Starfield

Steam Reviews

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• Not recommended Posted October 3, 2025 on Steam The big feature with this game is the Creations store. You spend real money, to get "credits" that are used to buy paid mods in the store. Of course, the amounts you can buy credits in, are not multiples of what the paid mods cost. So you have to always buy more credits than needed. Some of the paid mods are good. Some are complete garbage. But the fact is you always have to buy more credits than you need. So you can end up with quite a lot of credits. I had a lot of credits, while waiting for something worthwhile to spend them on. In a fantastic example of anti-consumer behaviour, these "credits" have an expiry date. A date that you can not see anywhere in game. Imagine the happiness and satisfaction I felt to log in and discover all my credits have expired. A shame because I found something I had wanted in the Creations store. Obviously, that's not going to be purchased now that Bethesda has stolen the credits. Clearly they must be so hard up for money, that they have resorted to stealing from customers. That should give you an idea as to the actual state of this game. If it was actually good, they wouldn't need to steal from their customers. Considering how many bugs and problems I have encountered in Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield, I was genuinely surprised to see that this expiry system appears to be completely bug free. It clearly shows where the bulk of development went in this game. I have to applaud the development team for proving that if Bethesda wanted to, they could create bug free code. They just won't do it for anything they actually want you to buy from them - like for example this game. I will be voting with my wallet in future. This is the last Bethesda game I will purchase.
• Not recommended Posted June 17, 2025 on Steam I've had some time to digest this one. I did everything, put it down for a while, then came back to it for second taste. The short answer is, it's just okay. At some points it even qualifies as good. But It's rarely great, and too frequently bad. The amount of missed potential here is staggering. We'll start with what I liked: It's a new adventure, and in the opening chapter it does a great job at building a sense that you have an enormous galaxy to explore before you and this is a universe that is both highly technologically advanced and still a rugged frontier. Your first quest shows you the scale and grandeur the game engine is capable of. The bespoke, non-procedural generated story locations are unique and life-like. There's even a glimmer of something mysterious and special when you get some cool new space magic Then the bad: Everything else. At the risk of sounding cliche, the universe here is as vast as the ocean, and as deep as a puddle. The "1000 planets" touted so highly might as well be 4; the flat barren one, the jungle one, the snow one, and Australia. The variations are so trivial that each could barely hold my attention long enough to complete whatever fetch quest I came for. A meager handful of flora and fauna to scan and "catalog" that bare an incredible similarity to the last planet, and the one before that, etc. And the same could be said of the points of interest. About the third time I wandered through the same cryo-facility with the same corpses, same loot, same enemies, and same notes with the same names, just on a different planet, I realized that I hit the limit on the exploration aspect of the game. And then I was robbed of the sense of adventure the opening chapter promised. Everywhere I went, somebody had been there. The surface of every planet is littered with abandoned structures and homesteads, or the remains of corporate industrialism. From a narrative perspective it drives me right out of the immersion. The presence of mysterious alien ruins unknown to mankind a short walk from the local space-Waffle House while random ships fly overhead of what should be an uncharted, virgin world destroys any of the mystery of discovering them in the first place. And a sense of mystery is only satisfying if there are breadcrumbs along the way to hint at a purpose to it. They just dump all this mysterious alien-looking nonsense everywhere and then never explain any of it. Then I see why all those buildings everywhere are abandoned: they got bored and left. Then there's the combat. The game goes into great detail to build a world where a great war has recently concluded, and all the cool death rays, robo-mechs, bio-weapons, and other portable war-crimes that definitely exist in this universe have been conveniently outlawed and locked away by space-NATO. And what do they do with this sprawling arsenal of Chekhov's guns? They only fire the lamest one of them. No boss fights against towering mechs, no illegal weapons to smuggle past authorities on or off worlds to give you an ethically questionable leg-up on the scum of the galaxy. Just goofy looking guns, knives, and some mediocre gunplay with uninspired workbench mods. Only this game can make lasers boring. Blasting an enemy ship to pieces with laser cannons and missiles should be fun. Instead, it's a contest to see who has the more shield points while you spam all your weapons into one of the, at most, 3 enemies in front of you. Even the space magic is boring. They were literally given license to throw the laws of physics out the window and come up with something exciting, and the best they could do was "Fus Ro Da, but in space". And the same fly-through-the-rings puzzle every single time. TOTK had 104 unique shrine puzzles, and this game only has one. This review is already long enough, but we have to address the worst thing of all, the companions. Your companions are perhaps the biggest missed opportunity of them all. They all have the same likes and dislikes, a choice to please one is likely a choice to please them all. To their credit, none of them are psychopaths. They won't gleefully join you in committing acts of terror, and rightfully so. It wouldn't make any sense to play this game as if it were a live GTA server. But there is no nuance. Every one of them is an upstanding member of society with no desire to disrupt anything around them. Even the one that used to be a criminal will bug out on you if you do some actual crime. If they were different flavors of ice cream, they would all be vanilla. I didn't find myself attached to any of them, and their various involvements in any events of the game didn't elicit much of an emotional response from me. [Sarah Morgan disliked that] The game is mechanically sound and well polished from technical standpoint. But I could go on and on about specific plot points, character interactions (or lack thereof), and world building ideas that just missed the mark and could have been so, so much more. This game is worth about $25, tops. I advise you only buy it if it ever goes on sale, and for no more than that.
• Not recommended Posted December 25, 2025 on Steam Well, today I remembered Starfield exists in my library and it pissed me of to such an extend, that I had to write a review. Note, that I am not the review writing type. If a game disapoints me it just gets ignored forever if I can't return it anymore. So it says a lot, if I make my distaste known on a public forum. While others have torn into the bugs, the uninspired story, the myriad of loading screens or the fact that youre just Dragonborn in space I will concentrate on the fact that annoyed me the most: Communication in Questing. You see, all quests are written like Skyrim or Fallout. You go to a person, speak to them, get to say "Yes, I'll do it." or "No, but I'll do it later." and in the case of a "Yes" you go onto your merry way, visit a location, slaughter a bunch of enemies, find some macguffin and find your way back to your questgiver to end the quest in person. This is perfectly fine for a medieval fantasy or postapokalyptik sixties setting. You see, you can't expext the Dragon born or the Courier to just take out a mobile phone and call their questgiver to inform them for a job well done. You are kind of expected to travel back to inform them in person for a lack of alternative. In Starfield you are expected to walk back to your questgiver because the writers wrote like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ morons. You are piloting a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spaceship, but are expected to walk to every single person you want to talk to in ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ person. Through all the loading screens Starfield throws at you. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. The writers just don't understand that in a sufficiently technological advanced societey communication is important and technological solutions to copmmunication are widespread. Wanna know what counts for a sufficiently advanced societe? WE DO! Us, in this very moment! This very review can be read all over the globe if someone is inclined to dig for it through thousands of other negative reviews. Appearently cell phones where declared heresy and every single phone in existance and their plans where destroyed to such an extend that not even pirates use them anymore. Also yes, I know that communicating over galaxy spanning distances is hard, but it's never mentioned in the game. At all. No quantum entanglement node or whatever else sci-fi ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to communicate long distances. The writers just forgot, that they should have come up with something. Which means you have to suffer through loading screen hell to start and end any quest in Starfield. You wanna know a game that did it right? Cyberpunk 2077. The writers, not being total hacks crippled by a lack of cohesive vision, understood how technology would influence their story. They took modern day technology and expanded on it, going from physical phones to implants that are used for communication. While the base game fixer jobs wheren't perfect, they where at least quick and uncomplicted. You showed up to a place, got a call, did your quest and then phoned in to repeort your success. No travel needed. The writers of Cyberpunk even came up with a solution for phyical quest items. Drop off points. A map littered with drop off points doubling as trash vendors, so you just have to travel to the next point instead of your questgiver. In comparison Starfield just keeps wasting your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time. You meet questgiver (which is generous to Starfield because im ommiting the loading screens it took to get to him) and accept a quest. You leave the building. Loading Screen. You walk up to your ship and enter it. Loading Screen. You sit in your pilot seat. Loading Screen. You fly into space. Loading Screen. You the questlocation up in your starmap and oops, it's out of jump range, that means yu have to do an extra jump. Loading Screen. Loading Screen. You on the planet. Loading Screen. You exit your chair. Loading Screen. You leave the ship. Loading Screen. You march to tzhe lokation 2km away and enter. Loading Screen. You do the quest and no have to do the whole thing in reverese to meet the questgiver. Just buy Cyberpunk.
• Not recommended Posted August 28, 2025 on Steam The updated Terms lock you out of the game unless you agree that you don't own the game and you don't have any monetary interest in the game. I paid $100 Canadian Dollars for this product and now I can't use it unless I surrender any and all rights of personal ownership of the copy of the game. This updated ULA is not what I was led to believe I'd have to accept in order to enjoy a product I paid money for. I enjoyed this game for the most part. There's a lot I didn't like about it either but the things I liked outweighed the dislikes to me. But now I just can't enjoy the game unless I agree to their new Terms. I hope stop killing games ends this predatory practice worldwide somehow and I'll be demanding a refund in spite of my hours and time playing and owning this game. People deserve better than this.
• Not recommended Posted April 9, 2026 on Steam In a game that kicks each of its NG+ runs with the question, "What choices will you make this time?" its unbearable that there are no choices to make. The only thing you really decide as the player, from run to run, is how much of the content you will do before you hit NG+ because, spoilers: getting to NG+ is the point of the game narratively. Once you know how to do it, you can skip most of the game to get to it, and there's no reason to not just blitz for the NG+ each run because the rest of the game is inconsequential- other Starborn in the story literally point this out to you in conversation asking why you bother. For example: In one quest you find an ancient Generational ship in orbit around a paradise vacation world. The Generational ship was launched hundreds of years before from Earth and its crew have no idea humanity had FTL breakthroughs while they were slowly travelling to their destination; By the time they arrive, its already been colonized and turned into a planet-wide spa. During this quest, you go back and forth between the CEO at the resort, and the desperate descendant-survivors of the generational ship. The CEO, at various points, asks if you'd do awful things like kill all of the survivors to make the problem go away, sell the survivors into indentured servitude as staff for the resort by presenting them with bad contracts, or if you happen to have a huge amount of money on you, fix up the Generational ship with a new FTL engine on your own dime because the resort's board won't greenlight the funds to do it themselves. And instead of fighting these powerful people asking you to commit mass murder, you go back to the ship and offer them the stupid evil responses, and of course you spend the 40,000 credits and do the memory game to fix the ship because its the only option that isn't cartoonishly evil. There was never any choice, just a binary switch for the good/evil playthrough. All its really asking is, "Do you have the money to be the good guy?" and if you don't, you can just leave the planet and come back when you do. At no point can you kill the CEO or fight the company instead, despite them asking you to do the same to the survivors. At no point can you threaten the CEO into compliance despite you being able to do the same to the Captain. The game really, really wants you to play this quest out its way. You can ATTACK the CEO and his people, but they just all take a knee and stand back up, and then talk to you like that never happened. If you just leave and choose not to participate, nothing happens they just sit there and wait for you to get back. How is that any better than just letting us kill the NPC and risk breaking a quest? Its quest writing from the mid 2000's, Fable had more depth than this. This is a singular example, but all of the quests in the game are like this. Interesting premise with absolutely no follow through and the barest minimum of player input. The Player Character is not a silent protagonist, but they might as well have been. Even as the untouchable time-god that all Player Characters eventually become you remain the most powerless one in the story. The whole thesis of the game is "What choices will you make this time?" but there are never any choices to make.
• Not recommended Posted August 23, 2025 on Steam I know. I know. 479 hours played and a "thumbs down." I get the contradiction. Here's the thing: there are parts of this game that I love. Building spaceships and bases is my crack. Disabling and boarding an enemy ship, wiping out the crew, and adding it to your own fleet = *chef's kiss* The problem is that most of the rest of the game feels like it was designed by my 14-year old self. "What if we made a game that was Wing Commander + Doom?!" The RPG elements feel largely superficial and the story is--with the exception of a few specific missions/quests--not worth your time. Not once did the characters or plot elicit an emotional reaction from me. If you want to play Spacecraft Engineer or SimBase, you'll find something to enjoy here. If you want a deep, involving first-person RPG with robust mechanics, interesting characters, buildcrafting, and a memorable story, you should go play Cyberpunk.