VIDEO: Starlink: Battle For Atlas Announced For Nintendo Switch
Ubisoft has an original IP coming to the Nintendo Switch in late 2018. It’s called Starlink: Battle For Atlas and it is a space combat shooter. Not only can you fly around between planets, but you’ll be able to land and transform your vehicle to traverse the landscape.
The biggest surprise is that you’ll actually buy physical ship parts to create your own customized crafts right on your controller. It appears that Ubisoft is getting into the “Toys to Life” market in a big way with its new franchise. It’s no wonder some have already begun calling this game No Man’s Skylanders.
We think the game shows some very strong promise. Nintendo doesn’t typically see games of this type and it looks like it could be a ton of fun. We’re not completely sold on the toy aspect yet, as it does seem a little gimmicky, but we’re very intrigued to see more.
Customization is the cornerstone of any great strategic experience, whether you’re talking about adjusting weapon loadouts for a specific challenge or tweaking the performance of a vehicle to suit your preferred playstyle. But what if you could do it all without menus, by reaching for the parts you want in real life and slapping them into place instantly? That’s the idea at the heart of Starlink: Battle for Atlas, due to launch in fall 2018 on Nintendo Switch. An interstellar open-world adventure, Starlink brings together free-form interplanetary exploration with fast-paced battles in heavily armed starships. Or lightly armed starships. It’s all up to you, really.
As you explore the Atlas Star System, you’ll do so with a physical ship clipped to your controller. Using Smart Building Technology, you’ll be able to immediately swap out parts on the ship – including wings, weapons, pilots, and even the starship hull itself – and see them change in-game to meet the shifting demands of your situation as you experiment with different combinations, weapons, and status effects. It’ll all come in handy as you’re dealing with the evil forces of a warlord named Grax, while also searching for allies to help you survive in a hostile system.
Players will be able to use their starships to explore the game’s vast planets up close in a skimmer mode, take to the skies to fly quickly to their next objective, or blast out into the vacuum of space to travel between planets and engage in blistering space dogfights.
Coming from Ubisoft Blog:
Next up was Matt Rose, producer of Starlink: Battle for Atlas. As the team at Ubisoft Toronto wrapped up work on Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Rose said, the team started looking for a new project, and formed a team to explore new concepts and take calculated risks. Their members pitched, voted on, and created dozens of prototypes over the weeks that followed.
“There was one prototype in particular that was really special,” Rose said. “It had humble origins. It was a Wiimote with a consumer-electronics board duct-taped together with wires everywhere. And we built a game prototype to go with it, and it wasn’t much to look at, but everyone who played with it either got a big smile on their face, or started making their own sound effects.”
The team decided to dig a little deeper, and their efforts eventually created Starlink. Combining open-world exploration with an entirely new approach to customization, Starlink tasks you with piloting a battle-ready starship – which can seamlessly transition between traveling on the ground, in the air, and in space between planets – against a threat to the galaxy. More than that, it lets you clip a modular, physical starship to your controller, and swap out its wings, weapons, hull, and pilot to instantly adapt to any challenge, on the fly, with no pausing.
Craig has been covering the video game industry since 1995. His work has been published across a wide spectrum of media sites. He’s currently the Editor-In-Chief of Nintendo Times and contributes to Gaming Age.
