Starfield Review

Developed and published by Bethesda, Starfield has been the game on most gamer’s lips for what feels like forever and it will continue to do so long after its release. The anticipation for this game and the amount of weight on its shoulders to deliver a game of this magnitude before its release was immense. But it is now within reach of all Xbox and PC users and the galaxy surfing adventure is surely going to be a landmark in gaming regardless of the opinions out there.

                In typical Bethesda fashion, you always begin in a somewhat lowly and humble circumstance. In Starfield, you are a miner tasked with a simple job of mining resources for a company with ulterior motives. That is until you encounter an artefact of unforeseen power and in a moment after touching the artefact a flash of music, communication and wonder washes over you leaving you unconscious. Upon learning about the connection you had with the artefact a member of the constellation group flies down to discuss the discovery and it becomes the catalyst of your world if not the universe turning upside down and your adventure beginning.

                Starfield does a great job of setting the foundations for the game of who you are and what you need to do. It introduces you to key figures in the main storyline as well as many others. It is at that point where you get to customise your character with a plethora of options to choose from. The appearance is one thing but you also get to adjust your backstory a little and pick from 3 starting traits, each of which can grant you different experiences when playing. After that detailed character creation piece, you are brought to the lodge which is the base of operations for the constellation group.  What the game does well in a typical Bethesda fashion is swarm you with choices on everything. There is no rule book for just sticking to the main mission and nor should you as rules are for the dull. The key theme of the game is exploration and that means different things to different people. You are only hamstrung by your own imagination and opinions.

                Once the introduction piece is over nothing is stopping you from hopping onto your spaceship and tearing off to a new planet you haven’t heard of before. With the whispers saying there are 1000 planets to explore why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to explore? The answer is to do what you want and play it how you want. After the introduction in New Atlantis – which is the future equivalent of New Earth – you could run around each of the sections there and find a new mission around the corner. Even whilst completing those missions you could find yourself picking up other missions. It may sound overwhelming but from my experience the more things you do the more things there are to explore. A lot of these missions – even the smaller ones – have fully fleshed-out characters with great voice acting across the board. To show you the scale, in the first 10 hours of the game you can barely scratch the surface of what the game has to offer. I spent my time playing with side missions and just generally looking around at different planets and structures. Some of my friends stormed their way through the main mission and another spent their time solely on exploring Mars. It is that freedom of choice which makes Bethesda so appealing.

I’ve spent roughly 20 hours in Starfield so far, and I’m still in two minds on my opinions of it. The opening few hours were a drag, and I struggled to properly get invested. It lacked that spark that Skyrim immediately hooked me in with, and there was far too much piled on too quickly for me to really take in.

However, I did begin to find the fun once I settled on a planet and just stuck there for 10 hours or so. What I love about Bethesda’s RPG’s is the sense of place and just being dropped in a world and let loose. The planet hopping nature of Starfield makes that harder to do, but sticking to Mars allowed me to find an element of that addictive nature again.

The sheer amount of systems to learn, from ship building, crafting, upgrades and much more requires far more time dedicated to it than I can give right now, but the general flow of the gameplay eventually sucked me in. I’ve enjoyed the handful of missions I’ve played so far, and there’s more in my found list that I’m looking forward to getting back to.

It’s clearly a well made game, packed with content to see and do, and if you can get into the groove like Graham here it will likely consume you. For me, I’ve given it a break this week to play some other stuff and I can’t say I’ve really missed it. I will 100% carry on with it in the future, but it has missed the mark a little more than I expected for me right now.

Jamie’s thoughts on Starfield

                The controls are simple enough to learn and even that has a degree of flexibility of playing in third person or first person. The combat isn’t overcomplicated with skills and tricks. You have a good selection of guns to choose from and even melee options if that is your preference and you just have your trigger button to attack. You make use of the sprint and your modified backpack to do jet pack boosts to get around and dodge. Another element thrown in the mix is that planets have different gravity strengths so jumping may help on one planet but on another, you could find yourself scuffing the ceiling. But it is always a joy to find a different gun to use and modify and see how each one feels. You also get a companion who follows you pretty much everywhere and assists you in combat. As you progress you find more and more companions which you can take with you and some of them have their own stories you can explore.  

Aside from standard combat, you have your space combat. Yep, you can take your ship and wars in the stars against various space pirates. This isn’t the easiest combat to master early on and you only realise this once you see what options are available around spaceships. You can buy better ones from vendors, or you can wait until they land on a planet and commandeer them but by killing the crew of the ship, you can disable a ship’s engines in space and dock on to them to take over their ship. Some ships are even given out as rewards for certain missions and it doesn’t even end there. You are also able to enter a ship modding mode to craft some weird and wonderful ships to increase your cargo space which you will need by the way or make them look like legendary ships from the movies. You will need a lot of credits and perks on certain skill trees to get access to better ships and parts but once again the choice is vast.

                Another form of combat is the verbal kind and that is a standard with these larger Bethesda titles. Intimidation, persuasion, empathy and diplomacy plus a few others increase the conversation options you can have with many different characters on all kinds of missions and they could have a massive impact on how things unfold. Do you want to empathise with people to improve their well-being and have a better relationship with them? Or do you want to intimidate an enemy and force them into handing over goods or information which is valuable to your mission? Your starting build has some impact on the options that appear in conversations but your natural progression and choices you have made also impact the options which leaves you with the feeling I wonder what would happen if I went down that option.

                It wouldn’t also be a Bethesda game without an overload of crafting and modifying options. Guns, space suits, helmets, backpacks and your ships can all be modified. There are also skills to increase a lot of your modifying options and a lot of these modifications require resources which leads me onto another element of the game which is outpost building. Outposts are probably the least talked about option as they are not as exciting as the others but if used wisely they can serve a big purpose. You can build them on almost every plant you can land on and essentially you are building a base on that planet. The outpost allows you to station crew there or to set up excavation units to harvest resources on that planet which can come in handy when some upgrades require some rarer resources.

                Is this game a buggy mess like other Bethesda launches like Fallout 76? Compared to that it is a pretty decent launch but I am not going to say it is bug-free. A lot of the same bugs and quirks from other titles in their library still remain. Randomly sinking through the floor or enemies embedding themselves into the walls. Some NPCs give you a death stare whilst talking to you or your companion is making a fool of themselves in the background. Sometimes conversations cut to people who aren’t even there which can be confusing. I have also seen people glitch their way through walls which isn’t unforeseen with a game of this scale.

There are also some minor gripes with a big one being that there is no map whilst on planets. Sometimes it can be a challenge to find certain buildings on planets without any guidance. Another gripe is when space travelling you know which planet you want to go to but you do not know what star system it is on and it could have easily been solved with a list of planets that you have visited that you can click on to fast travel that way. Otherwise, you have to keep clicking on star systems until you find the one you need. There has also been noise that planetary exploration can be boring as there is a whole lot of nothing. But that was done deliberately with hundreds of planets to explore and not all of them are hospitable or have not been terraformed, there isn’t going to be a lot to explore. I agree that the use of a planetary vehicle to speed up exploration would have improved the experience but considering it’s not something you have to do but something you can choose to do it is not the end of the world. I still find some joy in exploring planets and scanning for flora and fauna but with so many missions to do you can always mix things up to keep your playthrough fresh.

                But those bugs and gripes are nothing short of what was already being expected. They do stop the game from being flawless but they do make up for it in the vast content that is on offer. With main missions, faction missions, companion quests, side missions and even activities there are hours worth of content to explore. But even if you did complete all of the main missions does the game just end there? Well, the rumours say no as there is a new game plus mode in the game which may seem like a cheap way of getting some replay value. But what if there is a POWERful twist in the tale which means there is even more content than you can even comprehend?

I was looking forward to Starfield, though not as much as some of our podcast hosts (not pointing any fingers Ross).

I’ve found playing Starfield hard, finding time to game as an adult is getting harder and harder. Especially as I feel you need a good few hours to to enjoy the story, the atmosphere and experience as this has so much to offer in its massive world.

There are a few little annoyances within the game, like the menu system feels a little clunky, finding star systems and places to go for myself feels too long winded.

With the overly critical parts out the way, I am really enjoying playing Starfield though, the story is rich and the fact you can get easily distracted with side mission makes the world feel alive and not just a backdrop for the games setting.

Starfield could easily surpass my favourite Bethesda Series Fallout. I find myself needing/thinking I must play more. If you haven’t started Starfield make sure you set aside a good chunk of time, as you could easily get lost in missions, conversations NPCs have, which in turn could lead to another side mission and don’t forget sell as much unused stuff as possible.

Daniel’s thoughts on Starfield

Conclusion

Starfield for me is very easily the game of the year, it would take something phenomenal to knock it off the top. Is it perfect? Not by any means, there are bugs and exploits to see but you have to go out of your way to do so, albeit to the detriment of your own experience. I think calling it Fallout in Space with Mass Effect tones and elements of No Man’s Sky is a cheap description. I think this is the massive space adventure we have needed and I am addicted to it and with so much content I feel very spoilt. It is so much fun and an RPG lovers fantasy to explore and I cannot recommend it enough.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.