Recent reviews by Coldforge

It's interesting and can be briefly fun, but there's nothing to the game. You gather stuff to build stuff to gather more stuff, and you can occasionally fight things or people but the combat is awful.

Do not buy this game for now. Nothing in it works well, and some things just straight up don't work at all - units appearing graphically on tiles a space or more from their actual position or straight up teleporting around the map, resources that disappear between ages or new ones appearing where they shouldn't be able to, etc. A lot of the more frustrating issues from launch were fixed in the latest patch, only for even more frustrating issues to be added.

There's fun here, but also heaps and heaps of awful bugs and design decisions. Maybe in a year it'll be a more worthwhile ratio.

You can pet a frog, a cat, and rescue a dog.

GotY.

The best feel of exploration I've played in a long time, maybe ever. The combat is fairly mid, and seems mostly structured around attrition, but the classes are all distinct and well differentiated. Archers have a unique feel from magic, the thieves fight radically differently from the warriors, and there's several advanced classes to unlock and evolve (as well as "hidden" meister skills that you can learn). On the subject of magic, the magic system is fairly well done and spell effects are gorgeous, but combat spells will kill your framerate and completely obscure the enemy, so they're kind of a mixed bag in the end. The story is tripe and garbage and I'm happily ignoring it while I wander and delve into every dungeon/cave I run across, which are absolutely amazing and perhaps the best part of the game.

Hugely recommended if you live for exploring worlds and uncovering every secret hidey hole on a map, probably give it a pass if you're looking for DMC level combat or a story that doesn't make you laugh.

Great start to Early Access. Very crafting/exploration focused survival game, combat seems like a distant third in priority (and feels correspondingly bad). Online only because it saves everyone's progress in co-op mode, so you don't have any issues where only the host progresses and the clients get nothing from a game session; everyone is just a client of the central game servers.

Be warned that it takes a few hours (3-5 depending how fast you go) to get into the meat of the game, the tutorial is pretty long and hand-holdy.

Managed democracy calls, and you have to decide if you're going to let sketchy anti-cheat and a few bugs stop you from answering the sweet, dulcet ring of liberty.

Base game is a good Stardew Valley clone, but the features that (should) make this game unique are so unfinished that it's embarrassing. Should still be in Early Access, do not pay full price for this.

Master yourself to slay/kiss/free/imprison a sharp/soft/thorny/immaterial foe(?)

GotY of the decade.

This is how you make games. This is why we play games.

Give me more, please.

Do not get if you want another BG3. Starfield is to an RPG like BG3 in the same way that a bargain amusement park is to a Broadway play. If you want to make your own fun in a genuinely entertaining (if janky) setting, have at it.

Are there interesting people and good stories? Yes, but not in the Main Story Quest. The NG+ mechanic is interesting, but the changes it creates in the core game aren't enough to carry it. Like so many Bethesda things, the fun is in the playground and the side quests you stumble upon. The Faction questlines are a mixed bag, but better than the MSQ.

Space exploration is meh. Not as basic as Mass Effect, but also nowhere as seamless as NMS. Everything is a discreet zone with a border and is connected by *fast travel*, but if you can deal with the limitations, it's still fun. Ship design is a definite high point and you can get quite creative, Outposts are a definite low and I question their inclusion in the game at all.

Combat is simple, but I highly recommend starting out on Normal difficulty due to higher difficulty enemies being "tuned" into bullet sponges. Once you've gotten some points into damage increasing skills, you can and should crank up the difficulty. There are some MSQ-gated abilities that will radically change the way combat works, as well.

Too many Quality of Life abilities are gated behind a poorly thought-out skill system. You can do *everything* at level 1, but outside of shooting your gun, it's all clunky and extremely limited. Hand scanners have a base range of 10m; want to scan things further away? It'll cost you 4 levels of skill points to get a good range. Even worse are the skills gated behind tiers of unlocks. Want to increase the size of your starship's crew? First spend a dozen levels of skill points in that tree, then you can start working on your crew size!

Most bad things about the game are due to long-term design decisions by Bethesda, which is not surprising if they're aiming at hardcore Skyrim players. There's a lot of good to be found, however, and thankfully most of the bad can be overcome by console commands.