Beat Starlink a week or two ago and only just now have the internet to type about it! I helped a friend beat all the Gummy Ship stuff in Kingdom Hearts 3, and it made me really wanna play a real spaceship game. I looked over on the eShop and noticed the eternal sale that the Digital Deluxe edition of Starlink was still on, so I picked it up. It made a really great simple game to de-stress to while I was waiting for my job to start after moving to Japan.
Starlink is a game by Ubisoft and it is very much still an Ubisoft Game (TM). Large open-world with tons of icons scattered around that you progressively unlock more of with effectively identical activities to do to fill up number percentages, all while a larger story goes on around it. The gimmick this time is that you're a spaceship, but that said, it's a pretty decent gimmick.
There are two parts to Starlink: planets and space. Space has you in your spaceship flying around, getting into dogfights, and attacking larger spaceships in raid-like solo fights. They're really well put together, and honestly I kinda wish the whole game had just been a better fleshed-out space game, because you're honestly barely in space unless you really wanna do ALL the nearly identical raid-like fights. The second part is the planets, where you're still in a spaceship, but your spaceship is basically glued to the ground like a landmaster in Starfox. You zoom about these slightly procedurally-generated planets doing quests for quest-givers, attacking enemies you find, scanning wildlife, and collecting goodies. There is a lot of planet stuff in the game, and honestly I thought it was a shame because it's definitely the less remarkable part of the gameplay loop.
You're a spaceship, so of course you can customize it! If you have the physical toy, you can plonk your IRL guns onto the ship's wings and they'll appear on your ship in the game, same goes for wings on your ship. They'll even face backwards if you plonk them on backwards! It's a really neat gimmick, and the digital replacement for it is honestly really horribly clunky and cumbersome and really would've benefited from a faster way to instantly toggle between loadouts without going into a menu (the game does have loadouts, you just can't go between them quickly).
There are 4 different elemental weapons, fire, ice, stasis, and vortex; and there are also a series of additional neutral weapons that have no element attached. They're all really different and fun to use, and using one with a pilot gets only a certain amount of skill points with that weapon, so you're encouraged to try out loads with different combos to get more skill points and see what works best together. The weird thing is that the number of each is really odd, especially how there is only ONE stasis weapon, and given that vortex enemies are weak to stasis, you're gonna be using that ONE a LOT. The physical versions of the game also never came with at least one of these elemental weapons, and given there are certain in-game activities that require all the elements to complete, the game NEEDED extra toys to be bought to actually 100% if you bought the physical toy (a very crappy, but quite typically Ubisoft move). In summary, weapons are fun, but elemental gunplay is kinda poorly thought out and badly monetized to boot.
The Switch version comes with included Starfox DLC where you can play as fox, fly the Arwing, and play some special Star Fox missions as you try and track down Star Wolf, and at least compared to the rest of the content in the game, it's fairly substantial. Now, there isn't actually THAT much to do, but it's another story side-quest in a game that otherwise has ONE story-related side-quest that isn't a part of the main story, so at least proportionally it's a fairly sizable amount of content. It's quite well put together too, and easily makes the Switch version of Starlink the definitive one despite how much better other consoles can likely run the software.
The story of Starlink is VERY forgettable and a far cry (no pun intended) from Ubisoft's better writing achievements of recent memory (such as the excellent Watchdogs 2). It's very kiddy in the kinda bad way, where it seems like it's trying to feel deep but never really does anything beyond looking pretty and having an atmosphere of something cool happening without anything meaningful occurring. For the sake of selling more toys, the cast is bloated to the point where there were several cutscenes that featured characters I never remembered seeing before, let alone knowing the character traits of. The story was clearly not the focus of this game, and was sacrificed for the sake of selling more toys. Not a deal-breaker (I mean I 100%'d the planet parts of the game, so clearly there's something to the gameplay loop that's appealing despite the story), but a shame given how well Ubisoft has shown they can construct a narrative.
Verdict: Recommended. Starlink may not be anything mind-blowing for most people, but it's a good time, and something fairly easy to recommend if you can get the digital deluxe edition for 50% off like I did. It made me look forward to the upcoming Starfox DLC for it, and even more look forward to the innovations a Starlink 2 may bring, if that ever exists.
Starlink is a game by Ubisoft and it is very much still an Ubisoft Game (TM). Large open-world with tons of icons scattered around that you progressively unlock more of with effectively identical activities to do to fill up number percentages, all while a larger story goes on around it. The gimmick this time is that you're a spaceship, but that said, it's a pretty decent gimmick.
There are two parts to Starlink: planets and space. Space has you in your spaceship flying around, getting into dogfights, and attacking larger spaceships in raid-like solo fights. They're really well put together, and honestly I kinda wish the whole game had just been a better fleshed-out space game, because you're honestly barely in space unless you really wanna do ALL the nearly identical raid-like fights. The second part is the planets, where you're still in a spaceship, but your spaceship is basically glued to the ground like a landmaster in Starfox. You zoom about these slightly procedurally-generated planets doing quests for quest-givers, attacking enemies you find, scanning wildlife, and collecting goodies. There is a lot of planet stuff in the game, and honestly I thought it was a shame because it's definitely the less remarkable part of the gameplay loop.
You're a spaceship, so of course you can customize it! If you have the physical toy, you can plonk your IRL guns onto the ship's wings and they'll appear on your ship in the game, same goes for wings on your ship. They'll even face backwards if you plonk them on backwards! It's a really neat gimmick, and the digital replacement for it is honestly really horribly clunky and cumbersome and really would've benefited from a faster way to instantly toggle between loadouts without going into a menu (the game does have loadouts, you just can't go between them quickly).
There are 4 different elemental weapons, fire, ice, stasis, and vortex; and there are also a series of additional neutral weapons that have no element attached. They're all really different and fun to use, and using one with a pilot gets only a certain amount of skill points with that weapon, so you're encouraged to try out loads with different combos to get more skill points and see what works best together. The weird thing is that the number of each is really odd, especially how there is only ONE stasis weapon, and given that vortex enemies are weak to stasis, you're gonna be using that ONE a LOT. The physical versions of the game also never came with at least one of these elemental weapons, and given there are certain in-game activities that require all the elements to complete, the game NEEDED extra toys to be bought to actually 100% if you bought the physical toy (a very crappy, but quite typically Ubisoft move). In summary, weapons are fun, but elemental gunplay is kinda poorly thought out and badly monetized to boot.
The Switch version comes with included Starfox DLC where you can play as fox, fly the Arwing, and play some special Star Fox missions as you try and track down Star Wolf, and at least compared to the rest of the content in the game, it's fairly substantial. Now, there isn't actually THAT much to do, but it's another story side-quest in a game that otherwise has ONE story-related side-quest that isn't a part of the main story, so at least proportionally it's a fairly sizable amount of content. It's quite well put together too, and easily makes the Switch version of Starlink the definitive one despite how much better other consoles can likely run the software.
The story of Starlink is VERY forgettable and a far cry (no pun intended) from Ubisoft's better writing achievements of recent memory (such as the excellent Watchdogs 2). It's very kiddy in the kinda bad way, where it seems like it's trying to feel deep but never really does anything beyond looking pretty and having an atmosphere of something cool happening without anything meaningful occurring. For the sake of selling more toys, the cast is bloated to the point where there were several cutscenes that featured characters I never remembered seeing before, let alone knowing the character traits of. The story was clearly not the focus of this game, and was sacrificed for the sake of selling more toys. Not a deal-breaker (I mean I 100%'d the planet parts of the game, so clearly there's something to the gameplay loop that's appealing despite the story), but a shame given how well Ubisoft has shown they can construct a narrative.
Verdict: Recommended. Starlink may not be anything mind-blowing for most people, but it's a good time, and something fairly easy to recommend if you can get the digital deluxe edition for 50% off like I did. It made me look forward to the upcoming Starfox DLC for it, and even more look forward to the innovations a Starlink 2 may bring, if that ever exists.