AKA: No Man’s Skyrim. Bethesda Game IN SPACE! I can go on.
WARNING: This post contains SPOILERS for the game Starfield! Sections with story spoilers will be hidden, but mechanical spoilers will not be! If these ruin the game for you, I sincerely suggest reexamining your relationship with video games and media, because that honestly sounds kind of exhausting!
OVERVIEW
Media type: Video game
Platform: PC, Playstation 4
Genre: Sci-fi, action RPG
Moddability: Extensive, once they bloody add it
DLC policy: Not great, not terrible
A side note: this took me something like eight hours to write. You are looking at my magnum opus. I will never top the sheer bulk of this review. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! My name is Dee, monarch of monarchs!
GAMEPLAY
COMBAT
It’s alright. That is to say, it’s alright at first. Unfortunately, as you level, your enemies become tougher – both on the ground and in space. On the ground, it’s alright, you can upgrade your gear and steal it from enemies and stuff, although the enemies become horrifyingly spongy as you continue to level. In space… you can’t upgrade your gear and stuff in any way other than buying new ship modules, which tend to be pretty expensive. Space-based enemies that might not have been too bad at the start of the game are suddenly ripping your poor little ship to shreds, taking forever to kill with guns that are upgraded solely in one of the more frustrating UIs I’ve ever seen. Shields in particular feel like a bit of a waste of time, taking a good while to regenerate even partially, and going down quickly enough that you might as well just throw up a wall of tissue paper around your ship. Thank God for mods.
All of this is quite fortunate, as even with mods, the NPCs are very stupid. With said mods engaged, I’ve walked up to an enemy on multiple occasions, being metres away from them, staring them in the face, and they only react once I start shooting them.
INVENTORY
Looting has gone backwards from Fallout 4, as you can no longer break most equipment down into base materials, and in a similar vein, most clutter has no associated material value, only being useful as vendor fodder – I’d much rather not have clutter be pick-upable at all, honestly. A lot of crafting requires components, sometimes made from materials but most often found in the world. These components are very heavy, quickly using up your disturbingly limited carrying capacity. Even most containers have a storage limit now! And, as I mentioned, you can’t break useless equipment down into materials, so it has a habit of occupying a significant portion of your storage until you manage to offload it somewhere.
Vendors are also disturbingly limited, many carrying only a pittance of credits, making your selling power very poor indeed, especially when selling high-value crap. And yet, in other areas, credits come very easily, which is great because ships are expensive, but ships kind of operate on a totally different scale to everything else. You have enough buying power for a ship, and you could probably afford to purchase any given vendor’s entire stock.
PROGRESSION
Fucking frustrating. Levelling feels kind of slow and not very rewarding, as each level only nets you a single perk point, requiring 328 to buy out every last perk in existence. Most perks in any given tree require point investment higher up in that tree, making it a particularly long journey to make it to some of the more advanced perks.
To purchase ranks in a perk beyond the first, you must complete a challenge related to that perk – blow up ships for Piloting, run out of oxygen for the oxygen one, sprint while almost overencumbered for Fitness, and so on. Conceptually, I like this idea, but the challenges are either way too grindy or trivial, with absolutely no in-between.
For crafting perks, the journey isn’t over yet. Now that you’ve bought the perk, you must then perform research to actually make use of it, costing in-game materials – some of which can be quite a pain in the ass to scare up.
Now, in your crafting journey, you must actually make the things. This also requires materials, some of which can be quite a pain in the ass to scare up. Weapon and armour mods in particular are, shall we say, egregious, as unlike in Fallout 4, you do not get an uninstalled version of the mod upon replacement or removal, and you do not get the materials back. This is made even more frustrating by the fact that there are multiple tiers of armour and weapon, much like in Fallout 76, which cannot be upgraded, only replaced by new equipment. Every new level of equipment basically obsoletes the previous one – and this includes legendary gear! Hope you’re not attached to Boom Boom!
Finally, as mentioned previously, perks require the completion of challenges to level up, and crafting perks are no exception. Making gun mods is one thing, but suit mods are quite a bit more of a pain in the ass, and outpost building even more so – in no small parts becase the criteria for what actually counts towards the outpost building challenge is so damn stringent.
EXPLORATION
This game cribs significantly from No Man’s Sky in its exploration mechanics, which is actually not the worst idea. No Man’s Sky can occasionally be joyful in its exploration, as you discover weird rocks and weird creatures and weird planets!
It is significantly less interesting here, as while the pseudorandom generation of planets is maintained, the same cannot be said of what’s on them. Most life forms are slight variations on one another, lacking in sheer variety without much love given to what we do see. Planets also suffer from being samey, as aside from special features that only really exist to make you go “oooh, look at that” before moving on, never to think about them again, each planet doesn’t have much to offer apart from a disturbingly well-distributed variety of abandoned facilities. This is explained in the lore, which I’ll give Bethesda props for. These will be some of the very few props earned by the developers. Cherish them, Todd Howard.
These landmarks are spread at least kilometre apart, a distance which becomes very dull to traverse time and time again. This becomes particularly egregious when you don’t get any form of vehicle, which are apparently not present due to engine limitations. Game engine limitations, that is. They have engines in Starfield. Haw haw. Why they couldn’t just reskin horses as space motorcycles, I don’t know.
BUILDING
Starfield includes two kinds of construction minigame – Outpost Building and Ship Building. Neither are particularly enjoyable, for similar reasons of the UI being extremely frustrating. Everything is so awkward to navigate, it’s so awkward to put things in the right place and make them fit, expensive, awkward, awkward, awkward. Ship Building is somewhat avoidable if you opt to use the Upgrade Ship option, but for some stupid reason, that’s intensely limited. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with it if you want to upgrade your ship properly, which you will need to do.
Another annoyance in the Ship Builder is the fact that it is impossible to preview the interiors of modules, not allowing you to see what one contains before placing it down (the Armoury module does not contain weapon and space suit workbenches!). This also becomes annoying when you realise that the facing of interior doors and placement of interior ladders is governed by arcane rules that are only barely understood by a handful of players. It is to the point where people are making spreadsheets and big lists with what each module type contains. Aesthetic elements are limited with no rhyme or reason, and I can’t even get a cover panel for the ship’s reactor and grav drive, two of the most important components on the ship and ones that you would reasonably really want buried in the core of the damn thing, or at least given some level of protection from bullshit!
Outpost building is no less irritating, in no small part because of its stringent tolerances. For instance, it is not actually possible to place an outpost airlock coming directly off a landing pad without mods, giving complaints about overlap. Even with mods, it’s unreasonably difficult. Randomly strewn environmental rocks cannot be removed and will inevitably hassle you as you try to place habs, miners, and other such things. Apparently rock removal is a technique forgotten when we left Earth.
INTERMISSION
Wow, this has been a long post so far, and we haven’t even dug into the story yet! This is a good time to get a drink and/or snack. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Have some nice intermission music in the meanwhile!
