Starfield Review

In a universe with endless possibilities you find yourself as a low-level miner who is about to have something happen to them that will change not only your destiny, but potentially the destiny of the entire universe. In Starfield you will be sent to star system after star system on missions both big and small. It will be up to you how you approach your time in this world. Will you be a hero vanquishing evil whenever you come across it? Will you become a legendary pirate always trying to put one past authorities all the while seeing your bank account rapidly grow? You could even just be a more science oriented person mapping all the systems, minerals, plants, and animals out there. There of course is a main story, but how you get there is totally up to you.

I have to admit I got super wrapped up in the hype of what this game was promised to be and to be brutally honest it falls well short of almost all my expectations. There may be tons of planets to explore, but once you land you’ll be walking everywhere, there are no vehicles to utilize. Each time you land on a planet most times will be spent in a random instance (which means that structures, minerals, plants, and animals are randomly placed around you at different distances). The only thing about the instance you will be interacting with that will truly have you pulling out your hair is the fact that EVERY building structure has the same layout as it would on another planet. If you’ve seen an Abandoned Science Outpost you’ve seen the layout of EVERY Abandoned Science Outpost. There were points in the game where I was able to stealthily take out all the enemies in a structure, not because I am good at stealth, but because I KNEW where everyone was going to be positioned and with my overpowered rifle I was able to one shot ALL of them. Sure, that sounds like fun the first 4 or 5 times, but when you’re doing it for the 40th time it's not so cool anymore. With a game of this magnitude I would have thought that there would be at least 3 different structure layouts per type so that the player could have some variety in their life.

Now let's talk about the characters you’re going to be interacting with. There’s really four different types in the game. You have your random populace that just walk, sit, stand or attack in an area. You have your quest givers, most of your quests will be given via a terminal but there are still some people who just want face to face time with people they trust to get something done. You have your targets, those individuals you either have to rescue or more than likely have to kill. Finally you have your companions. Your companions will help with your ship and one lucky soul will get to be by your side when you adventure into the great unknown. One of those companions you’ll also have a chance at a romantic storyline with. Thankfully when it comes to characters in the game they have more than 1 line of dialog to give, but there’s definitely a lack of diversity when it comes to lines given by certain characters. A great example is if you decide to become a pirate and join the Crimson Fleet, every time you run into Crimson Fleet members on planets you’ll get the same 4 lines of dialog (thankfully there are about 4 different voices that you might get to hear). There’s nothing quite like quoting the lines faster than the character can spout them at you, for the hundredth time.

One of the big game immersion mechanics these days is the romance option. You have the chance to flirt with companions to slowly open up more room for growth later in the game. I feel like most games that have this mechanic have some form of physical intimacy added to the mix when you enter the later stages of your pursuits, but that is not the case in Starfield. You will have to make do with starry eyed looks and compliments. I felt like I was dealing with a kindergarten romance where even holding hands would be too much for the characters’ hearts to take.

The funny thing is, even though I’ve been bashing this game from almost the start of this review, I still put over 120 hours into it. There must have been something about this game that kept me coming back. Perhaps it was the hope that during each play session I hoped that I would find something that would blow my mind away. I’m not really sure, but the fact of the matter is that I put in a ton of time with this game. Speaking of time spent in the game, I did find it truly odd that with the simple action of paying off my outstanding bounty all was forgiven. What I mean by that is for example I could go on a bloody shooting spree and kill United Colony soldiers left and right and then go to a non-UC star system and go to the bounty kiosk and pay off whatever the outstanding bounty is on me, and all is forgiven. There are very few consequences in this game, well, consequences that stick, I should say.

There technically is a lot to do in this game, but at the end of the day I always felt that no matter what I did I was rinsing and repeating, and the only reason I was slightly okay with it was because I wanted to level up, or save up money to buy a new piece for my ship. If I’m being honest in the end the only thing I really enjoyed putting time into was upgrading or building a new ship. I will go ahead and tell EVERYONE that you need to put your skill points quickly into ship related skills, there’s nothing quite as embarrassing as building a ship from scratch only to have an error talking about an incompatible piece that you’re never really sure about what it is exactly. This is one of those games that I can definitely see the potential in, but almost all of it comes out flat.