Recent reviews by Rookie

Note: I received Starfield for 'free' (depending on how you look at it) along with the purchase of a graphics card.

Starfield is a game that is trying hard to be many things - a first-person RPG, an immersive sim, a ship builder, a base builder, a space shooter and an open-world(s) exploration title - but at its core it is simply Yet Another Bethesda RPG™. If all you are expecting from this game is Skyrim or Fallout in space, then you might enjoy it. But if you buy into Bethesda's hype and expect more from the gameplay loop than anything they have delivered in the past, you will be sorely disappointed.

In past Bethesda titles, the overarching plots of the main quests have been if not world-class at the very least understandable and even enjoyable. Starfield fails to meet that very low benchmark. The premise used to elevate your character from a lowly miner to The Main Character is flimsy at best, and after a few hours of main quest story content I found myself really failing to care about any of the game characters or their problems. This is not helped by the complete lack of immersion when taking to NPCs; while their animations and facial expressions have been improved, in terms of their functionality and responses you may as well be talking to a city guard from Oblivion. At the end of the day the story seems to exist purely to contort the setting of the game to fit the player upgrade mechanics that were extremely obviously lifted and shifted from Skyrim.

Starfield is a truly massive game, and to its credit there is almost limitless scope for exploration. However, this falls pretty flat when you realise that these semi-procedurally generated chunks of planet are almost completely devoid of stuff to do. There are a handful of in-game cities to explore and a few smaller settlements on certain planets that are important to the game's questlines - but beyond this, outside of some flora/fauna/minerals to scan or harvest for resources, encounters with anything more interesting are few and far between. If you are lucky, the chunk you decided to land on might have a few abandoned buildings to loot, or maybe even a spacer/pirate base to fight through. Overall, once you've seen a few desolate planets or moons you've seen them all.

Overall, the gunplay is 'fine' (I'd even go so far as to say it's kind of fun). But, IMO, the most enjoyable combat in the game is the space combat. This is where I found I spent most of my time; turns out that flying around space blowing up a bunch of enemy ships is more entertaining than wandering around desolate moons; who knew.

Exactly the same as every other Bethesda RPG. You start as a lowly peasant, and through a litany of deus ex machina you become elevated to a god-like destroyer of worlds. Pick up quests, run dungeons, kill mobs, get loot, obtain upgrades, become Dragonborn Starborn - rinse and repeat.

In true Bethesda form, I also found that my player character became extremely overpowered to the point of being completely broken relatively quickly; the final fight at the end of the game's main story was over in about 30 seconds due to the stupid amount of damage my character was able to lay down.

Starfield is a game whose aspirations clearly exceed the technical capabilities of the creaking Gamebryo/Creation Engine foundations that Bethesda chose to base it on. While it has had some impressive graphical upgrades, at its core the engine was originally built for a very different type of RPG - in-game spaces are represented in the engine by breaking them down into interiors/dungeons/caves and exteriors/landscapes. This approach - while well suited to more "traditional" RPGs like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout which revolve around the player wandering around the overworld and occasionally delving into a dungeon, cave or building - doesn't translate well to a game of Starfield's scale.

This is extremely apparent with the landing/takeoff and planet exploration mechanics; clearly, the engine cannot handle the ability for the player to seamlessly transit from orbit to atmo and from there pick their own precise landing spot (in the same way that i.e. Elite Dangerous or No Mans Sky achieve the same thing) - instead, Starfield breaks planets into large tiles - each tile is quite large, I would estimate roughly the size of the map of Skyrim. You of course have freedom to fully explore each tile and any caves/structures/locations you find on it, but once your ship has 'landed' you cannot reposition the ship any further within that tile. You also cannot leave the boundary of the tile on foot, you will be greeted with a warning message telling you to go back to your ship and land on the adjacent tile.

This lack of seamless transition between game spaces (as a result of the limitations of the engine) is perhaps the most immersion-breaking thing in a game that already has plenty of other ways to do the same thing.

Honestly, you'd probably be better off just playing through Skyrim again. If you want a space exploration game, No Mans Sky and Elite Dangerous are excellent alternatives that do a lot of the things Starfield tries to achieve a lot better.

In terms of price; even though I got this for free I still feel cheated out of time. But, if you are a die-hard Bethesda RPG fan, at least wait until it goes on sale for a significant discount.

I bought this pack because I like this song, little did I know that I was actually paying for a perverse torture session that now means I have a burning hatred for KISS and this song in particular.

Good workout, though.

Pros:
* You move and sound like a walking refrigerator, which is lore-accurate.
* Very well executed aesthetic.
* Heavy bolter go brrrrrr.

Cons:
* No in-game map? Come on. Even DOOM had a map. I'm here to purge heretics not waste time backtracking and wandering around aimlessly. It doesn't help that EVERYTHING in 40k is either a cathedral, an industrial plant, or a combination of both...so literally every level looks pretty much the same.
* Related to this, some of the Tzeentchian map puzzles are downright obnoxious in both their level design and their graphical effects. Trying to solve a Portal-like puzzle while half the map is turned into translucent neon purple chaos ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (whilst also slaughtering flying chaos daemons) just made my eyes hurt and ended up giving me a headache.
* At some point around 1/3rd of my way through the game, during a level transition I lost most of my weapons and was left with just the bolter and shotty. Not sure if this is a bug or some kind of obnoxious kooky retro mechanic (I don't remember the original DOOM doing this, but I could be wrong) - it was pretty annoying as the weapons I was left with were definitely not scaled correctly versus what I was fighting.

Overall: Pretty fun. I find myself needing to take fairly frequent breaks though as by the very nature of the game it does get pretty repetitive.

I will add a caveat to this. I've played the game on console already - the gameplay, story and character development are all 10/10, absolute masterpieces, 100% worth your time and money.

But, when it comes to this port, right now it is not the optimal way to experience this game for the first time. For example, approximately 10 of the 14 hours I have spent playing were in fact just idling overnight letting the shaders compile.

Once the initial shader compilation had finished I almost immediately ran into issues with the game just crashing to desktop before loading the prologue. After a few attempts, I was able to get ingame and progress to the first chapter, and get my first taste of the improved graphics and game engine - which are, in fairness, very impressive. I then updated my GPU driver to address a few reported issues, and following this had to wait another 5 hours for the shaders to recompile...

I would suggest waiting a few months for a couple of patches to drop to address some of the more critical issues. If you are desperate to play the game and do not want to wait this long (perhaps you've been watching the HBO show), and happen to own a recent PlayStation console, the experience on that platform will undoubtedly be better right now. Plus, you can find the first remaster that was released back in 2014 at a pretty steep discount compared to this.

Updating this review to positive after 28 hours of gameplay (actually probably more like 22 hours taking queues into account).

The good:
* Aside from some obvious balance issues and early bugs, the core gameplay is actually fairly solid. It feels very much like an old-school MMO from the early to mid 2000s. If you liked WoW classic you'll probably like this.
* It's very pretty.
* Performance, once you are actually in game, is very good. I haven't experiences any issues with servers lagging or failing to keep up with player actions, even when at max pop.

The bad:
* A week after release and queues are still an issue. The fact that a game studio owned by Amazon of all companies can scale the game "worlds" horizontally (adding more of them), but not vertically (increasing capacity) is frankly embarrassing. New players are now being steered directly towards empty worlds, but that doesn't really help players who are well established on an existing world. My advice for now is to have another game ready that you can play whilst you are waiting in the queue.
* A downside of the old-school MMO mechanics is that it can be extremely tedious and grindy. Fast-travel is a limited resource and there are no mounts. Quests will often have you traipsing across the entire map. (There is at least auto-run.)
* Some things are hilariously broken. Jump off a 200 foot mountain? No worries. 30% HP loss as fall damage. Want to swim? You can't. What you can do is creepily stride across the ocean floor like some kind of Terminator. Until you drown. Need to skin a key boss mob for a quest? Too late, that level 35 troll beat you to the punch. Find something else to do for 15 minutes until it respawns, and hope that same player isn't camping the spawn location.
* Oh, and there is a non-zero chance that it might kill your GPU.

If we put the bugs and queue issues aside (which should be fixed, eventually), on balance I've actually found myself quite enjoying it. However, if in a month's time we're still seeing these stupid problems then I'll revise my review back to negative.

Not bad, pretty accurate. Couple of glitches here and there, but that's to be expected for an early access title.

Things I'd like to see added going forwards:

* More detail on the CPU mounting + cooler installation for each type of socket. Right now it's pretty much three clicks, one for CPU, one for paste and one for the cooler.

* Speaking of cooling - liquid cooling, AIO installation at minimum. Custom loops would be a bonus, but to be honest if you're going down that road chances are you already know what you're doing without having to rely on a sim for help.

* Cable management. Currently attaching a cable takes two clicks and the rest is done for you. In reality you spend more time planning out the route of the cable rather than worrying about what plugs into what.

* More variety of components. Currently there are no NVME drives, no PCI-E cards other than GPUs. No optical drives (eh, who am I kidding, it's 2018). Still, you get the idea.

* BIOS support. This one is fairly obvious, not only do the vast majority of builds require some form of BIOS tweaking before they are ready to install an OS (e.g. to set up hardware RAID, check fan sensors, memory speed, etc), but this could also be instructional to those who are new to overclocking and would like to know more about the process of doing this from the BIOS (including the inevitable troubleshooting steps when you push it too far and end up having to reset everything).

Anyway. Food for thought. Looking forward to more content, this was fairly fun to play and has the potential to be a really useful tool for newcomers to the PCMR.

> Set out with the intention of building a car
> Ended up having a heart attack whilst trying to work a sauna

10/10 it's the spring of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for sure!

Okay. 8 hours in, these are my thoughts so far, in list format (because who doesn't like a list?):

The Pros:

1. The graphics are very impressive.

2. Terrain deformation is incredible. Granted, it can also be a little glitchy at times (more on this below) but on the whole the devs have done a stunning job on this.

3. Vehicle/model/environment physics are extremely realistic - trees will deform or even topple over completely if you drive into them, vehicle chassis movement is both visible and reactive to the terrain, the suspension model is almost perfect and the water effects are downright beautiful - right down to wash generation as you fruitlessly wheelspin in a riverbed trying to find traction. I'd even go as far as to say that they might just be the best looking water effects I've seen in a game.

4. A nicely rounded selection of off-roaders, from the humble UAZ Jeep to monstrous 8x8 ex-soviet missile carriers.

5. A wide variety of maps, all sufficiently large as to give you plenty of hours to explore all of them.

The Cons:

1. The terrain deformation mechanic, while possibly the game's greatest strength, is not completely perfect - sometimes it will glitch out and form a rut which 'leaks' into the void outside the map - plus, the deformation mechanic is always in effect, even on surfaces which should not be susceptible to it (i.e, tarmac roads) - this is a little immersion breaking. Unless your truck weighs several hundred tons, it should not be able to leave tyre ruts in a concrete surface...

2. Some of the challenges seem a little unrewarding, and there is very little variety in terms of cargo either. Granted, there is obviously fun to be had in transporting stuff from one place to another over challenging terrain in and of itself (which is pretty much the entire premise of the game), however the reward system seems to be a little unbalanced - to unlock a vehicle, for example, you simply need to find it abandoned on the map somewhere, drive up to it - and it's now yours (albeit a bit dented and bashed, and most likely with no fuel either), and it seems like most of the utility attachments you can outfit your trucks with are available right from the outset. Perhaps a better mechanic would be to receive nicer or more powerful trucks and unlocks as a reward for completing different or increasingly difficult challenges?

3. The camera is complete arse. It's locked in a third-person 'over the shoulder' view (think Gears of War), and it seems extremely recalcitrant whenever you try and reposition it - which is an utter pain in the backside when you're trying to judge the distance between the edge of your vehicle and a cliff face - or when you're trying to select an in-game menu option, as the in-game menus appear as virtual 3D overlays, much like a heads-up display. Please, Oovee - get rid of this camera, or at least add a proper 360 degree (preferably zoomable) external camera as an alternate view mode. A first-person in-cab perspective wouldn't hurt, either.

4. No wheel support. Apparently this is in the works, though, so that's good news. In the meantime you can still use a gamepad, I find that a 360 controller works particularly well.

5. There are no driver models in the cab. This isn't really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, personally I just find it a bit eerie to see a driverless truck lurching through the wilderness with abandon, like some sort of freakish Herbie on steroids.

To summarize: While frustrating at times (there are plenty of 'NONONONOYESNOYESYESNOOO' moments to be had, as you try and prevent your 6-ton vehicle and its cargo of logs from toppling over for the fifth time in a row), overall this title shows huge promise and is already a lot of fun - especially considering the price. Go get it!