Ubisoft, despite recent appearances, has made a plethora of phenomenal games that are indeed worth playing. The majority of these titles are fairly well established and need no introduction. Even its so-called obscure or underrated games like Beyond Good and Evil are relatively popular at this point and garner a lot of love from their loyal and dedicated fanbases. That’s not really a surprise considering it is one of the most recognizable developers currently active and routinely pumps out a slew of video games for our insatiable consumption.
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However, despite almost all of Ubisoft’s games, flops or not, at least somewhat penetrating the zeitgeist, there is one that I see discussed so little that I’m convinced almost everyone has either forgotten about it or didn’t know it existed in the first place. This hugely underrated open-world sci-fi RPG is not just a great game that deserves a lot more love, but also one of the few titles to attempt to ape the No Man’s Sky formula, albeit on a much smaller scale. I’ve always been a little astounded at just how much Starlink: Battle for Atlas was going for, and I really want more people to experience it, especially as it is incredibly cheap nowadays.
Starlink: Battle For Atlas Is What Starfield Should Have Been
Starlink: Battle for Atlas was released in 2018, although, despite some very old-school Ubisoft design, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a more recent release. It launched just two years after No Man’s Sky, and managed to rather successfully replicate its seamless space-to-planet travel, varied biome design, and excellent spaceship combat, albeit without the quintillion randomly generated planets. Rather, Starlink features just a handful of curated planets, each of which is filled with unique POIs, flora, and fauna, as well as its own selection of quests to complete and characters to meet. Ostensibly, Starlink is what Starfield should have been, only five years earlier.
Sadly, despite its sprawling universe, seamless space-to-planet travel, and variety in biomes and planet types, all of which make Starlink: Battle for Atlas easily one of the most underrated open-world games of the past decade, it was a commercial flop. The biggest contributor to this was its status as a toys-to-life game, something that had only really ever worked for Skylanders, and even then, briefly. Starlink’s gimmick was that you would buy the actual spaceships you flew in and the pilots you were playing as, and then equip both to your controller. Then, you could switch out the various guns and parts of your ship, and these would change in real time in-game.
In practice, it’s really impressive and honestly never gets old. Even without the physical components, switching your wings and guns out to get the edge in combat or combining elemental types to deal extra damage is a lot of fun and adds a novel level of strategy and customizability to an otherwise excellent combat model. However, no one wanted to invest in the physical toys, and they proved too expensive to produce. With the game relying on introducing new characters regularly, Starlink: Battle for Atlas’ list of DLC became prohibitively extravagant, which I can understand putting people off. Ultimately, Starlink ended up being the death of the format, and it was the death of Starlink, something I believe is a genuine shame.
Ubisoft Should Return To Starlink: Battle For Atlas
There was so much potential for Starlink: Battle for Atlas to expand beyond the initial game. The roster of characters was fun and well-designed, each contributing to the game’s mostly enjoyable main story that paved the way for this universe to be explored in greater detail in a potential sequel. The customizability, frenetic action-packed combat, and stunning planetary exploration have not been done quite as well since, even by Ubisoft itself, with its severely underrated Star Wars Outlaws. Sure, Starlink: Battle for Atlas wasn’t perfect, cursed to be afflicted with the traditional Ubisoft open-world design philosophy, but what it had to offer was phenomenal, nuanced, and certainly made it one of the best Star Fox games, a series that, until very recently, has not been well serviced.
I can see a non-toys-to-life sequel that builds upon the digital components of Starlink: Battle for Atlas working exceedingly well, especially in the vacuum that Starfield has left behind. People want epic space adventures, but few developers seem capable of delivering them at the scale that Starlink: Battle for Atlas provides. Even the seamless travel from space to the planet’s surface appears impossible to achieve in games that at least look and feel technically less impressive than Starlink.
However, as far as we know, no sequel to this underrated commercial flop has been greenlit. Shocker, I know. While one was perhaps a possibility shortly after the original game was released, after Ubisoft’s restructuring and cancellation of several high-profile titles, it seems almost impossible. Even if Ubisoft doesn’t return to the Starlink: Battle for Atlas brand, it should dabble once again in this style of open-world, or open-solar-system, experience. No Man’s Sky certainly delivers the quintessential experience, but it can lack the focus that a more tightly designed and handcrafted experience delivers. As Starfield and Star Wars Outlaws don’t seem interested in offering that to players, then perhaps Ubisoft should revisit the idea, albeit minus all the toys, as much as I may personally love them.
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