It was always going to be impossible for Starfield to live up to the hype and expectations. Billed as the second coming of video gaming Jesus, Starfield was, if the hype was to be believed, set to revolutionise video games, cure cancer, cause the blind to see and raise the dead.
Starfield doesn’t do the latter three things. It also fails to do the former. Starfield is fine. But it’s just fine. It’s not a revolution. It’s not unique and it’s certainly not anything new. It is a solid if often surprisingly dull Bethesda RPG™.
What’s most disappointing about Starfield is that anything “new” isn’t capitalised on in any meaningful or interesting way. Instead, it’s strung up on the lumbering, aged skeleton of the Bethesda RPG™ framework and largely feels like a missed opportunity.
Starfield Review
Starfield’s big hook, space exploration, is perhaps its greatest failure. Bethesda bragged about Starfield having over 1000 planets to explore and made it sound as though the universe was an enormous playground for players to go wild in. In reality, because you are forced to fast travel to get anywhere in Starfield, the universe feels tiny. Instead of exploring the vast expanse of space, you’re forced to go through menus, choose a location and zip there in an instant. This system renders Starfield’s universe a collection of tiny curated locations linked by menus and not a large open play space.
Being forced to fast travel everywhere quickly kills any sense of scale and makes you wonder why space travel was even included. Especially when you’re not able to travel through space at all. When you fast-travel to a celestial body’s orbit, you’re given the illusion of a vast open space, but you can’t actually go anywhere. The planet behind you is a still image and you can’t travel to or land on it nor can you travel to other locations within the same star system.
A good example of this is Jemison in the Alpha Centauri star system and one of your main hubs. The space station The Eye is located in Jemison’s orbit, however, unless you actually choose to fast travel to The Eye you’re unable to access it. Should you fast travel to Jemison and attempt to fly to The Eye you won’t be able to. These kinds of baffling restrictions permeate the entire Starfield experience.
No Man’s Sky allowed players to travel to a planet and fly directly to the surface seven years ago. Even Kerbal Space Program has a better grasp on space exploration and interplanetary travel. So we’ve established that fast travel essentially makes Starfield’s enormous world feel tiny but it also suffers from an overreliance on uninspired procedurally generated planets.
Curated spaces like New Atlantis, Neon and Akila City are interesting enough but they are few and far between. With over 1000 planets to explore you’d expect more than a mere handful of settlements and places with some kind of human presence but most locations are barren rocks with nothing to see and or do besides fight the same space pirates in the same outposts. Sure, most planets are likely uninhabitable and featureless frozen rocks, but why stick to science for the sake of realism when some creative license would make things far more interesting to play.
If you like scanning rocks and trees and the occasional alien creature while exploring the same, reused outpost assets over and over, you’ll probably enjoy the planetary exploration in Starfield but I grew bored of it rather quickly. This was where I found fast travel to be a godsend because I could simply fast travel exactly to the mission marker, quickly complete the objective and fast travel to the next one. I doubt this was how Bethesda intended for Starfield to be played, but it certainly reduced the tedium. Unfortunately, it also rendered it a series of loading screens interspersed with fetch quests.
Gameplay in Starfield really is just the same as every RPG Bethesda has released in the past 20 years. just not as good. Basically, it’s Fallout which is just The Elder Scrolls with guns except without any of the unique mechanics that made both those franchises so good. Without VATS Starfield’s shooting is average at best and without The Elder Scrolls’ magic, there’s something compelling missing. So, Starfield boils down to a Fallout clone, in space minus the interesting gameplay and narrative that made Fallout such a joy to play.
It also goes all in on the, frankly awfully mid, crafting and base building systems from Fallout 4 and 76. The menus for these systems are pulled directly from Fallout. They are identical. If any other developer released a game that was a reskin of one (or several) of their previous games and called it something new they would be rightly crucified for it. For some reason, Bethesda is allowed to get away with it.
It is admirable that Bethesda offers so much content for players in Starfield. It gives players a huge number of options for how to play and who they want to be in this world and should they grow weary of one path they can travel down another for a while. Factions also give players a wide range of content and missions as well as some roleplaying opportunities if they choose to veer off the golden path. Unfortunately, for me, none of what’s on offer is all that compelling. Coupled with being forced to fast travel, the lack of unique elements like VATS and the largely empty planets, Starfield fails to hold my attention for very long.
If the plot in Starfield was more interesting it might have helped but sadly it’s a bit of a fizzer. Beginning with a cliched call to adventure sparked by a mysterious artifact and driven by a bland group of adventurers with a thirst for knowledge, Starfield’s plot meanders along without much in the way of highs and lows, plot twists or thrills. It does have a bit of an uptick in the later hours and there is an interesting twist to look forward to but it’s all too little too late.
It takes roughly 20 hours before you even start getting to the bulk of Starfield and by then, if you’re like me, the rot has set in. After spending so long and feeling so underwhelmed, it’s difficult for Starfield to turn it around and it doesn’t do enough to do so.
On the plus side, Starfield plays really well. It’s smooth and largely free from bugs and glitches and controlling your character, whether exploring, shooting or flying works really well. There are also some pretty fun quests and interesting diversions — The Mantis is a standout — which do hint at potential greatness under the surface. I feel like Starfield could have been something truly special had Bethesda been brave enough to diverge from its well-trodden path.
Sadly, instead, Starfield is a less interesting Fallout in space with some serious design issues. It’s still very playable and easy enough to pick up and play for short bursts but it certainly doesn’t have the staying power of Skyrim or Fallout 3. It simultaneously tried to do too much and does too little.
I would have preferred Starfield had a smaller scope with a greater focus on story and curated game spaces and made those elements outstanding instead of spreading itself so, so thin and only delivering an average experience across the board. Perhaps with updates and DLC, Starfield can pull a Fallout 76 and turn itself around. The base is there but for now, it’s not the revolution we were promised.
Starfield was reviewed on PC using a digital code provided by Bethesda.
