Starfield has a massive world, interesting lore and background, incredible audio design and voice actors, over a thousand planets... but the game is so shallow, decisions irrelevant, gameplay is boring, environments are repetitive and utterly pointless, and the quests are just so phoned in. The amount of pure laziness on display in the games design is staggering.

Quests are a joke. There's an early quest where you need to track down some military-esque bandits that were threatening a homesteader. You have to track them through a canyon and are warned that the canyon has a lot of mudslides, twisting turns, mines from an old war. The game sets you up for a maze like puzzle where you have to cleverly follow the bandits path or face the peril of becoming lost in a mine filled canyon. Well, it don't deliver chief. You walk towards UI indicators, get a pop up saying there's foot steps going that way, walk to the next UI marker, get another popup saying footsteps go this way. There's no actual footsteps, there's no maze like elements, there's only a handful of mines which you have to go through despite supposedly following a trail. It just sucks. The whole mission sucks. So many of the missions start great with a huge promise brought on by excellent voice actors lifting up mediocre dialogue, but then the gameplay is just shallow nothingness.

In Skyrim you could spend hours travelling on foot from city to city discovering unique ruins, unique characters, unique story lines. Starfield you can travel every planet one block at a time but you will find nothing unique. They all have the same random points of "interest" scattered 500m from each other drawn from a pool of 10 "interesting" places. Even the quest temples are just repetitive copy-pasta which, while very cool the first[/i], you will eventually mod out of the game. There is no reason to explore. The whole science and scanning system is plain stupid. The entire galaxy might as well take place in a single country as all you'll do is teleport from objective to objective, there is no sense of travel, nothing is earned, then you'll get a mod to remove teleportation cut scenes as they slow the game down too much.

Starfield is expansive, it is wide, it is ambitious. It is equally shallow, lazy, barebones, and mediocre. If you're going to play you will need mods, at the very least a UI mod to replace the games terrible interface.

Solid 6/10.

Starfield has a massive world, interesting lore and background, incredible audio design and voice actors, over a thousand planets... but the game is so shallow, decisions irrelevant, gameplay is boring, environments are repetitive and utterly pointless, and the quests are just so phoned in. The amount of pure laziness on display in the games design is staggering. Quests are a joke. There's an early quest where you need to track down some military-esque bandits that were threatening a homesteader. You have to track them through a canyon and are warned that the canyon has a lot of mudslides, twisting turns, mines from an old war. The game sets you up for a maze like puzzle where you have to cleverly follow the bandits path or face the peril of becoming lost in a mine filled canyon. Well, it don't deliver chief. You walk towards UI indicators, get a pop up saying there's foot steps going that way, walk to the next UI marker, get another popup saying footsteps go this way. There's no actual footsteps, there's no maze like elements, there's only a handful of mines which you have to go through despite supposedly following a trail. It just sucks. The whole mission sucks. So many of the missions start great with a huge promise brought on by excellent voice actors lifting up mediocre dialogue, but then the gameplay is just shallow nothingness. In Skyrim you could spend hours travelling on foot from city to city discovering unique ruins, unique characters, unique story lines. Starfield you can travel every planet one block at a time but you will find nothing unique. They all have the same random points of "interest" scattered 500m from each other drawn from a pool of 10 "interesting" places. Even the quest temples are just repetitive copy-pasta which, while very cool the [i][b]first[/i][/b], you will eventually mod out of the game. There is no reason to explore. The whole science and scanning system is plain stupid. The entire galaxy might as well take place in a single country as all you'll do is teleport from objective to objective, there is no sense of travel, nothing is earned, then you'll get a mod to remove teleportation cut scenes as they slow the game down too much. Starfield is expansive, it is wide, it is ambitious. It is equally shallow, lazy, barebones, and mediocre. If you're going to play you will [b]need[/b] mods, at the very least a UI mod to replace the games terrible interface. Solid 6/10.