Recent reviews by nfinite.recursion

Starfield is absolutely NOT Fallout or Skyrim in space.

The foundation of this game is centered around exploration. However, unlike Bethesda's previous games, while performing a mundane fetch quest for instance, you can discover new locations, quests, and points of interest along the way. This provides a genuine sense of discovery amid the mundanity of such a basic quest while providing additional exploration and questing. Starfield, however, relies heavily on fast travel to connect you to what are essentially "instanced" locations in the game world. This fast travel negates the exploration and discovery that was one of the key elements of success of the older titles.

Starfield's quests are ultimately quite bad. Some of them show promise of greatness only to fall apart. The UC faction quest starts strong with a very Alien-esque intro with a motion sensor tracking a very powerful alien. This was genuinely very fun. As the quest progresses it just turns into: go here, talk to dude, go here, talk to dude, go here, follow dude then talk to dude some more, talk to other dude, kill some dudes, go back and talk to dude, find dude then talk to dude, go get dude, kill some dudes along the way, and on and on. Ultimately you are given some decisions to make that don't change the outcome aside from the responses you get.

Shooting is good... for a Bethesda game. Compared to many others it's just passable. Combat overall is hampered by the brain-dead enemy AI. Human-type enemies are often content to just stand there and let you shoot them. Alien animal-type enemies just run up to you and attack, even if they can sling rocks or spit poison at you from a distance. Melee weapons are all the same no matter what you wield.

Companions are boring and beyond lame. Their AI tends to have them stupidly walk in front of you while you're actively firing at enemies. Ultimately, I dismissed all of my companions to play solo. Sarah didn't like that. That's fine. I was also tired of their inane chatter.

How did I get 150 hours in this game? Coming across locations for the first time was truly interesting and warranted thorough exploration. Coming across the same exact locations time and time again is immersion breaking especially when these locations feature the exact same enemy and item placement. The only thing in these locations that get switched up and randomized are the item containers.

Starfield is a middling at best game that makes you realize how good other games are by comparison. Towards the end of my 150 hours of play I could only hope to find more of Starfield's elusive "good" content. After coming across the same exact "Deep Mine" for perhaps the 10th time, I was done. No more. Relying so heavily on procedural generation for exploration was a massive mistake by the devs.

What? You want a numerical score? OK.

4 / 10.

If you've played Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit and enjoyed that game, then feel free to just continue enjoying that gem from 1998. This game is just a test of your patience and a very poor followup that misses the point of "Hot Pursuit".

Graphically, the game looks great and the featured cars are modeled well. Playing the game as a cop is fun. Um, that's about it.

The first thing that you are treated to are some unskippable logos followed by some unskippable video sequences before you can start the game... or so you think. This is immediately followed by EA's Autolog online connectivity feature hassling you to log on with your EA Account credentials. While I have an EA account and Autolog acknowledged that it recognized my provided email address, no password that I have ever used in the past worked. So I decided to go ahead and make a new account. For whatever reason, Autolog accepted my email address, but never asked for a password to be provided and won't allow me to log on. Maybe the Autolog servers are offline? Some users say that they are still online, but just notoriously unstable. In any case, I get bugged about logging on every time I start the game. Several features of the game that have no business being tied to Autolog like "Photo Mode" refuse to allow me access because I'm not logged on.

After the Autolog harassment you can finally start the game. No, wait! Now you must watch an unskippable video. In fact any time you unlock a new tier of cars or new equipment you get an unskippable video. NFS:HP(2010) loves to slow you down at every opportunity. When it's not a video, it's the game's UI slowly adding up your points at the end of a race (partially skippable) or informing you that you've unlocked a new car (unskippable) or have gone up in wanted level (completely pointless and unskippable).

As for the actual racing, the one race type that really sticks out is Time Trial. Not because it's any good, but because nearly half of the races in the game are Time Trials. These races are by far the most boring as you just race from point A to point B by yourself under a set time limit. Preview is another race type, but don't let it fool you. It's just Time Trial with a car you haven't yet unlocked. If you avoid doing these terrible races, eventually they'll pile up and you won't be able to unlock any more fun races until you do the Time Trials and Previews.

The cars are split up into performance tiers. This has the side effect of preventing you from being able to choose a car from a different tier. Have you come to love a car or want an increased challenge by driving a slower car? Too bad. You have to pick a car from this race's arbitrary tier level. Many races even force you to drive a specific car.

The various gadgets in this game are fun to use, but are only available in Hot Pursuit. It would certainly be nice to have them in Race or especially Duel.

Oh yeah. This is a racing game, right? Where's the replay function after a race? I've had some awesome close calls and come from behind wins in this game, but when the race is done then that's it. No option to review your race or save the replay or anything. NFS3:HP(1998) let you do this. This would have been great in the age of Youtube and online connectivity to watch some awesome race replays.

Quickrace was a really nice feature in NFS3:HP(1998) that let you pick a track, difficulty, weather conditions, daylight conditions, number of opponents, and what cars they drive. Wanna race a bunch of Diablos while you drive a 'Vette? Go ahead. When you finally pull off a 1st place win, you could even save the replay! (Amazing!)

In short, this is a game that disappoints and tests your patience more than anything. It's irony of an artistic sort that this is a racing game with "speed" in the title that keeps you away from racing and having fun with with unnecessary features like Autolog, unskippable videos, and slowly advancing UI screens. If you ignore my review, then at least play through as a cop, though even the cop playthrough still has stupid Time Trials in the form of "Rapid Response".