2/5 ★ – Lord_Hazenberg's review of Starfield.

Bethesda Game Studios first original IP in 25 years, and boy oh boy have we found out exactly why with Starfield. I played this on the Series X via game pass, and it took me around 35 hours to finish the main story & all major faction quest lines. Don’t even need to touch the pronouns topic or worry about me being a Sony shill who’d crap on this game for no good reason. Starfield takes care of that all on its own, so buckle up for a rant ladies & gents. I will mark the paragraph I discuss story spoilers in should anyone care. I’m gonna start with the positives because there aren’t many. First off, I didn’t touch the ship/outpost building or resource mining in any capacity so I won’t factor that into this review. Next up, ditching the voiced protagonist & dialogue wheel is a welcome return after Fallout 4. And lastly, the main voice cast is pretty decent. (Story spoilers here) Alright let’s get into the negatives with the writing. The entire main story from beginning to end is “go to planet & find artifact.” They rip off Mass Effect 1 big time as well. Artifacts give main character visions but ME1 was smart enough to only have that kick off the actual story instead of just recycling that for 30 hours. There’s also an attempt to do a save Kaidan/Ashley on Virmire except Bethesda are beyond incompetent and it falls completely flat. The other main factions also aren’t involved in the main story whatsoever if you think there’s gonna be alternate endings. There’s also some multiverse implications at the end because that’s totally not exhausted by other recent media. I’ve heard NG+ cycles offer differing choices, but I’m never playing this game again. (End of story spoilers) The world building is also atrocious. Your party members are supposed to be your doorway into a new world, but here they are all from the same faction so you don’t learn anything. One of the side factions literally gives you a quest to walk through a museum and click on exhibits while the narrator gives lore exposition. I got married within 15 hours of game time, and I couldn’t even tell you my characters wife’s name or defining trait with a gun to my head. Now we know exactly how talentless Todd Howard’s Bethesda has become when they aren’t making sequels to IP’s these ppl didn’t even make. They bought Fallout from Interplay and took Elder Scrolls away from Julian LeFay causing him to leave the company after Daggerfall. Next up is exploration aka menu & loading screen simulator. You cannot take off or land your ship, there are no local maps, buildings aren’t marked on your map, & it’s almost impossible to find your destination unless you go through the quest log & select the show on map option. Each random planet map is auto generated and surrounded by invisible walls but no one will walk that far because these maps are empty of any interesting content. The UI is atrocious. I didn’t even bother with the straight from Fallout 4 crafting & research mechanics, because the menu darkens so much that I couldn’t even read what I needed to make anything. Combat is the exact same as Fallout 4 without VATS. Enemy AI all have aimbot and you now have nothing to even the odds against that. Enemy variety is either human in spacesuit, robot, turret, or bug like crawling creature. There are no stats/attributes just a perk tree which locks basic RPG functions behind a skill point & challenge system. Abilities such as; pickpocket, lock pick, stealth, ship lock on, jet pack use, dialogue skills such as persuasion, & basic stat boosts such as health, stamina, and carry weight. The art style is abysmal. If you really like the color grey then this game is 100% for you because that’s all you’ll see. Grey corridors, grey guns, & grey planets. There’s also zero developed alien races, so you’ll only talk to dead eyed Bethesda humans the entire game. Not once did I find a weapon, ship, or armor set that I thought looked cool or was excited to have which is bad in a game claiming to be a RPG. They also have a color coded loot system with randomized perks similar to Destiny. The soundtrack is a huge nothing burger which is unfortunate considering Inon Zur is a talented composer. His work on Dragon Age Origins & Fallout New Vegas was great, but I couldn’t pick out 1 notable track on a soundtrack of 80 different songs. It’s Bethesda so bugs & hard crashes are present and accounted for. I experienced 2 hard crashes, two game breaking dialogue bugs near the end of the story, and several visual glitches. It is unoptimized to hell too since it’s locked at 30FPS on Xbox, and plagued with performance problems on PC. But the man himself Todd Howard says we just need better hardware to run his shitty game. There is no more Bethesda charm. Starfield has already aged poorly because Bethesda refuses to ditch the Morrowind engine, or expand on their known formula. They would rather do 10 things just okay then 3 things really well. Space exploration, first person shooters, city builders, & actual RPG mechanics are done so much better anywhere else. People were rightfully championing Baldur’s Gate 3 as the new standard, but then turned around and gave this lazy crap 10/10s. And we’ve reached the end of this review. I played this game for free and I feel ripped off. All I wanted was something mindless to play while I’d watch something, and Bethesda over delivered because this game is so mind numbingly stupid that I couldn’t even enjoy it in that capacity. Probably the laziest AAA game world I’ve played in a while. Boring, uninspired, & just not fun. Why wait for Starfield mods when you could instead play games that are already good now.