All right, everybody strapped ourselves in this is going to be a bumpy ride. I feel like I’m the kind of person Starfield was made for I loved bethesda’s last single player RPG Fallout 4 maybe a bit too much there’s nothing I like more than a Sci-Fi Universe with spaceships lasers and political Intrigue flying every which way you have my agreement and yet a dozen hours in I was feeling lost in space never went too far off course while I was flying my Rinky Dink little ship around chasing down mysterious artifacts and war criminals with a damn fine crew of companions at my side but man did Starfield make me work hard to get through that opening stretch you know most dusties don’t even make it this far even when it mostly right at the ship and I was loving the story side quests and launching boarding parties on enemy ships there were still too many problems that constantly popped up forcing me to curb my excitement it’s a bit like starfield’s own elaborate shipbuilder tool even though you can slap together a bunch of high-end parts and it will technically fly sometimes it’s just not the best fit I’d expect no less, but Bethesda has built out a sprawling universe with detailed lore.
I wouldn’t call it especially distinctive; it’s reminiscent of universes like the expanse and Firefly and full of references to every sci-fi movie from Aliens to Blade Runner and, of course, Interstellar. In fact, there’s a significant similarity to what Obidian created for 2019’s outer worlds, but the story of how humans abandoned Earth and colonised the stars is so densely packed in, with more around every corner, but I found it easy to get invested in.
We’re all here because we’re committed to exploring space, and once I learned the difference between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, United Colonies security and peace regardless of which background option and starting skills you pick for your character, everyone starts out in the same mining camp and touches the same space magic that sets off a Trippy 2001: A space magic that sets off a Trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey-style vision, but after that, Starfield is an immense game that will send you off in all kinds of different directions once it hands you the keys to your first spaceship. It’s to the point where talking to others who have played alongside me has left us all bewildered.
Wait, what do you mean you don’t know who the Vanguard are? Wow, you didn’t unlock that until Level 20. You met who and above your new best friend on Neon, and you can easily fall down all sorts of wormholes into extended chains of missions that take you on adventures that rival Skyrims and scope. Even after about 70 hours, there are major quest lines I haven’t even touched and others I’ve left unfinished. I’m eager to go back and pick those up now that I’ve completed the main story. You know there’s more to come. In typical Bethesda fashion, the main quest itself isn’t terribly flexible in how you can resolve the situation to thrust you into your options.
Here is for the most part about picking whether you want to be a Boy Scout, for whom a good deed is its own reward. a wisecracking mercenary who has to be rewarded after doing a good deed or an all-business mercenary who demands to be paid up front to Deuce after doing a good deed, I’ll say right up front that if you’re looking to get rich, this isn’t kind of work for you. There are a few life and death choices, and there’s a decision at the end about which philosophy to embrace before heading into the final battle, but most of it is going to play out the same way because no matter what your goal is to solve the mystery of those artefacts alongside your secret society of explorers known as constellation I won’t say much about where the plot goes because it’s way too easy to spoil, but I did enjoy the way it probes its biggest concept in distinctive ways, and there’s plenty of well-written discussion about what it all means.
You’re on to bigger things. It’s in the side quest that you really get to act out your character’s morals and choose to resolve conflicts peacefully or just by killing and robbing innocent people. There’s a storyline that felt very Boys from Brazil inspired as well as numerous related quests about hunting down war criminals that pose ethical quandaries to reconcile You can even join up with the Crimson Fleet Pirates and dive into a life of smuggling and general space crime. It seems like it would take hundreds of hours to explore them all, and there sure are a lot of options. I wouldn’t say I’ve encountered anything just yet that’s as spectacular as destroying Megaton in Fallout 3, but Starfield has its moments.
There’s no shortage of interesting companion characters to hang out with throughout all this. There’s definitely a focus on Sarah, the virtuous leader of the constellation. I don’t think we can forget what, and Sam, a former lawman with a young daughter who is always worried, will see him as less than perfect. However, I was richly rewarded by taking the eccentric scientist Barrett along with me on some missions. Your part of this now, and I suspect the others hold a few surprises for their slaves as well, but you can only take one with you at a time, so I have more explanation to do here as well. We waste time, we should complete our mission, and then we can talk.
It helps the Bethesda has certainly upped its facial animation game for Starfield. Sure, it’s nowhere near as lifelike as the motion-captured performances we’ve seen in The Last of Us in God of War, but generally, it’s expressive enough that it can do justice to the excellent voice performances, looking a little more murdery than usual, but let’s just say they had it coming. I have to say that the early hours are pretty rough going, and there was a while there when I was wondering if the stars would ever rely, so this review is going to go through that rough patch too. Bear with me.
Just like Starfield itself it does get better by the end that’s why I keep him see this vast map of stars it feels extremely small when each of its hundreds of explorable planets is separated by a little more than a loading screen it didn’t take long for me to realize the takeoff and Landing animations are barely interactive cutscenes they can often be bypassed by just going to the map screen and jumping to another planet without even setting foot on a ship it’s impossible not to compare starfield’s disjointed space travel to the seamlessness of No Man’s sky and it’s a bit of a letdown every single time the next nuisance that irritated me no matter where I roamed is the fact that there are no actual Maps many or otherwise this screen is just not helpful at all I spent way too much time searching for basic things like vendors to sell my loot to while I tried to memorize the layout of multiple settlements and I expect most people will just look up Community made Maps like Bethesda’s previous RPGs, Starfield’s play time is roughly 30 inventory management, and yet it’s shockingly bad at that task.
You’ll constantly need to transfer loot between your inventory and your companions or to and from your ship’s cargo hold, but maddeningly, you can’t view both at the same time like you can in Fallout 4 in Skyrim Otters. If you’re listening, please help. Those problems never got better during my playthrough. I just learned to live with them. the hump that I did work my way over though is that Starfield doesn’t tell you enough about how its huge collection of systems work and it trickles out the cool stuff too slowly out of the gate you can’t mod your equipment you can’t use your essential boost pack and you can barely use stealth or board enemy ships at all and build outposts that are a lot like Fallout 4 settlements but it doesn’t tell you that you probably shouldn’t bother with them early on because you don’t need huge quantities of a single resource until way later speaking of storage space on the first tier of ships is obnoxiously small for the amount of Loot and resources you gather I resorted to silly workarounds like throwing stuff on the floor of my ship like a space hoarder what can I help you with eventually though all that stuff gets resolved through upgrades and learning the ropes it’s also worth noting that the worlds you explore are generally visually different with varying gravity but they’re Barren and lifeless aside from the crafted areas you visit in quests I mean yeah you’d expect that from planets that are mostly Untouched by intelligent beings but that doesn’t make them a lot more fun to run around outside of a handful of randomly generated outposts full of enemies to raid all there is to do is scan trees and rocks or zap them with a mining laser we just love rocks or sometimes scan and maybe shoot alien wildlife It’s a far cry from Bethesda’s previous games, where you could barely swing a dead mud crab without hitting something cool.
It took a while for me to learn that I could largely just ignore this stuff. There’s one part of the main quest that’s pretty repetitive too. You’re said to investigate a series of ancient structures, and it’s annoying that what you ‘re said to investigate a series of ancient structures and enticing enough for me to want to chase them all down at least, but after the first few, I couldn’t help but wish that Bethesda’s designers had taken some inspiration from breath of the wild when it came to creating different puzzles for each one, so it wasn’t until about a dozen hours in that I unlocked enough upgrades that the gameplay started to gel for me alongside the story.
Starfield absolutely is one of those games that takes way too long to get to the good part but the fact that it eventually did get its claws into me forced me to jettison all of the more like Star failed jokes I had been workshopping out the airlock and focus more on what this sci-fi epic gets right or at least does well enough wild under does well enough is combat which is the solution to most problems unless you’re extremely dedicated to the idea of talking or sneaking your way past most encounters with hostile Pirates robots and Wildlife and anything that looks at you funny not bad and it’s kept me happily blinking away with my tricked out laser rifles and shotguns but it’s not especially great either without anything new and exciting to fill the void left by a fallout’s time-stopping pad system it’s pretty standard stuff to their credit enemies do react in fun ways and sometimes they’ll flee if you killed off their friends plus the modifiers on Epic and legendary weapons and gear have some fun stuff going on that’s not afraid to be game changing I found a rifle that does more damage as my health decreases and makes enemies more likely to drop medicine packs. I found a spacesuit that has a 10 chance to set nearby attackers on fire and made me invisible when I crouched and held still.
That’s kind of cool, and there’s a lot more where that came from. The other side of combat is shipped to ship battles, which are also fairly simple as space dog fighting games go. It’s never not entertaining to blast away at pirates and watch the pretty explosions. there’s some basic power management but I rarely felt the need to fiddle with it in combat because most of the ships I bought or found had enough power to go around the closest thing to Vats you get in Starfield is when you spend a skill point on target locking which is an absolute must-have disabling weapons is a great way to even the odds when you’re being ganged up on but even better is when you take out their engines and board them some of the best moments in my Starfield playthrough have happened during these raids as I went room by room mopping up enemies until I gunned down the captain and sat in their chair to seize their ship in its cargo for myself I’m definitely going full pirate next run through so I can do this all the time The starfield is the sheer variety of spaceships flying through the settled systems, and the fact that they’re so modular and customizable made me want to dump more skill points into starship design so that I can mess with it more and learn the somewhat complicated rules of how to snap the pieces together to form a space worthy vessel. Oh yeah, and the lockpicking minigame deserves a shout out as one of the best I’ve seen in an RPG. Are there bugs? Of course, there are.
I’ve seen a fair amount of model and texture pop-in occasional crashes. performance slowdowns mostly during Auto saves wonky waypoint clipping issues wrong camera angles during conversations. the works I’ve played mostly on PC myself, but nothing outrageous. I have to say Starfield has been fairly stable for a big open RPG like this. I never ran into a quest I couldn’t finish on the first try, for instance, so its bugs haven’t been bad.
May Vary though with the game this complex they always do it’s never a great sign when somebody recommends a game on the grounds that it gets good after more than a dozen hours but that’s very much the kind of game Starfield is and I do recommend it and to think I almost went for coffee instead there are a lot of forces working against it and the combination of its disjointed space travel non-existent maps aggravating Inventory management and slow rollout of essential abilities very nearly did it in it was the joys of piloting a custom spaceship into and out of all sorts of morally ambiguous situations in a rich sci-fi universe that eventually pulled it out of a nosedive I might even let you fly me around sometime I’m glad that I powered through the early hours because it’s Interstellar mystery story pays off and once the ball got rolling Combat on foot and in space gradually became good enough that its momentum carried me into New Game Plus after I’d finished the main story after around 60 hours like Skyrim and Fallout 4 before it there’s still an immense amount of quality role-playing quests and interesting NPCs out there waiting to be stumbled across and the pull to seek it out is strong.
