Starfield Review: A Mix of Grand Space Adventures and… Rocks?

When Starfield was put into its early access on Steam, it reached a whopping 230,000 concurrent players, proving that the hype was real. Although there has been some negativity around Starfield in the Xbox community since the announcement of it being locked to 30FPS, fans are still appreciating the grand scope in the trademarked Bethesda style. But fans haven’t fallen deeply in love with Starfield like they did with other Bethesda masterpieces in the past. To top it all off, the leaked gameplay videos caused quite a stir.

Starfield is currently in early access so that players can have a first look, give feedback, and review everything Starfield has to offer. Starfield is Bethesda’s first big thing ever since coming under the wing of Microsoft, and so the game had no choice but to live up to the expectations. Here is our Starfield review:

Starfield Review

Starfield Review

When you first start in the Starfield campaign, things can be very underwhelming. The phrase ‘it gets better’ goes well with how the game starts. The story is quite bland at the beginning, picking up as you progress further into the game. It will take a bit of time for things to start to get interesting, but if you hold out, it’ll eventually get going well. The way that you are able to integrate yourself while choosing different backgrounds and having unique skill sets shows the work put into the story of the game.

Being a Bethesda game, there are a lot of bugs as expected of the game since it’s still in its early stages of release. But that was not unexpected, and shouldn’t cause much disappointment. What is disappointing though, is how Starfield harshly limits what a player can have access to, managing your inventory can be hectic, and the missions for these mysterious artifacts can feel repetitive because if you’ve done one, you have seen it all.

But where players can let their creativity shine is when it comes to building ships. You can create the spaceship of your dreams, and yes, you can make a Millennium Falcon. The customization isn’t limited to ships, however, as character customization is also great. You have a wide variety of options to make your character to your liking or to make it into a goofy person that everyone seems to get along with in the story. TL;DR, customizability in Starfield is top tier.

While playing Starfield, you will see a lot of references to other Sci-fi movies like Interstellar, Alien, Bladerunner, and more, adding to the immersive story. On the planets, there are only occasional bases that you can raid, aliens, some structures like caves, trees in some places, and rock. Lots of rock. The rest is pretty much barren, while there was still room for a lot more. Our expectations from a game by Bethesda was that one could simply walk from part of the planet to the other instead of having to fast travel. Couple that with the experience No Man’s Sky has delivered since its rocky release, and it shows that players’ expectations weren’t unfair.

Conclusion

All in all, as you can see from this Starfield review, it is a great game but it is not at the level of other Bethesda games. The start of the game is so slow that it makes most people just quit, exploration and planets are limited, load screens are littered all over the place, and visually, the game looks remarkably dated. All of these flaws hide a journey through space that you won’t soon forget, and might want to dive back in a few times… or more.

Our overall rating for Starfield is 8/10.

Starfield is available to play on the Xbox Series X|S, and PC. For more information about Starfield, head on over to the Starfield official website.

If Starfield didn’t float your boat and you want to check out other games that are coming out this year, here’s our list of the top 10 games still coming out in 2023.