Starfield

Starfield is a game massive in scale that feels smaller than the previous elder scrolls and fallout games. It allegedly has 1000 planets spread over 100 star systems; but the planets all feel the same and have the same selection of hostile alien monsters, facilities and/or caves so it just feels like the same planet reskinned a few times and given a few random tweaks.

Despite the size of the universe you can explore; most of the missions revolve around just 3 major hub cities, and a handful of smaller towns. This makes everything feel even smaller since despite the huge breadth of space available everything always loops back through the same locations.

Exploring and scanning minerals and lifeforms on the various planets feels pointless; as all the planets either look to be currently occupied with ships constantly landing or have previously been occupied and have since been abandoned with old factories and research stations appearing all over.

NPCs constantly find themselves inside the floor or ceiling. In one of the main cities, Neon, I would frequently see guards slowly floating up into the ceiling, never to be seen again. One time an NPC I had to turn a quest into would fall the floor as I approached him, making the quest non-completable. I had to take a long detour to approach him from another direction to avoid this from issue.

Managing resources is a huge pain, even with maxing out the increased inventory capacity perk first, I would constantly find myself overburdened with materials. I would even fill up my space ship’s hold with materials and have to keep adding on more storage compartments to make room for more things.

The combat is easy, with a fairly small selection of weapon types. I never even found a single particle rifle in my entire 87 hours with the game. You unlock some powers through the main story but other than some that help you move around a bit quicker they aren’t really that helpful since nothing is ever a challenge.

The main story is pretty boring and repetitive, mostly travelling to various caves to find an artifact, and then later travel to various temples to solve the exact same zero gravity “puzzle” and unlock a new power.

Travelling anywhere sucks with lots of cutscenes (likely hiding loading screens) of things like your space ship taking off or landing, or docking/undocking from something. I would try to batch as many things up in an area as I could to avoid hitting the huge delay in travel incurred from all these cutscenes.

NPCs constantly shuffle around in conversations and either end up glitching into objects and flickering around, right up in your face or in another room entirely as the camera faces a wall.

I wrote this review more than a month since playing it last; so the only lasting impressions on the game seem to have been negative.