Recent reviews by Zeis [ZF]

Sony actually reversed their idiotic decision, so I'm flipping my review over to positive, even though I think the game deserves more of a neutral rating than a thumbs up.

Don't get me wrong, if you play with 3 friends it can be a lot of fun, but the game has a LOT of issues, and they only keep increasing.

The same (small) team that develops the monthly "Warbonds" (paid content drops) is also apparently responsible for playtesting, bug reporting, bug testing and fixing on top of everything. They don't appear to have a QA department. Thanks to this, the game has had major gameplay and stability issues since launch that still haven't been fixed, because making more money is more important than having a well working game. The tech debt is ever increasing, every single Warbond that introduces new stuff appears to not be playtested at all and half the things in it tend to not work or not work the way they're supposed to.

Arrowhead have also decided to punish players that prefer playing alone/with less than 3 friends or not with randoms by increasing enemy spawn rates more and more the fewer players you have. They could reward players for playing in a full squad, but they decided against that.

Their overall philosophy seems to be "play the game the way we want you to play it, not the way you want to" in terms of balancing and gameplay decisions.

Finally, they're using a Kernel-level (!) anticheat system for a cooperative PvE game, for "safety" reasons - which is nonsense. Absolutely ridiculous.

You don't have to be a Hololive fan to enjoy HoloCure - heck you don't even have to know what VTubers are. This is genuinely one of the best indie games I've ever played - it's addictive, simple and just plain fun. No microtransactions, no paid DLC, just a really good game. It's shiny, energetic, and upbeat. Get this game - you literally have no reason not to.

The art style is consistent and adorable, the songs are absolute bangers, progression and unlocks are almost perfectly spaced. It runs very well on a SteamDeck, but towards the end of a level your Deck can start to crawl with the amount of particles or sprites on screen. It's extremely simple to pick up, but you can really get into the nitty-gritty with min/maxing if you so desire. But if that's not your thing, then you really don't have to touch that aspect of it - it'll still be enjoyable.

The side content like Holohouse, fishing, gardening and so on are very cute and a nice distraction, and give you even more reason to farm those coins other than unlocking new characters. I do wish that things like the Holohouse furniture, farming, and other minigames will be expanded in future updates - although there are already hints that this will be the case. It would be great if Kay Yu (the lead dev) would allow Steam Workshop integration in the future, so fans can add their own furniture or other mods/maps to the game.

If you're a fan of Hololive, you will love this. Guaranteed.

TL;DR: It DESPERATELY needs mods to be fun and functional. So if you absolutely must play this, wait a few months until we start getting some proper mods. Right now it's kind of a let down, mostly boring and tedious.

Bethesda said they're bringing back more roleplaying elements, so this is what I expected from the game: Skyrim but in space. With some arcadey space flight á la Freelancer, Rebel Galaxy, Everspace 2. It was obvious to me that we wouldn't get seamless space-to-planet transitions because Bethesda is still using the Creation Engine, but I was mostly ok with that.

So, is Starfield that? No. It's - at best - Fallout 4 in a Retro-Futuristic wannabe-space suit, with next to no arcadey space flight or exploration mechanics (seriously, it can't even keep up with Freelancer, which had similar engine limitations). If you liked Fallout 4, you're probably going to like this. If you liked Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, for their roleplaying abilities, the feeling of a lived-in world that's ripe for exploration, then you're probably going to be as disappointed as I am.

Usually with Bethesda games, I throw the main quest out of the window the moment I step into the world and get agency. DO NOT DO THIS HERE. You will be annoyed and bored out of your mind. Follow the main story, at the very least until you finish "Into the Unknown". I spent 30 hours just flying around and exploring planets, only to find that the entire game, from cities to barren wastelands, is repetitive, shallower than an puddle, incredibly repetitive, dated, super repetitive, and the world/landscape generation is disgustingly boring. Not to mention repetitive.

This is not a roleplaying game. It's a Bethesda Looter-Shooter with some could-be-space elements slapped on top. When interacting with the bug-eyed, plastic looking NPCs, you can usually give 4 answers, that amount to "Yes" "Also Yes" "Mildly annoyed Yes" and "No but later yes". Your background or skills hardly play into anything, they're more of a mild seasoning you get to throw in every now and then (Almost always being a "Yes" type answer as well).

For example - and this is a super minor spoiler for a side activity you'll pick up very early on - An employee asked me to break into an apartment and modify his employment records so he'll get a promotion. If I do that, he'll give me a mcguffin I'll need for the quest I'm on. My answers amounted to the usual 3 yesses and a no. This would've been a great opportunity to bring in some background-based answers, or give me the option to rat him out to his superiors, or modify the records but to his detriment, or modify the records of his rival instead. But no - none of that. You just pop in there, click two buttons, done. No options, no roleplaying, just... work. Everything is sterile, everything is always positive or at best neutral, there are no consequences to speak of.

For some unholy reason, Bethesda decided that all roleplaying skills and mechanics need to be locked behind skills/perks. Want to sneak? Gotta unlock that first. Pickpocket? Intimidate? Persuade? Good luck, you'll need to gain a level to simply unlock each one. You can then level them up with each level-up too, but there are so many other mechanics locked behind these, that it might take you a LONG time until you can get a normal base-build for roleplaying going without suffering from not speccing into more combat or survival related skills/perks.

The game is incredibly tedious and artificially drawn out. It takes 3.5 minutes to walk from one point of interest to the next that's 1km away. I stop-watched it. Why is that important? Because you will be constantly walking, since you're running out of O2 in a few seconds if you sprint, and it takes ages to recharge. There are no vehicles, you can forget about using your jetpack for lateral movement, so exploring a planets surface is not just boring, but a strain on your patience. You are CONSTANTLY over-encumbered, and inventory management is a pain thanks to the annoying and counter-intuitive UI/UX.

The worst part for me is that the game might be huge and expansive in theory - on a technical level - but in actuality feels like the most closed-in, shoeboxed, tiny, super repetitive, flat, boring world Bethesda ever created. That is thanks to the constant, unending, relentless loading screens you'll encounter.

You won't travel around in space from planet to planet (you might technically be able to, but it'll take several IRL hours for literally no reward whatsoever), you'll just open the map, fasttravel to your destination, leave your ship (loading sceen), walk a couple meters to the entrance of a thing (loading screen) talk to someone (cut-scene), walk to the next area (loading screen), then back to your ship (loading screen), undock (unskippable cut-scene), open the map and fasttravel to the next thing (loading screen) and so on and so forth. It just doesn't end.

The result is that you'll feel like you're just being picked up and dropped into different sets, do the thing you're supposed to do (remember, no roleplaying), get picked up and dropped into the next thing. It doesn't feel cohesive or like a big, open, explorable world like Skyrims or Oblivions. The game constantly takes control away from you with these loading screens and cutscenes, ripping immersion to shreds.

Not everything is bad though. The prop, weapon, and set design is seriously incredible. I absolutely love looking at all the small details, check out the walls of whatever place I'm running into and look at everything I can pick up. Those teams did absolutely fantastic jobs. So did the team that is responsible for the ship builder - which is super fun. Although I wish there were more cosmetic and smaller parts (mods will probably fix that though).

Gunplay is... fine. Nothing special, but better than Fallout 4. Shooting in Zero G is definitely fun.

As for the technical side of things: The game is CPU-bound, so performance could've been a lot better than it is. I don't know where other reviewers got the "the least amount of bugs of any Bethesda release" line from, but that is definitely not true in my experience - I've encountered just as many, if not more, bugs here than in Skyrim on release. Bethesda also moved the textures folder to your C:\ drive, rather than where you installed the game. This is an incredibly dumb decision, as mods can add a good 100+ GB of textures to the game, which will now clog up your main drive.

The game looks dated. Yeah, sure, it might be the most extensive re-write of the Creation Engine since Oblivion, and it does look better than Skyrim or Fallout 4, but it struggles to keep up with modern games. Years ago, there was a heated discussion about Bethesda continuing on with the Creation Engine. I mostly didn't think it would be a problem - it's an engine, those often get updated without major issues. But with this, it's REALLY starting to show it's age and technical limitations. It truly is time for Bethesda to create a new engine from scratch and not rely on the bones of the gamebryo/creation engine anymore for their next title.

I could go on and on about the tedious conversations, unlikable characters, uninspired fetch quests, disjointed gameplay systems, and so on, but I think you'll get the idea. I wanted to like this. I really did. After 30 hours, when I finally started to follow the main quest, I started to not be bored and annoyed anymore, but it's still a far cry from being fun. The game has so much potential, it could've been so great. But it feels like Bethesda has long since abandoned the idea of making great roleplaying games. How deeply disappointing.

In short: If you want an RPG, skip this. If you want something like Fallout 4, then wait a few months until there are official modding tools and modders had time to fix the majority of the game.

It's a wonderful little game you can put 9-11 hours into. I really liked the atmosphere and world, the voxel graphics were delightful and the voice acting was good. Every bigger update so far has improved the game by a lot. I do wish there was a little bit more to do, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment. If you just want to play a game with a fairly straight-forward story, that is told well, but won't have you invest too much time into, then this won't be a miss.