Starfield review: a space-faring behemoth which soars past its own limitations

After zooming around the cosmos, here's our review-in-progress after over 30 hours in Bethesda's long-awaited space RPG Starfield.

Heidi Nicholas

Published 06 Sep 2023

Well, this is it — the big one, Todd Howard’s brain baby, Bethesda’s latest behemoth; and after a lengthy wait full of anticipation, I was honestly a bit nervous starting it up. When my character opened their eyes to find themselves with a stranger sitting across from them, I was half expecting them to tell me it was good that I was finally awake. But before any Skyrim nostalgia could surface, someone else had dumped a helmet on my head and it was off to the space mines with me.

Starfield doesn’t slow down from there — it really is a beast. The more you explore, the more you realize there is to explore. The more you do and the more you become acquainted with the game’s systems, the more Starfield’s potential begins to unfold, and it dawns on you that the game you’re playing 15 hours in is far different than the game you started with. That’s partly why this is a review in progress: with Starfield being so chunky, it’d be difficult to ever feel like you’d “finished” the game, especially since so much of what it has to offer exists outside of the main story campaign.

I’m over 30 hours in and so far I’ve fought alien creatures, negotiated the release of hostages from a bank robbery, delivered an espresso, been ambushed by space pirates, had a look at the game’s four other factions, and a whole lot more, and my thoughts and opinions about the game have changed quite a bit since I started. There is so much to this game, and if you're looking to grab all the Starfield achievements, it's definitely going to take you some time.

Starfield’s sheer scope and ambition is by far its greatest strength, and yet, it almost counts against it at first. There’s not much in the way of hand-holding, and that can be a great thing, since it encourages you to immerse yourself more fully into the world to figure out how anything works. On the other hand, it does seem like quite a bit of basic necessary information is hidden, leaving you to feel overwhelmed by all the information and data Starfield presents you with.

I was enjoying Starfield from the get-go, but I definitely feel that I’m enjoying it even more as I progress. As you find more interesting weapons and start to be more selective with skills, the combat becomes much more engaging. The overwhelming amount of ship-building options becomes much less frightening as you start to understand which areas you want to focus on or improve; whether you’re looking for more storage space, room for your crew, or focusing on the ship’s individual systems to power it up.

Speaking of storage, you have a ton of options. You can store things in your inventory, companion, and ship hold, along with various storage boxes at bases across the cosmos. Storage seemed frustratingly limited at first - I was constantly bouncing between storage boxes looking for the crafting materials I’d squirreled away. Mercifully, you can upgrade your carrying capacity down the line to help, but the issue never goes away entirely. It’s especially problematic if, like me, you’re a massive hoarder who picks up every random object they find in case they need it later. That’s how I ended up with a spoon, a deck of cards, and a desk ornament as my first inventory items, as well as a sweet roll — yes, I stole it.

Now for how Starfield’s massive scope works in its favor: Bethesda kept telling us the game was huge, but it’s still sort of mind-blowing to think just how much you can do. You can travel to countless planets, many of which have their own cities and settlements, which are often again made up of distinct, individual districts. You can play how you want: I tried everything I could of what the game had to offer, but after I’m done playing space ranger and gutsy explorer, I think I could spend a good few hours just visiting different planets, surveying their resources, fauna, and flora, and selling the information to fund my next adventure. The quests are already fantastic, and it’s great to see that the “side” content — such as quests for different factions, activities, character quests, and so on — is just as brilliant, if not better. The dialogue is engaging, and it’s incredible to see that this quality is kept up for all of the characters, not just the main ones. I’m always taking any excuse I can to eavesdrop on the conversations between my companions, but the idle chatter of passersby is just as interesting, and it makes getting anywhere take twice as long since I can’t resist stopping and listening to everyone.

Choices feel impactful in the game, too. I chose a Freestar Collective background as one of my traits, so I had some dialogue options with people from the same faction; some of which I could even use during persuasion. You’ve always got a range of options with how to deal with anything — I tended to lean towards persuasion, and those options always felt tense. When trying to persuade someone to do something in particular, you’re given several attempts to win them over. You have to fill the bar to successfully persuade them, with each persuasion option you’re given filling it up to a certain degree, and each mistake meaning you make no progress. It’s been a while since I was so invested in persuasion, and I reloaded that bank robbery bit several times to keep trying until I was successful, just because it felt important for my character to manage things that way. Your companions also comment on much of what you do, and you can win or lose favor with them by doing actions they agree or disagree with. Depending on who you’re with, you’ll hear interesting tidbits about the places you’re visiting or the people you’re meeting, with even more info if you’re traveling with a local. What’s more, you’ll start to hear tales of your exploits played on radio stations (especially if you start helping out a particular news group with news tips).

The main story sees you quickly joining up with Constellation, a private group of explorers working on uncovering the secrets behind a group of strange artifacts. Their quests branch off, taking you to different planets and meeting new companions. You could have a great time just following that story through. The side quests, however, are so irresistible that you’d be hard pressed to ignore them. One Constellation companion took me to their home planet to look for an artifact. I was barely there for a few minutes before being invited to apply to be a Freestar Ranger, and a new quest line opened up. In a minute, my allegiances completely changed: I had no time for Constellation, I was clearly meant to be a space ranger. Just moving from the Constellation objective to the Freestar Ranger hub brought me into contact with even more quests and intriguing characters, and that was just one part of one city on one planet. I want to be a UC Vanguard; I want to help a scientist figure out why that particular tree is liquifying; I want to help that shopkeeper recover the private data he lost about his clients; but there’s no time for any of that, because I absolutely have to head to Neon for my interview with Ryujin Industries.

Some quests are given by specific people, while overhearing conversations of random citizens can activate new activities. Starfield’s characters sometimes have that small, odd delay when you’re talking to them — you wait to see if they’re done, and they stay silent, so you move onto someone else, only for them to start speaking again, meaning you miss out on what they’re saying. There are so many people offering you so much to do that it’s sometimes hard to listen to them all; my companion was talking to me at one point when someone else muttered something that started a new activity. Before I knew it, a notification had popped up telling me to speak to the scientist under the tree. What tree? What scientist? Who knows!

The menus are, honestly, quite unwieldy. Your options are set up in a radial format about your character, and most menus have branching submenus. After a while, you figure out some shortcuts, but navigating the menus is always an activity in itself, particularly when you’re transferring items between different storage types. It’s a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, unlike the maps for planet surfaces, which are downright bad. The only icons you have are for districts as a whole within a city or landing areas on a planet’s surface; you can’t see a map of the district itself, such as where vendors are. It’s not even always clear where you need to go to get to your objective — sometimes a quest marker will tell you to land somewhere, and then as soon as you disembark, it’s telling you to get back on your ship again. Again, when the rest of the game is as good as it is, this isn’t much to set against it, but it does seem oddly undetailed for a game which is so forthcoming with the rest of its information.

Starfield is incredibly expansive. Even when you take just one base on one part of one planet, there’s so much to explore — sometimes you’ll come across a locked door or a safe that you don’t have the skill to open yet, and have to add it to the mental list of places you’ve “got to come back to… as soon as you’ve finished exploring the rest of the galaxy.” On that note: the lockpicking mini-game is great. Using digipicks, you’re shown several rings with gaps in them, and have to fill the gaps with the different keys you’re given. Some keys appear to fit the gaps for several rings, and the challenge is making sure you save the right keys for the right ring. It’s quite irresistible, and I’m sometimes guilty of leaving my companions to clear out the rest of an outpost by themselves while I crouch in the corner, muttering over lockpicks.

You often hear about games which promise to let you play how you like, so it’s genuinely satisfying to see this come true in Starfield. There are so many ways to play. If you’re looking to make money, you can pick up bounties, steal and sell ships, raid and loot outposts, join up with a faction and pick up paying missions, and a whole lot more. You might not always be able to avoid combat (although you often can with the right dialogue choices) but if you’re looking for a more peaceful playthrough, you could just float through the galaxy, cataloging unknown planets and selling the data. With your scanner, you scan the creatures, plants, resources, and traits of the planets you land on until you’ve 100% completed your survey. Sure, some creatures object to being scanned (or approached, or looked at) but for the most part it can be a peaceful experience. Starfield’s systems hold up so well that you could lose hours just to mining. Upgrades and research paths cost different resources and items, and when you’re starting out it’s a whole mission in itself to locate which planets have particular minerals. And that’s even if you manage to stay focused: you might be bouncing along the surface of a planet looking for nickel, before you spot a strange structure in the distance, and head over to scan it for your planet survey. On the way, you might bump into a group of spacers, or run across some alien monster, or even spot a landed and apparently empty ship and decide to borrow it for a while. Before you know it, you’re halfway across the system, you’ve got no aluminum, and you’ve turned to a life of crime.

Outpost building is also incredibly extensive and can hoover up hours of your time. If you’ve got the right resources, you can build anything from a simple outpost tower and mining machines, to a full on base with all the crafting stations you need — plus the option to decorate it and make it your own. And speaking of decorations: another note I’d like to make before we finish up is about succulents. You don’t need to play much of Starfield before you realize that the people of the future are, apparently, obsessed with them. There are succulents everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you work in a fancy office on a luxurious planet or on a rickety farm in the middle of nowhere; there are succulents everywhere. I saw space pirates living on the edge of the law and barely surviving on scraps; they were low on resources and desperate, yet had still apparently made time to care for a variety of lovingly-tended succulents. Succulents litter offices, abandoned outposts, homes, shops, and ships. If there’s one more point that Starfield makes clear: space is not the future. The future, clearly, is succulents.

Bethesda games are famed for their bugs, and I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s been a remarkably smooth playthrough so far, with just the occasional minor glitch. I haven’t had any crashes or lost any progress. The customisation options at the beginning are extensive and while I lost my mind trying to see the difference between the various neck and jaw choices, I was happy with the end result. Despite the infinite possibilities of space, some depictions of space settings in games or on TV can seem pretty generic, but Starfield’s various settings become more detailed as you examine them. Offices, shops, or homes seems thoughtfully planned out (and littered with succulents) and Constellation’s Lodge in particular looks great. The drawbacks like the maps and storage systems don’t drag down a beast of a good game like Starfield, so one of the only things I’d like to see improved is better communication about its basic systems, so that you can enjoy it as much as possible without frustrations right from the start.

Summary

If you're looking to see everything that Starfield has to offer, it's clearly going to take some time, and that can only be a good thing considering that Starfield seems to have delivered what it promised: an almost endless adventure we’ll still be discovering new details about years down the line.

Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to dive back into Starfield and see what else we can discover.

* Heidi spent over 30 hours traveling the Starfield, earning eight achievements as she went. We preordered a copy of Starfield to unlock early access for this review, and played on an Xbox Series X.

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Written by Heidi Nicholas

Heidi tends to lean towards indie games, RPGs, and open-world games on Xbox, and when not playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, happily installs every new wholesome game that appears on Xbox Game Pass, before diving back into favorites like The Witcher 3. She's looking forward to Age of Mythology Retold, Everwild, Fable, and Avowed on the Xbox horizon. Heidi graduated with an MA in English Literature before joining the TrueAchievements team.