2025-05-01 21:03:52

I put this game on my wish list in summer 24 and started playing 9 days ago, when I saw some friends playing. I should Not have waited! Negative reviews had put me off, My reality has been very different. Plenty of content, particularly if you take the time to step outside of the main story line. Progress is rapid, (even for a grinder like me, who has to pick up everything shiny) I'm also part of the exclusive 60+ gamer society with slower reflexes, yet the generous rifle targeting zone has allowed for "head shots" that I haven't been able to do in years. For me, so worth the money, (don't tell the spouse) I'm still smiling even after paying full price. Enjoy!!

2025-05-01 15:18:54

The "haters" say this game is boring and there isn't anything to do. You can become a bounty hunter and track bounties for cash, dedicate yourself to exploring planets by scanning it's flora and fauna for cash, become a Space Pirate, or a secret agent for SysDef. An Agent Provocateur for a Mega Corp, or even a Space Trucker who ferries resources between planets for cash. You can build your own settlement to either kick back and chill in or use it to gather resources and automate production of objects you can sell becoming a Captain of Industry. You can even design and build your own star ships and hire a crew to make them even better. There is a ton of stuff to do and so many ways to play this game. I give it a solid 8.5/10.

2025-04-29 03:17:15

It's Bethesda's fault for not making a game that appeals to the masses. Despite it's shortcomings they've made a game that appeals to me. It's one of the immersive and "lived-in" universes I've come across. Certainly my dream space sim.

2025-04-25 09:23:13

This is a good game if you go into it without expectations. Solid gameplay, engaging story, good graphics if your pc is mid to high end. All in all a solid 6/10, not a masterpiece by any means, but much better than it gets credit for.

2025-04-25 02:45:45

This is my favourite game. Nothing is more exciting than space and this game has so much of it. Such a great game on every angle

2025-04-20 14:32:18

As a space enthusiast, I deeply appreciate this game for what it is. It is set in "real life" with LOTS of fantasy elements of course (artificial gravity as one example), but in the future. The partnership with NASA to help this game feel "real" (if you can even call it that) lets me live the life that I will only ever be able to dream of. I will never get the opportunity to explore another world. I will never get the opportunity to fly a space-ship. I dream about it, I imagine it, and I wish for it, but it will never happen. Starfield feels like a game that was made for people like me. Unfortunately, I actually really love jumping around a nearly empty moon with no atmosphere, where I can look up and see the planet the moon is orbiting, and the star, and the milky way galaxy. I understand this is a video game that is supposed to be packed with content. But for me, a simple body of liquid methane on Saturn's moon Titan, is something that fills me with so much joy, to see it from the surface as if I was really there.

2025-04-17 11:02:16

First Impressions

I almost fell for the negative comments surrounding this game, and I'm so glad I didn’t! As a massive alien fan and its retro-futuristic style, this game is aesthetically a dream come true. The fact that the game is more science than fiction is also a massive pro for me, because it makes it even more believable as a future vision of humans in space.
Just to say in advance, I'm not a huge Bethesda games fan — not that I think they're bad, it’s just that I always preferred hack and slash gameplay from games such as Witcher. So I'm not someone with thousands or even hundreds of hours in Skyrim or Fallout. I'm well acquainted with those games, but I won't even compare them to Starfield because you will get it by the end of my review.

Why I Like Starfield

Starfield gives me the freedom to do what I want in the moment. It’s not just some big map with thousands of question marks that I need to check out. I can go and do missions, extract resources, build ships, upgrade weapons or space suits, etc...
My goal that everything revolves around is ship building. To build ships, I need money. I earn money by building outposts and extracting materials that I use for various upgrades and manufacturing, and the rest of those I sell. The other way I earn money is by doing side missions that I stumble upon accidentally while exploring or picking them up on mission boards. There are other ways to earn money of course, but this is how I do it, because it’s interesting for me.
When I do a couple of missions and check the outposts, I’ve earned enough money to construct or upgrade ships, which is the ultimate goal. Ship building is by far the best aspect of the game for me and most of my hours are spent there. You are basically free to construct your own ship from your imagination, and the feeling when you walk around your ship that you made is great and immersive.
The best thing about all of this is that if you're not interested in ship or outpost building, you just don't have to do it and do your own thing.

Addressing the Biggest Complaints

Loading screens: To be honest, if I had the option to land seamlessly on a planet from space, I probably would once or maybe twice, but that's it. I mean I really wouldn't want to waste my time on stuff like that, and I'm glad I don't have to. Would I want to go seamlessly through cities and buildings without loading screens? Sure, but it’s not a deal breaker for me, because a game of this size obviously has its technical limitations, and I mean, most loadings are like a second or two.
“Not enough points of interest and repetitiveness”: I mean, it’s space. Space is mostly empty. If they made a few planets with handmade stuff, then everyone would be like "yeah, space game with 4 planets...". You wouldn't even feel the size and vastness that space offers.

A Game to Take Slow

This is a slow game that lets you do your own thing. It’s not a game to rush, but to take it slowly and methodically, and enjoy the scenery in the process. It's a game that offers a large variety of systems to interact with, and is good at most of them, and excellent in some.
Do I think that this is a perfect game? Of course not, not even close, but for someone who is into space stuff, I think it’s great. Does it have the most interesting side quests? No, but they are good enough to enjoy most of them, and some are great with twists at the end. Do I want bigger and more dense cities? Sure, but it’s not that these are not enough for what they are supposed to be, especially Neon. Do I want better companions and dialogues? Sure, but it’s not so bad as to be unable to enjoy or care about a few of them. Are there various minor aspects that annoy me? Of course, and I solve those minor things with mods.
I didn’t even go through the main quest, and currently it’s not even my goal, and I think that the story is good so far and gives you things to think about. I won’t discuss Shattered Space DLC, because I haven’t played it yet.

Who This Game Is (and Isn’t) For

People who are searching for action-packed, fast-paced combat with bombastic cut scenes will be disappointed. Those who want to interact with various systems and exploit them and take it slow and relaxing, with occasional action, will enjoy this game. And I think that it’s great, because we have action-packed games in abundance, but not many games like this.

Final Thoughts

I think that the base game and its foundation is great for what it is supposed to be and offers a lot of potential for further upgrading and improvements.

I don't defend this game for its shortcomings, nor do I really care if someone plays it based on my review. I just wanted to give my opinion, for people like me that are misled by all the negativity surrounding this game.

2025-04-15 06:11:48

Starfield... is a game with one thousand planets. And it works.

As Todd Howard would say... "It just works." And functionally, he's right. It is perhaps Bethesda's least buggy game to date. But here's the thing about functionality it doesn't always equal soul.

You travel from planet to planet, each one a barren husk of potential, a cosmic sandbox with nothing to do but find rocks. Temples float in space, offering you powers that are essentially Skyrim shouts... in space. And somehow, that sentence sounds more exciting than the experience itself.

The quests... are boring. There’s no other way to put it. Your companions? Equally boring. All paragons of virtue, like they were assembled in a lab focused on creating the most inoffensive AI personalities. They all agree with you. They all love when you make good choices. It’s like adventuring with a team of HR representatives.

And when you pick a space religion... the game nods. Once. Maybe twice. Then forgets. Role-playing in Starfield is not a journey. It’s a costume. A trait that’s only skin-deep.

The Settled Systems the world Bethesda spent years crafting feels like the sci-fi version of a gated community. It is sterile. Sanitized. A place where nothing dares to offend. A future built by people who listened to John Lennon’s Imagine... and took it literally. It is perhaps the safest vision of a post-colonial space civilization ever conceived in gaming.

This... is Bethesda at its worst.

Gone are the messy but passionate days of Skyrim. Even Fallout 4, divisive as it was, had something Starfield lacks: fun. You could lose yourself in that world. You could mod it into something wild, chaotic, beautiful.

And mods... haven’t saved Starfield. Maybe they can’t. The community hasn’t embraced it the way they did before. And Bethesda, ironically, has started selling paid mods on their storefront. So even creativity now comes with a price tag.

What are we left with?

A game that "just works."

And tragically... that's the best thing you can say about it.

Exploration? Empty.
Quests? Dull.
Lore? A shadow of what it once was.

In the end... Starfield doesn’t feel like a leap into the stars.
It feels like a fall from grace.

2025-04-14 17:24:11

Let me down but only bc of my own expectations. That said, i completed 3 playthroughs right after launch and am now reinstalling to give it another go. Great game, 7.5/10 Definitely recommend.

2025-04-06 09:44:53

It's really not great, and it's definitely not worth 70 bucks.

In a single sentence: Starfield feels like Mass Effect if it was made by Ned Flanders.

In another: Starfield is an exercise in complete and utter mediocrity.

Beyond the different quest lines, there is very little of interest. The time spent "creating" this massive universe should have been re-routed and put more into refining the combat, quests, and creating more interesting locations. Most planets have some semblance of procedural generation, yet they are generally barren, uninteresting, and not worth the time it takes to scroll through 4 menus to travel to, just to have to go into another menu to actually land on the planet. Points of interest repeat constantly and are generally copied and pasted. For instance, you will find a random named cavern on one planet, and find the exact same cavern on a completely different planet. Deviating from the quest lines WILL create a very boring experience, which is wild when you think about exploring other open-world RPGs made by Bethesda.

Even then, some of the side quests are entirely there for padding. Do you like running around in an undercity where homeless people threaten to kill you with hammers while you try to flip 3 switches to figure out where the power drain is coming from? I don't.

Many quests also have some disgustingly long "follow 'X'" moments, and that's a major gaming sin with how bad Bethesda's NPC's pathfinding usually is. There have been many times where I had to reset to a previous save because an NPC got stuck on a railing and couldn't figure out how to....Step slightly to the left.

There is a chunk of factions you can join as well, which all initially have pretty cool story lines, followed by extremely repetitive "Go kill those pirates" or "go rescue those captives" objectives. Sometimes they drop another interesting quest over time, but everything in between those quests is just really annoying padding.

Starfield is incredibly too large and lacks substance. Take a fishbowl, for instance with the players as the fish. There is no water. There are a few pretty rocks (the quests). There is one dried out log propped against the wall (I'm not sure what this is, but fish tanks usually have one log propped against the wall.)

Anyway:

The whole ship system is clumsy and generally unsatisfying. Personally, I have stuck to buying or stealing better ships, because the ship builder is so poorly implemented that a recently lobotomized man would have a better time trying to build a functional helicopter. Many upgrades are also locked by arbitrary "challenges". You invest a skill point, only to have to turn around and train that skill anyway to be able to invest more skill points into it. Why even have the skill points? Just make it to where you can train specific skills and they auto-upgrade without the use of skill points. This creates a very unsatisfying dilemma because you WILL NOT be able to explore all aspects of character builds on a single playthrough, but I guess this was Bethesda's idea to try to keep players on the grind because the engagement/retention for this game is abysmal when compared to other Bethesda titles.

The base building is just depressing. Again, many things seem to be locked behind arbitrary skill point grinding followed by grinding even more to get to spend more skill points on the same skill. I personally wouldn't know, because the "outposts" are entirely optional, and you can buy/find literally any resource you need at vendors or corpses of pirates, religious zealots, and robots.

This game has major pacing issues, as well. There's a lot of downtime when getting from point A to point B, and there isn't a ton of interesting or creative things happening in between. The most "random" event you will generally encounter is being threatened by a pirate, but even that just suddenly stops when you get into this groove of moving between the same 4 planets for 3 hours.

All in all, this is a "Buy at your own risk" type of game. Either wait for a sale, buy from a key reseller, or try to find a moderately entertaining youtuber/streamer to watch and deprive Bethesda of any more money until Elder Scrolls 6 comes out.