Starfield

The scope and vision cannot be grander. And Starfield indeed looks grand from the first minutes. The various mechanics and systems built into the game, from spaceship building to planetary exploration, are truly amazing, enough to fill multiple decent games.

But that's where the positives end. Starfield produces almost no gel, either in the form of a good story or cohesive world building, to hold its different parts together. The grand scope becomes pointless and bleak when there is no narrative to drive it. The various mechanics do not talk to each other and start to feel redundant very early. The saddest thing is when you push yourself to invest in some of them and they are proven to be redundant by the end of the game.

Bethesda seems to think that just because it's the first universe in 20 years for Bethesda (it's Bethesda!), players will just stick around for hundreds and hundreds of hours until they eventually truly appreciate all that's built within this grand scope. That's hubris. I felt a tinge of nostalgia I completed the game. Then I immediately deleted it and all my saves. What a disappointment.

If you enjoy games like Skyrim and Fallout then you will enjoy Starfield. This game is NOT a Space simulator so don't expect to play have the game piloting your ship. Personally I prefer this but I have seen people not happy that this is the case. There is countless quests to go through. The main quests feel like only a small percentage of stories to go through. You can enjoy playing through all the different faction missions (Sort of like guilds in Skyrim) and sidequests. Building a ship is fun but I am not the artistic type so I just use the one you get from completing a set of sidequests.

This game starts off fun but continues to get more fun as you play through.

Sadly the creation engine really does feel stretched to its limits in this game and I hope Bethesda does some serious work under the hood for Elder Scrolls VI. Its not a bad game to play but certain parts could be improved.

Like entering certain buildings requires a loading screen (Like in skyrim). If GTA V can make this seamless then I don't see why a game 10 years newer cant.

Hit boxes or aiming are frustrating at times. You clearly have your sites lined up for the bullet to not hit the enemy.

Sometimes youll reload but because the animation wasn't complete even thou it looked finished it will cancel your reload but not restart so youll be running with a gun with 0 bullets in the chamber. Would be nice if it atleast started the reload again.

Everything and I mean everything is locked behind skill points. Some stuff makes sense but others just felt like it was there to boast a bigger skill tree. Like why is a boost pack a skill point? Boost pack upgrades yh but to use one???

Other then this I have been enjoying the game. I hope Bethesda officially adds DLSS, I found an un-official way to use it but this should just be a feature. And hopefully they make some optimizations aswell. The game randomly stutters for no reason. I also had it crash a couple times or completely glitch out. A few bugs on PC but nothing that made you wanna stop playing. If anything watching an enemy sling across the map upon death never gets old.

After five long years of waiting and rampant speculation, Starfield finally released this year on September 6th. Was it worth the wait?

Positives: Starfield has some of Bethesda's best cities out of all of their games, New Atlantis, Akila City, Neon, Paradiso, Cydonia and New Homestead are all extremely interesting areas with tons of side missions to do.

The combat in this game is very easy to get used to and is extremely fun.

The amount of content you get in this game is what you expect when you pay £70/$70. It's truly a testament of how much bethesda love making video games and their passion for them.

Faction quests are also fantastic in this game, the UC Vanguard quest line being my favourite had an incredible movie like story with great action set pieces. The Crimson Fleet storyline was so much fun playing as an undercover agent trying to damage them from within. The Freestar Collective quest line has this awesome mandolorian feel to it as you become a space ranger. The Ryujin Industries quest line is probably the weakest of the bunch but still has great moments as you climb the slippery corporate ladder to get to the top.

Negatives: Starfield feels extremely outdated. Facial animations and controls are very early 2010s and the game just doesn't flow very fluidly. The bethesda "jank" is just unacceptable these days.

The abundance of loading screens is ridiculous, it is so immersion breaking when you have to load everywhere.

Starfield unfortunately suffers from the typical bad bethesda main story. It is extremely uninteresting and the amount of missions that are just fetch quests is ridiculous and time wasting.

The companions in the game are just flat out boring, there are no companions with personalities (except Andreja) everyone is just objectively good and morally righteous, it's so annoying. If you had bad karma in fallout 3, you would attract companions that were also scum bags, why not bring this back?!?

Exploration outside of the main cities is really disappointing. There is absolutely nothing to see and do, no interesting planets or Easter eggs. It makes the game feel so small and artificial.

Lore in this game isn't that interesting either, it's not bad but nowhere near the level of elder scrolls and fallout. It is very generic.

Overall Starfield is a good game that is held down by Bethesda's outdated game design, mediocre writing and old engine. Here's hoping Bethesda listen to a lot of the criticisms for Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5.

Starfield, the "final frontier" where no developer dared to finish, in other terms, Starfield is a rush job project that needs one year to bake in the oven in which ends up being an average game. I don't know how to tell you if you're going to like it or not, some people likes it and others don't, if you like it, cool. In my case i will tell you my point where ever since i was a kid i followed all sorts of media containing SciFi stuff, and im sometimes biased on it, but i will tell you what is good about the game first in which im around 100 hours.

Graphics and sound are great, not the best but like other space games you will receive your share of eye candy exploring the cosmos. The game at least gives you a lot of stuff to do even so half of the quests can be somewhat repetitive or just average but one thing for sure some side quests are way better than most of the main quest of the campaign. And combat mechanics meaning as in you, you will find it familiar like in other first \ third person shooter from bethesda.

Now to the somewhat bad part, yes... the game is riddled with bugs, as each player have seen its share and most of them have different scenarios in what bugs they have witnessed, more or less.

The Combat AI for the NPC's specially in ground combat are bad and way to easy, along the game you have to set the difficulty up to very hard to even recieve some challenge but at least space is more challenging until you get the hang of it in which space battles are ok, not much to say in that part... but returning to the ground combat aspect, as in my play-through , when i had the means to travel, i was traveling systems and combating NPC's 30 or more levels higher than me and i always managed to get the upper-hand in which the only good part of me being level 15 and the NPC level 50 or beyond was good to farm them for better items and i manage to get better weapons in which made easier to kill hostiles through out the main quest, and up to a point where being a low level i managed to go to the planet where the last mission is at, fun but the best way to get out of it was that, to ramdom stuff and finish the game whenever you wanted.

Now, lets talks about the Scifi elements of the game, yes, there is, cant complain, but is mostly generic, yes there is space exploration to the limits of the game, space battles, and Dragonborn slash Spaceborn powers, yeah, its a reskin of the temples where you get super powers in skyrim. But overall, another game falls in to the generic, uninspired scifi writing that is plaguing many games in which the slap some artifacts and wala, you got a "grand" secrets of the universe. The powers are useless in which I only gathered three of them since they don't really help you and later on I finished the game, and acquiring them just falls flat, you get to this temple, activate the rings by touching to energy particles, repeat until you acquire them and you're spawned back outside, and done.

And now to the ugly, the story but at least the story is average in which the scifi elements do suffer like i described before, but what brings it down is the dialogues, they are bad, they are awful and this is Bethesda once again setting one dude according to the credits to write the entire game but there are moments where it doesn't fit to the current situation, sometimes you are just a child, stupid , flirting/romance is all over the place, and there is this part when you meet for the first time one of the main antagonist, the hunter, and escape to the lodge, you literally become a little kid, when you arrive to the base, your dialogue sounds like you're running to your parents crying because some other kid in the neighborhood hit you.

Bethesda standards are in the ground in this one, to think and it looks like many of the old staff don't work with them any more, in which puts the next elder scrolls at risk to receive mediocre content specially in the story department, we saw quality drop in fallout 4 even so is still famous on things you can do outside of the main content of the game in which they tried to exploit the sand box part and do a bad job with fallout 76 in which they tried to do the cash grab at first with the "sandbox" experience in an empty map until they had to actually gather everyone and finish the game and once more they do that in starfield.

It has been 1 month and 26 days since the release of Starfield, and in that time, I have logged 6 days with a total of 144 hours, give or take.

Now after the debacle of Fallout 76 it was important that Bethesda had a win in a major way for this title, and with all the time I logged I can confidently say it's kinda better?... ya that's what I want to say better.

Oh, Bethesda, Bethesda. What happened to you? Why have you become so lazy and complacent?

I'll start with the good...

The game is pretty and has a lot of interesting things to look at and explore, good questlines (sometiems), and ya, you know there are guns and then space guns... and I can't keep up this charade.

Starfield is the biggest game with the most restrictions I have ever played! Soo many game mechanics and decisions are made in this game purely for the sake of wasting your time!

The story is boring, uninteresting, and dull, and the writing here is just as bad. Admittedly, some questlines were interesting, but everything always just led to "Is that it? Oh, ok." Then this games "ending" is the biggest slap in the face I've felt from a games conclusion. I would give details on it, but to avoid spoilers, all I'll say is completely unsatisfactory.

All this sucks because the game is actually fun. The gunplay, the guns, and the ships. I can't begin to describe how many hours I've spent building and customizing my ship.

But the games' starkingly surprising limitations hold back everything. Also please Bethesda PLEASE dump this engine! It's time to put it to rest.

Yet still, for some inexplicable reason, this game receives high praise and scores! How? Why? The game has the worst ui, maps, and downright stupid enemy npcs.

Character customization is good, but clothing is extremely limiting in variety. There's basically one style and almost no women's apparel. This leads to another complaint: Why is there like no fashion for women in this game? Even when I want to role-play going out with my companion wife, I can't dress her up because there's absolutely no style for women, and that lack of variety led into many of my other role-playing experiences.

Finally, I'll speak about characters. They are ok. They are all just not at all well written. Now if like me you choose to take on a female companion as a wife, then get ready to be criticized for almost every little thing you do or don't do! If you want to be a space pirate, then you'll be hated. Unless I was Mr. Perfect all the time, I would hear about it from Sarah. There is no companion who is like down for anything or everything. It's just another limitation and lack of variety in personalities.

I'm sure there are plenty of other mechanics and systems in this game I'm forgetting to mention, but honestly, I'm tired and a little disappointed to review this any further.

I really wanted to love this game being the massive Bethesda fan I am, but because of the games limitations, restrictions, lack of variety, and subpar writing, it detracts from the experience. Though even after all that, I can not deny the amount of fun I did have, and the game does contain that Bethesda charm, so for that, I can be a bit lenient. But Bethesda, you have used up the last of my good graces. You are better than this. You have done better, and you should do better. So please, please don't screw up Elder Scrolls VI.

Final score: 6/10 3/5

Played on Xbox Series X and PC.