet. Receive mission to scan, deliver, stop enemy threat. Repeat all of the above. It's the same thing over and over. The story is fairly generic as well. Bad guy wants power so he takes it. Off to stop him. Graphically this looks really beautiful despite the switch being light on the hardware specs. Every time I see some of the environments with fog, sunrises, sunsets, I just stare at the light rays going through everything. It's honestly amazing they were able to pull this off. Starfox is awesome. I can't deny that. He's brilliantly weaved into the main story that it feels like it was supposed to be a Starfox game. But since Ubisoft couldn't risk being sued so they threw together their own fighter pilots. Starfox's story only adds an hour or so of additional gameplay but it's very well done. Even though this is the physical edition you can choose to play digitally. Meaning you don't have to use the awkward toy holder and put the toys on the ship to use them. You can select to do all of that digitally. Overall, it's super generic. The majority of the game's sales were from the switch version because of Starfox. If the game did not have Starfox, it would be dead on arrival and forgotten almost instantly. But with Starfox and Nintendo fans wanting a proper Starfox game, this is the closest we'll get.

When I first heard about this game I was moderately interested, but then like most when I heard Star Fox would be in the Switch edition alone I was really interested. I did buy the digital edition as well as this to have more ships digitally but to also have the physical Arwing and Fox McCloud figures. The game is a lot of fun with no shortage of tasks and ability to level up your characters, ships and weapons. The Star Fox objectives are also really fun and nodes at that series. The game can be played with or without figures so you don't have to worry about taking toys with you on the go. Basically once you scan a character, ship or weapon into the game you will have that item in the game digitally for seven days. If you scan the same item(s) in again after seven days they will be yours digitally forever, which is great. I like playing with the toys as much as my kids do in game, but I have put a lot of time into this game just using the Pro controller over the joy-con with toys option. Ubisoft has mentioned they would like to add to this game, which as is has a lot of content, but a few more ships, characters and locations or enemy types would be nice. Personally I'm hoping they add a Samus Aran and her ship set down the road. That said this game does have a lot of repetition but in a lot of different types of activities from attacking enemies, protecting ships, scanning creatures, and other things.

I was a little skeptical about this game going in - seemed like a cheap toys-2-life cash in. However, I generally like t2l games, I generally trust Ubisoft to make decent games, and there is the bonus of getting to play as Fox on the Switch version, so when a good sale came along I jumped onboard. Gotta say, I'm impressed! You can check out YouTube for detailed reviews, but I'll just say that if you as a rule enjoy open world games with lots of objectives to clear and/or you thought No Man's Sky was good gampelay-wise but needed an actual story, this could be a good fit for you. If the idea of having to swap the toys while you play the game is a turnoff for you, I will point out that all of the toys you link are unlocked digitally for seven days. When that time is up, you just have to relink them again to have digital access for another seven days; repeat as necessary. So you don't actually have to play with the toys attached all the time, I just relink everything once a week and play in digital mode. Of course, there's also the option of just buying the game digitally, which unlocks varying amounts of content depending on which version you buy. It just depends on current sales which option is more economical at the time.

Starlink: Battle for Atlas is an open-world space adventure game where players can explore seven alien worlds. Players are part of a group of heroic pilots on an intergalactic mission to save the Atlas Star System from Grax and the Forgotten Legion. Players build their starships. The Starlink game has physical toys so players can assemble customized starships and link to their game controllers. Including the ability to switch out different weapons and pilots. The physical toys add a fun interactive element to the game. Every change players make to starship happens in real time on the screen. All the different weapons, pilots, and starships have unique capabilities, allowing players to mix and match according to their unique playing style. Starlink: Battle For Atlas graphics are incredible. Gameplay looks and feels like you are part of an actual movie. Players can choose to play as either a single player or with a friend in split-screen, two-player mode. There are seven alien worlds to explore in Starlink: Battle For Atlas and virtually endless ways to customize gameplay with different starships, weapons, and pilot configurations. Every game is a unique experience. Upgrade by adding new starships, weapons, and pilot packs sold separately. Awesome game to pick up this holiday season!