lazatoy Starfield Review

Starfield easily has some of the best moment-to-moment gameplay Bethesda has ever crafted. Procedural generation aside, exploration is often fascinating. Combat feels incredibly tactile, and neatly balances action and RPG; stat bonuses are a thing, yeah, but this passes the FPS barometer of shotguns feeling fantastic, so it gets a pass from me. There are gameplay loops within gameplay loops here, and although this runs into the issue of locking common features in past Bethesda titles behind an expansive skill tree, nevertheless, it feels rewarding to progress in this game. The issue is, then, that Bethesda has bit off more than they can chew with this title. To say that its scope is unreasonable is a bit of an understatement. What's on offer here would easily work in a game with ten star systems... at a thousand, I can see myself dropping this at some point in the near future. More concerningly, the writing is edgeless. This is not to say that all games should be so edgy that they [have sharp edges], but at a certain point, you have to get a bit brash with your dialog. Starfield's writing often feels sanitized and safe, and as a consequence of these factors, can feel outright boring to engage with at times. It also runs into the classic Bethesda problem of the writing itself not interacting with game mechanics in a particularly convincing way. While it's less outright egregious than previous Bethesda titles (I don't know that anything is ever going to top the myriad instances of this in Skyrim), you do still run into moments where a companion will have a personal conversation with you, finish their thoughts... and then immediately ask you to talk to them again. I still finished quests where, ideally, I should have waited a day or two to hear back from a certain character... who I then heard back from instantly. Once more, it merits repeating, Starfield is a lot more balanced on this front. But these moments still happen. Something that I'm more mixed on is this game's reliance on cinematics. Whether you're docking into another ship or traveling between planets, Starfield frequently plays as those it's been held together by duct tape and glue. The Creation Engine, while great at handling instanced environments, doesn't particularly fit a game of this scale, and the more you play Starfield, the more evident this becomes. The improvements made to the Creation Engine do, thankfully, imbue Starfield with graphical prowess. Character models and facial animations do still fall into an uncanny valley of sorts, but environments are typically stunning, brought to life through excellent foliage, texture and model work, and lighting. Regardless of its quirks, I do think Starfield is worth playing, but with the stipulation that you're aware of its quirks.