Review — Starfield

Bethesda’s newest RPG takes you to the stars and beyond as you try to uncover the secret of some mysterious artifacts in Starfield.

Bethesda’s first true new franchise in over a decade makes its debut as a ‘Microsoft Studio’ exclusive, focusing on bringing a Fallout-like experience to space and beyond. Years in the making, anticipation boiling. Here’s our verdict.

😁 The Wonderful

• The familiarity of a Bethesda game is omnipresent in all the right ways. For whatever reason, the loop of the game to keep going is addictive. It’s hard to put your finger to it, but in spite of all the negative sides of the game, there’s always ‘something’ to keep you invested and keep going. You feel like it’s a wonderful thing, you just don’t know why.

🙂 The Good

• Starfield can be a really beautiful game. Its cities are maybe slightly dated from a design perspective, but the overall art direction and graphical fidelity is something to behold. Starfield does nothing out of this world in term of look & feel, but everything is on a certain standard which does make you feel part of the world.
• While its by no means the most thrilling or layered story out there, Starfield’s main quests are put together quite well and are interesting enough to keep you on your toes and want to keep finding out what happens. Ultimately, it doesn’t fully deliver its full potential but in terms of a snackable video game story that is easy to get invested in — Starfield’s got it.

• In spite of being portrayed as an RPG, it’s a shooter just as much. And compared to Fallout, it’s a pretty decent one, especially blended with the different gravities on various planets. The weapons feel different enough, the weight of the shooting feels right and you start to embrace its ‘light space ammo effect’ feeling quite fast. It’s definitely not Destiny levels, but given that shooting is the star of the show most of the time, it’s definitely better than average.
• While overwhelming at first, the progression system is neatly built up, making allocating skill points quite a fun task. There’s a lot of different ways to spec your character and being challenged to complete certain related tasks prior to being able to upgrade a certain skill point, makes it entertaining and rewarding.

😒 The Bad

• Starfield feels like a collection of mini experiences, which you jump into one by one, one after another. There’s very little coherence to it whatsoever and ‘space’ feels as hollow as it probably really is. Starfield is a fast travel hub, giving the whole experience almost an internet browser vibe, where you go from one hyperlink to another to eventually start a new mini experience (which on itself is most likely very enjoyable). Starfield’s overarching glue between all of its systems is very shallow and forces you to spend more time than what is welcome in its menus, especially given that…
• Starfield’s UI and menus are a mess. It’s baffling how poorly they’ve been construed, in all aspects. The mission overview, the inventory, the world map, your XP progress. Except for the skills overview, everything feels just off. It’s like 20 different people were tasked to built a menu/UI and they put all different solutions in some kinda blender.
• Space exploration is a poor man’s No Mans Sky and it’s almost offensive how badly they copied it. It’s a bad, unrewarding experience which feels tacked on late in the development cycle and just checks a box that needed ticking when the game design plans were laid out. It’s a waste of energy that could’ve been used somewhere else.

😔 The Ugly

• / (hooray, no insane Bethesda game breaking bugs at launch this time!)

Starfield feels like a game that would be an instant hit in 2016. Seven years later however, it definitely isn’t. Starfield is a confusing experience, where there’s a lot of fun and value to be found in its core, but they’re hanging together by a thread. Starfield is too much about being more instead of being better. It has so much that actually it has very little. It’s a missed opportunity to be a timeless classic. Instead it’s underwhelmingly adequate.

3.5/5

Reviewed on both Xbox Series X and PC.