Rocket Science
Edge|August 2018

How Starlink: Battle For Atlas has the tricky business of toys-to-life down to a fine art.

Jen Simpkins
Rocket Science

Fantasy is all very well when it comes to toy spaceships and virtual worlds, but business is another matter. As such, there’s something irresistibly audacious about Starlink: Battle For Atlas. Ubisoft Toronto’s open-world space adventure is powered by a set of model starships, which can be disassembled and reassembled into various combinations that are then replicated, and used, in-game. It is, to all intents and purposes, a toys-to-life game.

And toys-to-life, you may remember, is currently on a bit of a downward spiral, to put it mildly. Following the success of Activision’s Skylanders, the nascent genre inflated rapidly, with plenty of would-be imitators throwing their RFID-tagged statuettes into the ring. The market, it seemed, was smaller than anticipated – one or two varieties of expensive plastic videogame is likely enough for most households – and the toys-to-life bubble is, if not already burst, looking dangerously fragile. Most of the genre’s superstars have shut up shop: Disney Infinity and Lego Dimensions have ceased production entirely, while the Skylanders series is currently on indefinite hiatus.

These were games attached to huge brands: Spyro The Dragon being the foundation for Skylanders, Star Wars for Disney Infinity, and not just the eponymous plastic brick but any number of pop-culture darlings in the case of Lego Dimensions. By contrast, Starlink is an original IP that Ubisoft Toronto hopes will capture the hearts and minds of eight-to-twelve-year-olds – and those of their parents – everywhere.

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