Rocket Science

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

- Jen Simpkins

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.