Bethesda’s space monster Starfield landed on Xbox consoles and PCs worldwide on its September 6 release date, officially ending the Fallout developer’s 25-year-long dry spell for new IP. These conditions—the decades of ideating, a novel franchise opportunity, Starfield’s intimidating hugeness—naturally inflated fans’ anticipations to hot air balloon levels, which critics thought was justified, more or less. The game’s Steam reviewers mostly agree that Starfield is a solid game, though they aren’t sure that it being “Skyrim in space,” as director Todd Howard himself said, is an inherently good thing.
Like other Bethesda games, action role-playing game Starfield can be stoic and noble, depending on where you take your highly customizable experience. Some things are cement, however, like the fact that you begin the game as a miner who’s accidentally discovered a weird artifact, and get yourself snagged in a multidimensional quest across factions and spaceships.
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Yes, “while Starfield is filled with aliens and spaceships,” Kotaku staffer Zack Zwiezen writes, “it’s still a Bethesda RPG. You can almost feel the ancient bones of Morrowind and Fallout 3 poking through bits of the scenery and menus as you play.”
Steam reviewers can tell. “[I]t’s a Bethesda game through and through,” says one popular positive review. “Beautiful environments, fantastic immersion and storytelling. Fulfilling the fantasy of living in another universe, especially in space.” For others, the Bethesda formula doesn’t seem perfected by decades of practice, it seems outdated, especially while accompanied by excessive loading screens and a couple persistent bugs.
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“The game is basically a mix of Skyrim and Fallout in space but worse,” a highly rated negative review says. “Game is a glorified loading screen,” says another. “You can’t fly to locations in space. This is on top of the combat still being the same left click spam for melee, and the exact same shooting as Fallout 4, [...] etc.”
See what else Steam has to say:
