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Starfield review: an impressive RPG that’s so big it feels smallThere’s so much space it’s hard to find a connection
There’s so much space it’s hard to find a connection
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
Space. The medium frontier. These are the voyages of me, reviewing Bethesda’s big space RPGStarfield. It’s the company’s first new IP in almost 30 years (a claim that contains in it an inherent threat forStarfield2), and though Bethesda has copied some of their own homework for some themes and factions, Starfield is indeed a spacefaring adventure of epic scale and sometimes surprising beauty. It’s this scale that makes Starfield feel unfortunately small and empty, a place that still has those fun little Bethesda side quests that escalate into something huge and absurd, but that can also swallow them whole in its cold, star-scattered grandeur.
Here we will reach for the term NASA-punk, which has been pegged as Starfield’s broad aesthetic style. It eschews the super-advanced holograms and shimmery onepiece outfits and instead sees a future where we still use big chunky spacesuits and strap into our spaceship pilot chairs with the kind of seatbelts you get on Ryanair rather than the pneumatic safety bars on Alton Towers' Nemesis. The future is modular cubes with rounded corners - even the food! I think my favourite bit of Starfield world building is that the most successful food company is called Chunks, and it provides cubes of synthetic future nutrition. Cube apples. Cube cheese steak. Cube pumpkin pie.
CHUNKS! |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
One of the first books you can pick up in the game is the Chunks founder’s autobiography, and I would have liked it if, in my cumulativedaysspent loading-screening around Starfield’s universe, I had run into one of his descendants or exploded the Chunks factory at the behest of a Chunks rival. And in fairness that might be a mission that exists. It’s not that side missions themselves are hard to find; Starfield is littered with tasks like local parks in the UK are full of half-fainting sunburned locals on the first hot day of the year. You’ll trip over them, in fact, but there’s no way to tell if one is going to be interesting until you engage with it.
The “You” there is, well, whoever you want to be. You start as a miner, and are amnesia’d intocharacter creation, “do you remember any of this?” style, where you can craft your face and approach to the game in suprising detail. My captain is a Space Scoundrel (a smooth talkin' Han Solo type who specialises in pistols), but you could go for hand-to-hand combat or an egghead that preferslockpickingand laser weapons. I picked the Kid Stuff trait, which gave me parents who used the money I sent them to go on holidays all over the place. Whatever you pick, you’re press-ganged into Constellation, a club of variously annoying explorer types who provide the plot and your stable of helpers, of which you can take one with you at a time.
Starship TroopersLook I’m not saying there areloadsof bugs, but there definitely aren’tnonebugs. The most infuriating one I encountered broke my quest tracking, randomly selecting a task literal lightyears away instead of what I actually wanted. There’s also just Bethesda NPC jank, which is your standard “this person looks and turns like a haunted shop doll” experience.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
The main story, which is basically an extended MacGuffin hunt that morphs into a sub-Duncan Jones sci-fi twistathon I’m not supposed to tell you anything substantial about (but which, at several points, did something I massively respected only to almost immediately reverse it), rattles along. I’d recommend you get through most of it as quickly as you can. All told, it’ll take you somewhere in the region of 35 hours, but the business of being lost in Starfield’s world mostly happens around it. The story’s real utility is to kite you to the cities, where you will meet the standard Bethesdafactions(Libertarian Mud Cowboys and Infrastructure Fascists, with side groups of Pirates That You Kill On Sight and Business Bastards). You can sort of join, or at least work with, any or all of them to mixed results. The cities are also where you pick up the most random tasks or mini missions via the expedient method of NPCs waiting for you to walk past to shout things at thin air, like extras on The Truman Show.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settingsWas Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question - and more - in the video above.Watch on YouTube
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Some of these tasks escalate, especially faction quests (the Freestar Rangers on Akila have a good one). You might find a note on a dead pirate that leads you to quite a big fun shootout, or intercept a distress call that ends in leading a small armada of settler ships against some marauding space-dickheads. But many of these missions are there to make the giant locations feel less empty, and as such feel quite empty themselves. On two separate planets I completed a series of tasks for wholly unrelated scientists that revolved around the placement of sensors and the collection of data, over several days.
Neon, on the left, and a random planet on the right. I’ve been to the planet on the right in different saves, and the first time it was snowy and had pines, and breathable atmosphere. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
Also absent is what I will refer to as Bethesda whimsy; there is a robot, but he is quite boring (and also one of the worse companions to take with you, because he’s very slow and will block doorways). Nobody really cracks wise, presenting an inverse of the problem to Marvel movies pausing for ten minutes so everyone gets the chance to do a one-liner. I did a fetch quest that was to collect funds for a shelter for unhoused families, and look, I get what you’re trying to do here, but since I did not get a mission to create systemic change that would render the shelter unnecessary - or even destroy the shelter because I’m a hyper-capitalist bastard! - are youactuallydoing anything?
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda Game Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda
The spaceflight though? Building your own ship? That’s pretty great. The Frontier, which is thefirst shipyou’re given, sucks, and though it’s a fiddly process that the game doesn’t do much, if anything, to help you with, building your own ship is extremely satisfying. You can gradually upgrade the different parts - the most crucial being the reactor, which governs how much energy you can divert to different weapons or shields. And I genuinely love the dogfights in space, where (if you have the right crew) someone will be reading out damage to your ship, or shout when the enemy shields are down, while you careen around a debris field trying to get a missile lock. It’s fucking great. It feels like you’re in an episode of that space nerd TV show you like - whichever, pick one. And since, like the weightless combat, there are times when you genuinely can’t avoid ship combat no matter what you try, it’s worth putting time into understanding it.
