Ubisoft showed off its new entry in the “toys-to-life” market, Starlink: Battle for Atlas. I played it at a recent preview event on the Nintendo Switch and got hands-on with Starfox character Fox McCloud, which Nintendo agreed to allow Ubisoft to use as an add-on character in the game.
The presence of Fox McCloud shows that Ubisoft is making a big bet on this market. Activision and Toys for Bob created toys-to-life with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure in 2011. By 2014, the toy-game hybrid had generated more than $2 billion in revenues from the sales of video games and more than 175 million action figures. But the market collapsed, taking down Activision, Disney, and Warner Bros. In 2017, even Activision put Skylanders on hiatus.
And that’s why Ubisoft’s entry into the market is so important. The huge French game publisher hopes to save toys-to-life as a billion-dollar segment of gaming. Or, maybe it will create an even bigger crater.
Above: Starlink: Battle for Atlas.
I wrote an earlier preview of the gameplay on the planet Haven, and I interviewed producer Matthew Rose, who helped kick off the game a couple of years ago with a team of just eight people. The game debuts on October 16 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. You’ll also be able to buy toy ships, weapons, and characters like Fox McCloud as separate purchases.
With Starlink, you have a modular spaceship that you can customize yourself. You pick your pilot. Then, you attach the starship and two weapons to the controller. Everything snaps together easily. Then, you dive into the video game and fight. If you’ve got the wrong toys attached for the enemy you’re facing, you can switch them on the fly, and the game will keep playing.
The game takes place in the Atlas system, which has seven inhabited worlds. I played in Act II on the Xbox One, exploring the once-happy world of Haven, a peaceful world with plants that are 80 stories high. I also played Act I on the Nintendo Switch. I used the traditional controller on the Switch, and then attached my character, spaceship, and weapons to the controller.
After watching the opening cinematic, I was immediately thrown into a dogfight in space, as I had to hunt down enemy Drake space fighters from the Forgotten Legion, an alien race that wants to wreck the Atlas system.
When you link a pilot, ship, or weapon to the game controller, it goes live instantly in the game. If you’re in a tough battle or you’ve got the wrong weapon, you can immediately disengage and plug in another toy. That’s a magical marriage of physical toys and the digital game. In toys-to-life, this is table stakes. You have to make a toy instantly playable in a game, and it’s good to see that Ubisoft is nailing this part.
I chose to play with Fox McCloud, so I picked up his ship and snapped it to my Switch controller. Then I attached a couple of weapons to it. I went into the opening dogfight of the game and found it relatively easy to control and get into the action. When I completed that part, I had to go down to the planet with a damaged ship. I had to switch weapons to deal with short-range alien targets. I moved around the planet, as my ship was unable to fly. That’s wasn’t that fun, but it did let me learn how to use the controls and get a sense for surface combat.
Above: Starlink: Battle for Atlas.
Fox McCloud is not just a snap-on character. Starfox is integrated into the cinematics of the game. If you swap Fox McCloud out, the game is intelligent enough to know that you’ve got a different character and that it should play a different cinematic appropriate for that character. The story, the cinematics, and the environment all react to your choice of a pilot.
You won’t have hundreds of toys to choose from, as you did with Skylanders. But it won’t be cheap to purchase all the stuff you’ll want in order to feel fully equipped to handle any situation. That can run up quite a bill, and it will remind you as a parent why you hated Skylanders so much. But Rose points out that you can play the game fully digitally. You’re not obligated to buy toys at all. Each ship pack is $25, pilot packs are $8, and weapon packs are $10. On top of that, you’ll buy a $75 game.
Rose said that Ubisoft is targeting children who grow up playing video games as the offspring of gamers. They can play games for young kids, but they often don’t have anything to jump to once they get to the next level. You don’t want them playing mature games like Doom. So, Starlink tries to fill that void with something that is age-appropriate, Rose said. The physical-digital combination is like combining Saturday morning cartoons with toys so that you can lose yourself in the experience. And by adding Starfox, Nintendo captures a certain slice of the dedicated fan demographic as well. Now the question is if toys-to-life will get another chance at success.
