izigame.me

Sum-Up

In-depth analysis further down.
If you’re looking for some screenshots click here to view all the ones I took for this game.


🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons



• Good amount of diverse activities you can engage into.
• Solid visuals, with particular attention to environmental and open-world details. On max settings, it looks spectacular.
• Progression feels somewhat satisfying for the first 20-30 hours.
• For a Bethesda game, the amount of severe bugs and technical issues is much lower than expected.


• Unengaging main story, encompassed by one-sided, forgettable characters you likely won’t relate to, or get a feeling for, at any point.
• Enormous amount of recycled / copy-pasted content, including 1:1 copies of locations that, on paper, should be unique.
• Long-term progression lacks incentive; it’s, essentially, a constantly-diminishing return in all aspects, that becomes a tedious slog without a satisfying goal.
• Space combat lacks depth, feels shallow, and boils down to a flat ‘DPS-check’ trade of blows between ships most of the time.
• Getting most things done is a cumbersome affair due to the high amount of loading screens, unskippable transition animations and clunky, formulaic UI layouts.
• Power creep issues in later-game: even on Very Hard, you’ll be able to steamroll enemies 30 levels above you without much issue, with any half-decent build.





🟨 Bugs & Issues
🔧 Specs



• Exclusive Fullscreen is unavailable; only Borderless or Windowed. Unacceptable in a 2024 release.
• Hit markers and other annoying UI elements can’t be disabled in any way.
• Alt-tabbing the game will pause it in all screen modes, making wait times a chore.
• Companions break stealth by getting spotted in dumb ways; play solo if you go for a stealth build.


• i9 13980HX
• 64GB RAM DDR5
• RTX 4090
• NvME SSD
• 3840x2160





Content & Replay Value:
Greatly depends on your approach. Main quest only will take you about 30-40 hours, while doing 100% will likely take hundreds. I played for 67 hours before giving up due to tremendous boredom and lack of incentive to progress further. NG+ mode available.


Is it worth buying?
No. The price of 70€ may be worth it on paper as far as raw content goes, but its quality is lackluster and it degrades the more you go on, as far as -meaningful- content offered is concerned.


Verdict: Mediocre
Rating Chart Here
Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. It’s a trite saying, but none is more apt in this case. Starts well, but becomes worse the more you play it, when it should be the opposite.



In-Depth

Writing & Worldbuilding
Starting as a miner nobody on a remote planet, your run-of-the-mill ‘deus-ex-machina’ starts when you happen to stumble on a mysterious alien artifact that, coincidentally enough, seems to attune to your person with yet-unknown consequences. MAGIC! It’s the same trope of Skyrim’s Dragonborn, only much less cooler because this time you have a rusted piece of alien metal instead of dragon souls sniffing. And you’re dubbed ‘Starborn’ not long afterwards, because Bethesda writers have a LOT of imagination. From there your journey through the stars starts yadda-yadda-ya - use the Force, Luke, and so on. Boring.
Everything from locations to quests, characters, companions and villains feel terribly generic, underwhelming and soulless. Not once in my nearly 70 hours have I said, in my head, ‘now THIS is interesting’ - or cool, or deep, or mysterious enough to interest me. That’s not going to happen, because trying to please everyone with cookie cutter narratives and character designs ends up pleasing NO ONE.
The world looks cool, and is visually fantastic in its details, especially out in the wild. Interiors, ships and general indoors locations, save for a few, feel generic and same-y, and don’t have the same level of interactivity seen in previous Bethesda games. They even removed the gore system everyone loved. The attempt at a ‘late-hard-sci-fi’ universe fails miserably, because it’s not nearly gritty enough, and doesn’t take itself seriously enough, to be fitting for a true ‘hard sci fi’.
Exploration & Secrets
You’ll explore the galaxy using your ship, jumping from system to system, able to land on pretty much any planet that has solid ground. Once disembarked, you’ll proceed on foot and, if you have the right perk, move faster with the aid of a jump pack for additional jump reach and better mobility. Reaching most locations is a tiresome affair, since your running speed will be very slow compared to the distance you’ll have to cross - with very little of interest between you and the next map marker.
Forget all the interesting random encounters of Fallout or Elder Scrolls, those won’t happen on these barren planets. Points of interest range from small outposts to multi-layered facilities, often filled with enemies, containers, loot, locked doors, terminals with lore - the usual. They’re interesting to explore the first time around, however the massive amount of copy-pasting will make them tiresome soon, since very few truly unique ones exist outside of questlines.
Exploration is compounded with a surveying system allowing you to painstakingly scan all resources, animals, elements and flora of each planet and then sell the data for a pittance - that’s not worth doing and takes ages. There are some secrets in the form of hidden locations discoverable only by reading specific documents, or hidden containers inside POIs, but they’re usually underwhelming - exceptions apply.
Combat System & Bosses
You’ll be able to use a variety of weapons that either deal physical, energy or EM (stun) damage, and also modify them via workbenches - same goes for armor parts. There are rarity tiers that add passive properties, although most of them are gimmicks not worth grinding Legendary Enemies for. The problem with weapons in Starfield is that they feel too similar to one another, and even ‘unique’ named ones are just normal guns with pre-set modifications and affixes, none of them is TRULY something one of a kind you can’t find anywhere else, powerful and sublime to look for.
Combat gunplay is fine, somewhat on the same level of Fallout 4, but less dynamic, with worse AI, and less gore / impact feel from shots. All enemies you’ll face feel the same, behave the same and LOOK the same because 90% of the time everyone wears spacesuits, even while inside. Except in cities. Companions are brainless meat-shields only useful to carry additional cargo, and the enemy AI is so dumb you’ll have a cake walk if you use a stealth build or just use basic cover. You’ll eventually acquire special powers due to your “chosen” status, which are memes I never really found useful. I’ve fought a total ONE unique boss in 70 hours in a specific quest, the rest were just oversized / renamed / reskinned generic enemies over and over again. FillerField.
Companions & Quests
Companions are one sided-flat and cringe in most cases. They don’t really seem to react to your personal dispositions in meaningful ways, or to your actions, and when they actually do, you can always persuade them to stick with you for the sake of the plot - God forbid actual freedom of choice. Remember how in say, New Vegas, companions ditched you if you behaved against their values or beliefs, or allied with a faction they hated? That’s not going to happen here, and there isn’t even a Faction reputation system to begin with.