I like space like that one kid liked turtles, so I think it is no surprise that I was excited to play Fallout 4: Space Edition, otherwise known as Starfield. This is Bethesda’s next big exploration into the world of being told “Obsidian did it better,” because some people can’t take Feargus Urquhart’s genitals out their mouth for a minute. Comparisons are of course going to be made, that’s the nature of a review and talking about entertainment.

However, I think The Outer Worlds is the wrong comparison to be making for what Bethesda made Starfield into. Professor Howard used a bit of Fallout, but his other ingredients before Chemical X were one part No Man’s Sky and one part Mass Effect too.

Playing a named character that wakes up from events to fill out the registration form, you become part of an elite group of pseudo-adventurers. These adventurers aim to solve a mystery bankrolled by a bar owner and staffed by Bridget Strand, a Jem’Hadar officer, JC Denton’s cousin, and other references I can’t be bothered with. Thrust into the many worlds of this Alien-themed far future, you become the hero of Canton that everyone needs or the villain to rival a Noonien Singh. It is the usual rigmarole for these types of RPGs with countless quests you get lost in before returning to the main one that you lost interest in long ago.

Expectations set up by marketing and poor writing for the main quest are what I think sank the boat Bethesda set sail on for a large number of people. Starfield isn’t a multi-world swashbuckling adventure among the stars. In fact, it is quite literally the opposite for large portions of the game, from the main quest and those surrounding it to basically all the side quests. The best I can guess by the negative receptions I’ve encountered, a lot of people thought they were getting Star Wars when in actuality they got Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.

I like Starfield and I think it is certainly more than what a lot of reviewers drilled it down to, but I think there are a lot of qualifiers for recommending it. Much like my love of Fallout 4 (Starfield – bomb edition), I think it is the personal stories you make out of its world rather than the story being told to you that shine in this not-sandbox of different mechanics to what Bethesda is used to. You can climb a ladder in a Bethesda game of all things! It truly is a brave new world. That said, I think a large portion of it is also a massive waste of time that is only there because it worked previously.

Those comparisons are what we’ll start with. Much like No Man’s Sky and Fallout 4, you “mine” and pick up all the junk to craft better components for your arsenal and for a thoughtless outpost. Fallout 4’s settlement building worked because it was part of the theme. You were rebuilding the Commonwealth and giving people a safe place to sleep, eat, and not get radiated up Uranus.

In Starfield, you are building outposts to craft stuff you’ll find in your countless quests to be Picard with a gun. What’s worse is the fact each coffee cup and raw material is the crafting component. It isn’t broken down as it was when you were throwing nukes at green men.

This entire portion of crafting and building settlements is something I found no real use for because there is no thematic link. Additionally, everything I found weapon-wise or armor-wise is either ridiculously overpowered or so useless I’d crack my head open if I sneezed. Mechanically there is little use in upgrading a shotgun that does 500 damage or an automatic pistol that fires depleted uranium rounds with nearly 300 damage per shot.

Maybe I was lucky, but it is still the experience I had that meant researching, building, and crafting became useless. I didn’t have to build anything for the people of the universe and I found more useful things than I would have from scavenging to craft better equipment.

Where does the Mass Effect comparison come into play? You don’t No Man’s Sky style take-off, fly-by, and land wherever it is you like. You don’t even fly between star systems either. I mean, you can fly to planets as Alanah Pearce pointed out, but they don’t actually exist in a corporeal form. It is weird. Instead, you have that ever-present fun of load screens and menus, but the comparison doesn’t end there. Landing on planets gives you a couple of square miles to run around in and that’s it, kind of.

For science, I took an afternoon fighting that boring tutorial, then set about looking for some of the landmarks. When you land on planets, the game generates a section of the planet, but I think most people believe that’s it, that’s your square couple of miles. No. If you go to the likes of London, where the biggest blight on the skyline next to Trump Tower in Chicago sits, or the Giza Necropolis, Apollo lander, Burja Khalifa, and even MER-B remains stand. A mission is required for their spawn (mostly), but they only appear at specific points on their planets. For most planets though, these landing spots are functionally similar.

Otherwise, mechanically it is a Bethesda game with a bit of polish and the occasional Bethesda bug. The guns work similar to how they did in Fallout but fart out slightly different things. Generally, you’ll talk to a lot of people about their problems as you always do. This is where I think it is worth bringing in a fourth comparison I don’t think others have/will make because it was very character-based. I played Starfield like I play The Witcher 3. I assure you I’ve taken my pills, though mostly painkillers after the headache of searching for The Shard of all things. Let me explain a little bit of the story before you call for the van with square wheels.

The tutorial and main mission are absolutely awful and should be put in the bin. You start as a new miner (not like Fallout 3), and find an artifact in what can best be described as the jumping-off point for villains finding ancient tech. This pulls you into the collection of pseudo-intellectuals who want to play with the magic alien tech. The alien part is hardly a spoiler. It is a sci-fi game, get a grip. It isn’t very fun or very interesting, it is just fetch quests with a bit of sci-fi nonsense thrown on top of that. Put it in the bin, forget about it.

This is where I need to talk about the “head-canon” I made up: Keira, a former wartime diplomat who was fired/retired following the Colony Wars. She is an empath with two living parents and a mortgage to pay off. Off the bat, I wasn’t playing as the big space adventurer. Instead, I’m someone who is just doing jobs for the money. The fantasy world version of a white van man. What inadvertently happened with the “Kids Stuff” trait and the name really made me happy. Creepy dad-face aside, I recognized Keira’s mother’s voice and then it hit me, Nana Visitor is Mom.

Getting back to my Witcher 3 point, my character wasn’t a gunsmith, an ace pilot, or anything exciting. She’s just a boring diplomat who needs money. Playing a few moments in any crowded section of the settled systems, you’ll find new quests and odd jobs being thrown at you. The point is that I’m simply reacting to and pushing back on the world around me, mostly trying to de-escalate through persuasion, sometimes playing spy, and very often shooting back when it goes sideways. Though the constant throughout was that I did it for the money, and if you had a sympathetic enough backstory I’d forgo being paid where I could.

My little DS9-loving heart might flutter from hearing Armin Shimmerman at The Lodge, Visitor playing your mother, and having all my baseballs. However, what sticks for me is the idea of the freelancer (or whatever you’d call Geralt) that drives your need to take everyone’s quests. I’ve been a spy, an emissary, a hired gun, a bounty hunter, a debt collector, a thief, a space cop, a space cop for another faction, a peacekeeper, a researcher’s lackey, technically a mechanic, and most of all throughout, a diplomat. None of that has anything to do with adventuring and I think that’s where most people let their expectations for Starfield get the better of them.

Does Starfield need the hundreds of planets you can land on, the dogfighting in space, or the crafting? Not really. I think the crafting/outpost building absolutely isn’t needed but the other two have a purpose, even if they are more superficial than their functionality or practicality. With the number of asteroid fields and other clutter that makes up the “space” of No Man’s Sky, it doesn’t feel very much like space. Though Starfield won’t let you land on the planets seamlessly or jump between systems at the single push of a button, Starfield has that sense of scale that space needs. The Alanah Pearce mention from earlier is of her 7-hour experiment to see how the planets work, and let me underline that for those in the back, 7 hours!

The main plot might be so boring (minor spoiler) that I purposefully chose to kill off Bridget Strand to save a kid from hating me. I also really hate how the crafting/outpost building is done, but Starfield does at least have that sense of scale. People expecting huge wars in the stars will say there is nothing in it, and if you come in expecting that then there is little for you. However, I have been playing a game that is filled with lost bits of Star Trek in its more personal stories. In its simplicity and in some of its grandest moments, there is still a hint of Starfleet captain for you to fill.

Everyone picks their wheels of cheese or old-world money to collect throughout Bethesda games, the nonsense junk that you never consume or use. Most seem to have picked potatoes and must be big fans of RHLSTP. Being mad, I chose the many books with extracts from their real-world counterparts, The Pickwick Papers, Moby Dick, Dracula, War of the Worlds, and a few others that are presumably made up. I even have a reason for picking up the books beyond my aimless infatuation with an element of our normal world before it turned to the Dune set.

Like anyone with any semblance of intelligence, romancing the companions feels like romancing a brick wall with a blank face on it. It is like romancing Chris Pratt as he gives a non-committal answer on his religion. Nevertheless, the companion I was most attached to was Sam Coe because he comes as a package deal on your ship with his daughter Cora, a 12-year-old who sits on the ship and does nothing but read books. There is even a dialogue line or two about digital versus actual paper and bindings. She’s the reason I’m stealing books.

At least that’s my reason for hoarding the books. It is similar things that give me the jumping-off point for personal character stories. There is a whole quest about a 200-year-old colony ship arriving at a resort planet run by the type of people that deserve bricks between their teeth before you stamp on the back of their neck. That whole quest is just a Star Trek plotline about getting some people the space to colonize whatever little world they want to. I’d have liked a more nuanced resolution, one that didn’t make me see a boardroom covered in red, but it still felt like Star Trek, if a little ham-fisted at the end.

One of the major quests surrounding the xenomorphs, Starfield’s Deathclaws with spider-like design, is not only very Star Trek in theme but it is a whole episode or season arc. You could screw over one of the factions or you could be Picard/Sisko. My point is, throughout there are these brush strokes of Star Trek’s political leg work, which very often isn’t action-packed. It isn’t exciting, and there is a point to do as Peter Capaldi once shouted: “[E]verybody does what they were always going to have to do from the very beginning. Sit down and talk!”

In place of the green, amber, and red traffic lights for speech checks we last saw in Fallout 4, Starfield opens up a sort of mini-game that is more based on your character and the person getting persuaded. I enjoy this system because it is better at giving you something to actually work with. Sadly, sometimes the lines feel recycled or generic rather than character/situation-specific. Similarly “new” this time around is the lockpicking mini-game, which is just a puzzle of working out which pegs fit in which holes. In an age of digital money, this works better than what we’ve been doing since Skyrim.

Mechanically, Starfield is the most sound a Bethesda game has been for the genre of action-adventure. It just isn’t a game about a massive amount of action or adventure. There certainly are bloated segments too. I’ve complained about the crafting enough to give you an idea of my opinion on it, and then there are some bits that are plain missing or poorly done. The ultra-clean, minimalistic UI topped with a hint of Destiny-like numbers bleeding out of damaged enemies is about as welcome as a cat turd on your pillow before bed. Honestly, why no one thought to natively gradient the color of the health bar so I can see it when it is low is beyond me.

I’ve banged on about it so much this year already and I’ve even written the news about its announcement for a future update. Why in the living holy space Jesus does a game with first-person not have a native FOV slider? I’m already flying a ship and doing something that can create motion sickness. I don’t need another reason to make my shoddy-looking NCC-1701 The Vomit Comet. I’d also like the shipbuilding to give an option on where the ladders might go, that way my brig doesn’t have a ladder or door where a guard wouldn’t be able to see.

Beyond the 120+K I spend on the house and the 500 credits a week I keep sending Commander Kira and her Vulcan husband with the messed up face, I spent far too much on ship retrofits. Even now, with 80+ hours, I’m not entirely happy with it. There is always a new part or a change of weapons you’ll want to do at different spaceports. Once again, that gives me a reason to be the woman they call Jayne. That said, some of the limitations are a little annoying, but some of them are understandable. My horribly bulky Enterprise is huge and I love it.

Much like my sometimes awkwardly square ship, Starfield is cumbersome, sometimes using companionways and storerooms to fill in the gaps, but I somehow love it nonetheless despite those useless components. The story is crap, trying to play with ancient this and magic that. However, once you look beyond that and create your own reason to be there, there is a fantastic world of mechanics, systems, and stories to be told. It is not every day you dock onto a ship with its artificial gravity busted, so you end up having a gunfight with people who brought knives to a zero-G battle.

Ultimately, Starfield has its trademark Bethesda flaws and even a few more beyond that too, but under that usual rubble of lies an artifact (if you will) that unlocks something special, fun, and engaging. I think for the number of load screens and exploration of minor procedural generation, the lack of radio or that sort of filling the gaps is apparent. Also, Cora’s Haikus got boring after the second time. By no means is this a perfect example of a space game, far from it, but it is one I can’t help but quickly return to for more even after so many hours in such a short time.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Starfield

$69.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• The very Star Trek portions.
• I might love some of the casting a little too much.
• The simple character stories you can create for yourself.

Cons

• Danger Will Robinson, something launched without an FOV slider.
• Why is the crafting so awful and useless?