Review Day: Starfield (PC)

Starfield is an overwhelming breadth of janky, poorly-explained gameplay systems trapped behind a cumbersome, inconsistent user interface. It is also very FUN, offering the same shallow type of entertainment that Bethesda's previous games (Skyrim, Fallout) excelled at.

For reference, I'm someone with about 350 hours spent playing Skyrim, 350 hours playing Fallout 4, and 550 hours playing Fallout 76. I like the way Bethesda mixes exploration, combat, and a bit of story together in their games, and the way you can just ignore the main story while getting lost making your own fun in a sandbox environment. Eventually, though, there's a point where there's nothing left to do -- I occasionally reinstall these old games but never get more than a couple hours into a new playthrough before drifting away.

Starfield is essentially "Fallout in Space" -- humanity has spread across the galaxies and the main storyline involves a collection of alien artifacts being unearthed on different planets. As with other Bethesda games, the supporting storylines are more interesting than the main one. There are a few neat ideas (like a questline that has you bouncing back and forth between two realities), but ultimately most of the quests end up being walking simulators where you spend a lot of time traveling somewhere and listening to someone telling you to travel somewhere else.

When you tire of questing, you can just fly into space, pick a planet at random, and start exploring. This is a very chill way to enjoy the game at first, but eventually you'll realize that most of the planets are completely devoid of anything interesting, other than about twenty cloned "points of interest". I enjoyed exploring and reading the lore about an abandoned cryo facility, the first time. When an exact copy reappeared on a different procedurally-generated planet, I was underwhelmed. You can also build outposts on planets to harvest resources, but this idea is quarter-baked and not nearly as interesting as Fallout settlements were.

The ability to create your own spaceship is a lot of fun -- I invested hours in customizing and upgrading my ship, and it's satisfying to see and walk through the ship you design in the game. (About half of those hours were spent fighting against the shipbuilding controls, which refused to attach ship parts in the right spot, or would delete random mystery parts). Dogfighting in spaceships is initially fun until you discover the weapons that make every battle trivial.

The skill trees aren't particularly interesting. Over half of the skills are absolutely useless, but you might not realize this until you've tried them (and there are no respecs available). Very few skills are truly game-changing -- most just help you win a little bit faster than you already would have. However, this game is less about winning than making your own fun.

A key flaw that this game has is its lack of true exploration. In Skyrim and Fallout, you'd set off in a random direction across the world and discover all sorts of things along the way. In Starfield, all of the locales feel like tiny, isolated apartments that you can only get to through a series of menus representing space travel. (Half of your game time will probably be spent in a menu). The parts where you actually get boots on the ground and start exploring are lacking because there's never anything unique to discover on a planet that you couldn't have found somewhere else in another galaxy. I would have preferred a small handful of heavily-customized planets over Starfield's thousands of vapidly empty planets.

So, Starfield isn't GREAT and I probably won't be picking up to play again and again 5 years from now. However, I had a lot of fun in my initial two playthroughs (two characters up to level 60) and don't regret the purchase. This is a game that will give you plenty of entertainment in spite of its flaws, especially if you like the Bethesda formula.

Final Grade: B-

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