Prince of Persia The Sands of Time - Teaser Trailer | Ubisoft Forward
The remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time will launch in 2026. It is now simply titled Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, rather than Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, and specific platforms have not been announced.
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The remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time confirmed the targeted year of release, through a poetic vision of a flame reignited. In 2026, players will get to reconnect with their beloved Prince, in an adventure rebuilt from the ground up, which captures the magic of the original game. The game successfully completed its pre-production phase and is now entering full production, with Ubisoft Toronto, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Pune, and E-Studio joining forces with Ubisoft Montreal.
An Ubisoft open world... in space! Also Star Fox is there!
Lylat Wars is one of my childhood favs, so I'll play anything if they put Star Fox in it. It just so happens that the Switch version of this open world toys-to-life game included a bunch of Star Fox side content as an extra, so here we are. Now it's taken me a few years to recover from Star Fox Zero, but the characters are handled very well here, enough for me to open my heart to them again.
At the very tail end of the Skylanders/Lego Dimensions/Disney Infinity craze, when shops were cutting back on the shelf space they had reserved for plastic figure after plastic figure of dubious usefulness, Ubisoft decided to launch their own entry in this space... for some reason. This being a customisable space ship game, their implementation involves large ship models that attach to a controller mount. The ships then have slots where different weapons and pilots can be attached, and each component can be swapped on the fly depending on the situation. In practice this is clunky and cumbersome, but luckily the physical models are entirely optional. Instead you can buy the components digitally and switch them around in a menu, and I was pleased to score a version off the eShop that included all wave 1 components at a good discount.
Locking weapons that have situational usefulness, or suit your playstyle, behind a purchase feels a bit scummy; especially when I stuck to just four of the 27 available (double gatlings and double missile volleys). Ships are helpful to have a handful of, as they essentially act as extra lives. The pilots are more understandable as optional DLC, but you do need ones from certain factions to unlock global upgrades and I think questlines. So there's a big FOMO component that feels exploitative, but it does make extra purchases feel helpful in-game. Beyond the "digital deluxe" set I also got the Star Fox team pack that adds Falco, Slippy, and Peppy to the base game's Fox (plus a new questline), and the monkey-like pilot Startail because she looked cool... sadly she had an annoying voice (she's not alone), but I still used her and Falco for most of the game thanks to their abilities.
But how does Starlink actually play? Funnily enough it feels a lot like a follow-up to Star Fox 2, Argonaut's SNES sequel that Nintendo cancelled then finally released 22 years later. You have a big star system map with various planets, where the baddies spread to over time. Strategy elements are present but light, where most of the progress comes from the player's direct action. Most of your time is spent ranging over planet surfaces, doing tasks and activities that get you resources and push back the army of robots. These build towards climactic battles with space battleships which you fly inside to destroy (again, very like Star Fox 2). Then follows much rinsing and repeating: this is an open world game, after all.
On the surfaces your ship becomes a sort of hover-speeder. I had more fun with the planet-bound sections than the space stuff, mainly because there's a much greater density of things to do there, and movement and combat is also more manageable when it's constrained by gravity and dimensions. Special mention must be made of how almost seamless it is to transition between ground and space by simply flying up; especially impressive on the Switch which handled the whole thing remarkably well, only chugging when there was an abundance of enemies on screen. The other platforms probably have better overall performance, frame rate, etc., but Star Fox is the winning draw (the other platforms don't have any equivalent extra content of this sort either).
Anyway, in the first few hours you'll get an idea of the loop: zipping around, building up outposts to get map information and resources, and fighting enemies to capture points of interest. All of this builds up a planetwide meter that represents your control vs. the evil alien robot whatevers. I settled into this groove and found it quite fun, never getting too bored of it, although this may vary with your tolerance for repetition. A scant few sidequests can give you some different things to do (and let you hear more voice lines from the actors other than the very oft-repeated expositionary chatter) but a lot of the time it's the ol' open world grind.
The plot is your standard YA sci-fi stuff, not much to write home about. The main team, a set of largely unlikable human schmoes, have uplifted themselves with alien technology to help an alien buddy, and in medias res arrive in the Atlas system. There's some uncomfortably heavy colonial vibes here, as the planets are all some variety of wilderness teeming with settlers, explorers, prospectors, and bandits, and your role as outsiders is uniting these folk under your banner—ostensibly to fight some monster guy and his robot army—and make big decisions about how the system is run before presumably jetting off again after the credits roll. Hmm.
The personal stories of the characters, especially the alien friends you make in Atlas, were the highlight for me, although I feel like they aren't always introduced effectively. As both a game where characters can be spawned in any time from the start and one with some open-ended elements, developments can feel abrupt and the pacing uneven. The Star Fox team and their story is actually integrated very well, although Wolf as the antagonist of this sidestory was, I feel, acting quite out of character from what I would expect. I see him as an amoral mercenary, while here he's set up as a would-be galactic conqueror. Ah well.
Otherwise the Star Fox stuff is excellent: you get a spiffy Starlink version of the Arwing, there's some nice covers of classic music tracks, and the team chatter is top-notch (again, when it's not just open world exposition). The voice actors have mostly carried over either from their original Lylat Wars appearances in a few cases, or the recasts that have stuck since the 3DS remake, and they nail it, especially because they're not just doing weird alternate takes on a reheated script (Zero still hurts my soul so much...). The team are integrated into prerendered cutscenes and there's unique events and missions, plus having them as an addition only makes the overall roster stronger. It's not a full new Star Fox game, but it's pretty much the next best thing. My only complaint is having the characters still trapped in this Lylat Wars/Zero-era setting, continuing the writing-out of Krystal, Sauria, Panther, the Aparoids, everything that Command introduced, etc... but I guess that wasn't really Ubisoft's decision. It's better than nothing, I suppose.
Anyway, Starlink was a pretty good time. As long as you resign yourself to spending more than the normal cost of a game to get a full experience. And you don't think too hard about the themes of the setting. And you don't mind a bit of open world repetition, or the uneven weapon balance, or that obnoxious influencer kid who's on the team for some reason. But let's not focus on the negative; there's a lot to like here. It's a cool sci-fi space game that integrates planet surfaces well, the core gameplay loop is solid and satisfying, and it has a very good crossover with my favourite rail shooter series. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a sequel though, as the retail toys underperformed and five years later the developer is now making Watch Dogs and Far Cry games (as if Ubisoft didn't have enough of those) or assisting on every other Ubisoft release.
So, Im playin Watch Dogs Legion right? Im on the SIRS chapter to get the Malik Dossier at SIRS HQ, and there I saw one of my ops, a Met Police together with a potential recruit SIRS officer I saved to my "to recruit list" and I stealth my way inside the HQ without being noticed by them, made my way thru tue elevator, then i fought the microwave drones then I got the alarm that my potential recruit HATES DedSec now and I didnt even touched her. I cant recruit her now, I saw the bio that my potential recruit was hurt and hospitalized by my Met Police op.
And I was disappointed bc I cant recruit that person and at the same time I was really amazed, how ops can actually help each other behind the scenes. I dont have my footage to prove it tho im sorry.
Metalhead Space Mom!!!
I’m slowly getting through the portrait series I assigned myself for no reason, like a fool. I think next up will be St. Grand because I’ve only drawn him once and like... he’s so underrated???
Starlink: Battle for Atlas is still my main jam and I’m careening into the new year with space on the brain and metal in my ears!
