Starfield honest review

Having played Starfield for more hours than we’d care to admit, here’s our honest review to give you a good idea about whether or not it’s worth the investment. It’s pretty well known that the game itself is huge, but does that mean it’s as much of a beast to play when you get into the action.

Our honest take is that Starfield has a lot of positives, but it doesn’t quite live up to the massive hype surrounding the game. It’s fair to say that Bethesda did a very good job of building things up for the launch of the game, but as you’ll find out in the rest of our review, it doesn’t deliver a total knockout.

However, there are plenty of things to look forward to and enjoy throughout the game, so we’ll start the review by going over what works well in Starfield. After that we’ll take you through the less impactful parts of the game, including the mechanics that make it difficult to progress at times.

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Starfield honest review… The good bits

Firstly, for anyone worried that the sheer size of Starfield would result in a broken game similar to the Cyberpunk 2077 launch issues, there’s no such problem. Yes, there’s the occasional glitch, like your robot Vasco sitting in the cockpit of your ship or one of the other support NPC clipping through a table, but for the most part Starfield is a stable experience.

When you consider the 1,000+ planets or moons to explore and the size of the built up areas, the stability is definitely one of the good bits. Obviously, this will vary depending on the strength of your PC setup, for but for the most part we didn’t have any significant problems with Starfield.

In addition to the stability, the latest game from Bethesda Softworks is a fairly good looking title. There are moments when it’s genuinely breathtaking, which will give you plenty of photo mode opportunities to capture some epic sci-fi/space exploration shots.

It isn’t always quite as impressive as in the trailers and promo videos, but it definitely has its moments. We’ll save some of the visuals that don’t work as well for the next section in our honest review, but in general Starfield is a good looking game that does a lot to impress.

It’s a similar situation for the overall gameplay mechanics, with decent combat, weapons and traversal. The boost packs are good fun to get around a little quicker and with less monotony and they can come in handy in a fight.

However, the big thing that saves Starfield is the sheer variety of experiences. In a lot of ways it feels like a number of different games wrapped up in one with mystical sci-fi in the main story missions being complimented by the different experiences you get in the faction missions.

One day you’ll be hunting gravity defying alien artifacts or super powers and the next you’ll be a space pirate on the hunt for the biggest payout in the history of the Crimson Fleet. Even within a single faction stream there’ a lot of variation between missions and when you get on a good run it can feel like a game within a game.

The UC SysDef faction arc is the best of the bunch. In fact, it’s a better run of missions than the main story for the most part. There’s stealth, full on attack sequences, alien monster nightmares, space ship combat, and it’s all wrapped up with an interesting collection of characters.

Finally, the flight combat actually works well in Starfield, so it’s worth a mention in the good bits section of our honest review. It can feel fiddly at to begin with, and we’ll go through the negatives in the section below, but when you get up to speed and work out how to get the most out of your ship it can be pretty intense.

Starfield honest review… the bad bits

By far the biggest issue with Starfield is the setup of the upgrade and mod system. Trying to changes little things on your ship and upgrades can feel impossible until, maybe a week or so into playing the game, it starts to make sense. And then when it does make sense, you’ll be left wondering why they didn’t make things at least a little more intuitive.

It’s a similar situation with setting up a base, modding your weapons and making changes to your flight suite, helmet and boost pack. It’s fair to say that everything is very hard earned, but what that means is that it’s just not a great deal of fun, so you’ll probably spend more time being annoyed than overjoyed by the impact of your efforts.

This leads on to another big issue in our review, which is that you can spend ages working on something only to get it working and find that it really doesn’t change all that much when you’re in a fire fight. What’s the point on putting time and effort into modding your flight suit without the impact being instantly noticeable?

If that isn’t enough, there’s also an emptiness to the vast size of Starfield. On the one hand, it makes it feel like you’re actually out in space, but at the same time it can also leave you wondering why bother having so many planets and moons to explore if they’re just a bit uninteresting.

If there were just 500 of them, instead of the 1000+, but those 500 were teaming with rival organizations competing for resources or a deadly alien scourge sweeping the galaxy it would be a much more enjoyable experience. A lot of this could be just as procedural as the environment of the planets, but it would make exploration more engaging.

Throw in some carefully crafted unique experiences and you’d have the makings of a great game, instead of good game that could have easily been better. A big part of why The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is a firm favorite for game of the year in 2023 is because you never knew what you’d find when you went looking. Sadly, that’s not often the case in Starfield.

We’ve already mentioned that the graphics work well for the most part, but there are a few situations where they sort of don’t. You notice this the most in cities and built up locations, which need more processing to deliver the scales of numbers, so what you get is grainy foliage, which takes a little away from the impact.

There are some niggles with the gameplay too, which takes place inside caves and building for the most part. If you look back on the trailers, the focus was on blasting around the wilds of space with your boost pack, shooting down on enemies and getting the jump on them.

There’s a little of that here and there, depending on your mission, but for the most part these are few and far between. Instead, you’ll be working your way through buildings or caves as you take on enemies in closer confines with narrow corridors and constrained rooms being the norm.

Finally, there’s the story for the main quest line, which never quite lands. It struggles to do anything with any kind of significant meaning and while it’s okay, it isn’t the masterpiece everyone was hoping for and the bods at Bethesda were probably aiming for.

Overall review

Starfield has a lot of positives and overall the experience is worth the effort. However, it’s a case a what might have been. A few choice changes and we could have so easily been looking at something so much more.

Starfield honest review: 76%

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