Starfield – PS5 Review

Starfield from Bethesda Game Studios by way of Bethesda Softworks, is the first new setting from the studio in more than two decades, being set in 2330. You play as an unnamed miner who for reasons that remain unclear finds themselves thrust into a grand space opera.

Said space opera has shades of Bioware’s Mass Effect series, only less far flung into the future, but there’s still mysterious alien artifacts in the equation. We were also reminded of Babylon 5 a little, but we’ll remain tight lipped on why lest we spoil the plot for you.

You start as a miner on a remote planetoid working for Argos Extractors. No catalogues there though, just lots of corridors with fellow miners extracting resources as they go. You’re encouraged to give it a go, and for a little while it seems like you’re destined to spend a great deal of time doing so too. We were so keen to collect every object that wasn’t nailed down, we soon encountered the true hallmark of a Bethesda RPG.

Yes, becoming over-encumbered is all present and correct. The main problem it presents here is that it curtails your ability to fast travel back to your ship, which is a pain, admittedly. But on planets where you are reliant on your oxygen supply, if you move any quicker than a walk, it’s a problem as you’ll be subject to hypoxia before you know it.

This is mitigated somewhat when you acquire the buggy, which as well as being fast enough to run away from hostile fauna on planets, is also equipped with a far more capable scanner than the handheld device you’re kitted out with. You see, scanning items is a handy way to get experience points and assign upgrades to the skills you’ll need to progress.

Exploring itself is a bit like that in No Man’s Sky but not quite so populated by freakish randomly generated flora and fauna, if you’ve ever played that you’ll know what to expect. You’ll be able to find resources on the various planets, but with your default collection method, you won’t be able to gather them unless you build outposts. These also allow you to have a shared linked inventory, which while improbable in reality, is a handy gameplay conceit.

A bit like the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. mechanic in the Fallout games, you can assign certain attributes to your player character at the character creation stage. We felt compelled to create a character that looked a bit like ourselves, but lost patience and ended up with a rough approximation of the fat bloke that lurks inside this reviewer, bald spot into the bargain. It’s why we’ve developed a fondness for baseball caps, put it that way. Though it came out looking more like Clint Howard. A departure from our Rainbow Six Vegas 2 character which we used the Xbox Live Vision camera to capture our real life likeness, yet came away looking like Arnold Vosloo’s skinnier younger brother.

These skills aren’t that important at the outset, but as you progress through the skill tree and explore crafting and research, some traits are more useful than others. Affiliations with certain factions unlock unique dialogue options too. You can also choose to flirt with your party members, though those that I’ve tried it with politely rebuffed our advances, although we’re not sure if embarking in romantic entanglements is possible due to our having been given the brush-off just like we used to in our twenties.

Your first ship is initially supposed be on a loan basis, but since the guy who lends it to you goes AWOL, you somehow end up as the captain. You can acquire ships, though generally at a price from a spaceport. We did end up with a space pirate clunker too, but other than the fact that we had to register it as our own, we found it generally useless as it was underpowered compared to the ship we already had. Plus the cargo hold was instantly full up due to our space hoarding already being out of control, even by that early stage. You need deep pockets before you can even consider getting a bigger ship, or in our case finding a ship on a planet but not having the right skill unlocked to pilot a bigger ship.

Skills are unlocked by skill points but also by way of fulfilling tasks, for example you can’t instantly go to high level lockpicking without having actually picked some novice level locks to begin with. Lockpicking is a fair bit easier than that in Fallout or Skyrim, with the ability to backtrack with your space lockpick being an option. It’s straightforward and as yet, we’ve yet to run out of lockpicks.

You’re introduced to multiple factions pretty much from the off, with the initial antagonist being a loose collective of space pirates known as the Crimson Permanent Assurance Fleet. In addition, there’s bonkers religious zealots, corporate behemoths, space sheriffs and a couple of planetary alliances that keep the peace in the core systems. Earth no longer being a factor. We’ll leave it to you to discover its fate, but practically humanity has decamped to Alpha Centauri as we’ve pure fucked the planet.

Some factions are hostile on sight, but others can be allied with for a beneficial arrangement. We’ve not quite worked out whether we can have our cake and eat it and join literally every faction going, but we suspect by joining one it precludes going with another, much like the Legion in Fallout New Vegas.

What became quickly obvious to us on simply wandering through Jemison, the chief settlement on Alpha Centauri, was how quick our quest log became full with all manner of side quests.  Walk past an NPC having a conversation, new quest. Hear a tannoy announcement, new quest. Etcetera, etcetera, Peter Cetera. It’s the quest equivalent of running around in a Ubisoft game and just climbing towers to see all the objectives without actually playing the game itself.

So as a result, quest overload is very much a factor here, as is getting sidetracked. Rather than focusing on the main storyline, we found ourselves going to a distant star system doing a sidequest that we ultimately had to park until we were higher levelled. The fun was in the journey to some extent.

Thinking we’d have to return to the core systems via the same circuitous route we’d taken on the way out, we were able to get back in just one simple jump. It brings to light the disconnect between the apparent ability to fly inside star systems, but practically you won’t want to, instead choosing to engage your hyperdrive via the ingame map.

That said, we did fly from Mars via Earth to Mercury using the impulse style propulsion of our starship and it was quite fun. Though weirdly upon having to keep a low profile to not draw attention to ourselves with enemy ships in the vicinity, they didn’t spot us nearby, even with jumping to hyperspace.

We’ve heard it said that Starfield does its spaceflight by menus, but that’s a little disingenuous. You can speed matters along via the menus if you wish, but flying your ship is just as valid an option.

Space combat isn’t quite as involved as say, Starlancer, but neither is it completely soulless. Switch on the inverted controls for your ship and matters improve anyway. Repairs can be carried out mid-flight if you’re in a particularly intense battle, but we limped around after one having exhausted our repair kits with barely any health remaining.

Combat otherwise takes place in real-time, with no VATS style queuing, but it would come in very handy if we’re honest, especially when you end up facing what would otherwise be easy enemies to dispatch. For example, one pirate freebooter we faced proved too much due to their absurd non-epic incendiary weapon. We died so many times that we were glad of a fortuitous autosave having taken place when we assigned a skill point not long before. Then once we’d taken them out, their weapon became our main.

This thing is ridiculous. Once we’ve put enough skill points into the respective talent to modify weapons, we’re all in on modding it too. It’s almost like the stupidly overpowered weapon we found in a random encounter during our Biomutant playthrough, except this isn’t quite so gamebreaking.

Day one DLC available on release is rarely as expansive as that on offer here, but we suspect that while you can jump right in as soon as you overhear the tannoy broadcast and the missions show up your quest log, the experience is best left until you’re fairly levelled up. One is penned Terran Armada, the recommended level is 50+, which is a good few hours into the game. Days even. You also have the Free Lanes update that’s available at no extra cost at launch, so plenty to do even if you don’t have the premium edition.

Bethesda kindly furnished us with the full bells and whistles version of Starfield and for that we’re thankful. We did have a few issues though, the odd bug that was highlighted with some minor quest pathfinding when the game originally released in 2023 was still evident. Also we had a few hard lockups, usually while driving the buggy on planets, though we also had a few lockups on Jemison, once while just walking around and the other while trying to access the mass transit system. All a bit odd and in the absence of an actual debug log we’re unable to work out what actually happened. Another oddity we noticed, is that you can be having a conversation with an NPC but they won’t turn towards you. Not to mention the fact that the characters don’t quite manage to nail looking realistic, though this is worse with the male characters. One weird guy was channeling Herr Lipp from The League of Gentlemen, though we didn’t find out whether everything was alles klar, ja?

In conclusion, Starfield is vast and even if you focus wholly on the story before picking up the sidequests, you’ll be busy for days. Yes, sidequest sprawl is a little overwhelming and it’s far too easy to get distracted. Spaceflight is generally alright and it’s what you make of it. The fact that the universe is based on our own Milky Way is also a plus, so for anyone who was obsessed with the cosmos as this writer was in their youth, it’s nice to have that real world grounding. Yes, the overencumbering mechanic was old when we first encountered it in Oblivion in 2006, but you find ways to work around it. Starfield is still decent though. Get to it.