Starfield Reviews
Starfield pairs near-impossible breadth with a classic Bethesda aptitude for systemic physics, magnetic sidequests, and weird vignettes. But in sacrificing direct exploration for the sake of sheer scale, there's nothing to bind it together.
Starfield delivers on everything it promised and then some.
Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist.
Starfield shares plenty of DNA with Skyrim and Fallout 4, but ultimately falls short of both.
I came into Starfield wanting to explore the stars, and I got a brilliant sci-fi story instead. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed.
With this kind of freedom 'avoiding the main mission' is the main mission.
Go in with the expectation that it will take some time to find your footing in such a vast gameplay space, and there’s a universe well worth discovering here.
Bethesda's spacefaring adventure has its moments with impressive scale, satisfying combat, and some worthwhile side quests, but its shallow RPG systems and uninspired vision of the cosmos make for a journey that's a mile wide, but an inch deep.
In trying to do everything, Starfield obfuscates its most compelling mysteries.
If Starfield is to grow into something beyond an impressively sized canvas just waiting for you to roll your own space game by way of mods, it needs to have these foundational issues addressed.
In Starfield, many might see a time-tested, signature charm. Others might see a time-worn, laborious monotony. These are fair perspectives. A game this large is hard to distill into one set of strengths or one set of weaknesses. As in other Bethesda games before it, you’ll likely have to make your own fun here, but in giving us not just a swath of post-apocalyptic terrain or a fantasy realm but an entire galaxy to explore this time, Starfield makes all the flaws and shortcomings of its patchwork world all the more glaring.
Starfield’s grandiose scope sets the scene for a few under-developed ideas in an otherwise thoughtful, muddy take on the sci-fi genre.
Starfield is a momentous RPG, even if it doesn't quite deliver in all its areas.
A genuinely impressive space RPG that ultimately loses some of its Bethesda charm in the vast reaches of its galaxy. It's so big, it feels small, cold and unlived in.
A short, sparky and colourful 2D PICO-8 blaster about a space captain fighting fascist robots.
Starfield boldly goes beyond just Skyrim and Fallout in space
More than anything else, I’m curious to see where the Bethesda audience takes Starfield. Each game from the company has its own dedicated community and I want to see what Starfield’s community will look like in a few months’ or years’ time.
Starfield is filled with possibilities for who you can become and what you can do, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in gaming.
Starfield is the enchantment and wonder of space bottled and fleshed out into something grand and ambitious, thoughtful and attentive, janky at times, often funny, but always charming.