Recent reviews by Symph

Democracy: 1
Sony: 0

Helldivers back to hellpods!

TLDR; Starfield is like playing the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. You were waiting for it, wanted it so bad.. and in the end you get the product but it not what should have been and leaves a void.

Summary (from a huge Bethesda fan):
Genuine disappointment. I was on the hype train and believed with every fiber of my being that Bethesda would knock this one out of the park. There are absolutely some fun and great moments & mechanics in Starfield, however, the game overall is outdated and feels unfinished. The "universe" Bethesda created here feels 95% empty, and has very little of the Bethesda charm that the Elder Scroll and Fallout IPs have.
If this got the No Mans Sky treatment, it might be a good game; but as it stands now, please don't play this game. If you are a huge Bethesda fan, you can probably appreciate this game and what it should have been, but even then you will probably feel just as much disappointment as enjoyment, if not more.

The good and the bad:

The Good:
+ Space and landscape visuals are breathtaking.
+ Ship building and flying is very fun. Ship combat is decent.
+ Disabling and boarding ships is extremely fun. Very well done.
+ The soundtrack/OST is FANTASTIC. Very very good.
+ Combat is fun. Its basically exactly Fallout 4 combat, with the addition of new "powers".
+ The main quests and side quests are well written and fun, especially the Freestar Rangers side questline.
+ Dialog like older Bethesda games is back, including better facial animations and great voice acting. However even while improved, it is horribly outdated in today's standards.
+ Skill Trees and systems are well thought out and overall good (However, melee combat is unfinished and unacceptable).

The Bad:
- LOADING SCREENS. There are loading screens for EVERYTHING. They are usually short, but they are everywhere and get annoying. There will be loading screens even for loading into the same cell.
- Cut-scene transitions too and from planets that cannot be skipped. And animations like getting up from your ship's captain chair are long and can't be skipped. They add up, trust me.
- The game would have felt outdated even if it came out 5 years ago. It is not optimized, it runs the same fps on all settings tiers. NPCs are boring and look bland, stare at you with all the same white soulless eyes. NPC AI is horrible, and AI fleeing in cities is bad, they all jog away and theres just one track for a crowd screaming even if only 1 npc. Everything is immersion breaking.
- Important story moments are hindered by bugs and so on, breaking the little immersion there was.
- All main cities have severe FPS stuttering, and also have no ingame maps. They are improving this in future updates, but its still unacceptable.
- Firearm combat is a downgrade from Fallout 4. Less weapon affects and stats. Lots of guns, but most are ugly and not interesting. Ammo also CAN NOT be crafted.
- Melee combat is VERY unacceptable. The selection of melee weapons are very small, and they all have similar stats. There is only one three hit combo for ALL melee weapons. Same attack throughout the game, no variety.
- Finding good loot is trivialized. You just fly out to a high level system (like lvl 75) and farm enemies from afar at a low level. They drop end game gear. Once you farm a little, you can breeze through the game no problem.
- Resource gathering on planets and so on is COMPLETELY negated by just being able to buy resources at vendors in large quantities for cheap. This takes all the want and reward of exploring and resource gathering on planets, which was one of the three main things to do on planets.
- Planet base building is wonky and buggy. And some mechanics like linking storage units is confusing and not explained.
- Planets feel empty; and the lack of on land vehicles makes you run for 10 minutes at a time between sparse and empty POIs. I would say only on average ~20% of PIOs on planets even have combat or something to loot, they're mostly landmarks. The POIs are also very far apart and sometimes you can land and there's only one.