If man's reach doesn't exceed his grasp, then what is heaven for, some might say? Starfield, Bethesda Softworks all new IP, tries to put this dictum into practice. Pathetically, it crashes and burns, barely reaching a fraction of its intended potential, instead resembling a failed chimera of concepts from better games as interpreted by incompetents.

Starfield, like all Bethesda games before it, is an action RPG set in an open world, though instead of a high fantasy world like Elder Scrolls or the post-apocalyptic United States like the Fallout series, Starfield is set in the Milky Way galaxy in the future. Unlike their prior games, which were set in hand-placed locations on one planet, this game includes space exploration and procedurally generated worlds atop the existing story locations to provide more for players to explore.

Starfield is set in a future several hundred years after the contemporary day where Earth has been rendered uninhabitable, forcing humanity to find other homes in the Milky Way. Taking cues from their prior Fallout games, there are many savage places and alien flora and fauna. Taking notes from their Elder Scrolls series, the player can acquire mysterious supernatural abilities in their quest that come off as magical in origin.

The story is that your character, working in a mine on the moon with a mining crew, finds a mysterious artifact of alien origin. You catch the interest of a group of exoanthropologists and explorers trying to uncover the mystery of these artifacts and are thrust into an adventure of discovering the mystery in a universe where they are not the only ones willing to go to any lengths to do the same.

The core gameplay, though, is going to be quite familiar to veterans of prior Bethesda games. You must explore dungeons, find and make equipment, fight enemies, and progress through various storylines and factions, all in an action RPG context. There are new mechanics like surveying planets and flying and building spaceships and settlements, as well as survival elements like needing to watch out for gravitational pull (or lack thereof), needing spacesuits for certain low-air areas, and other potential pitfalls of exploration.

Unfortunately, for a game that has been in development for a decade, Starfield does none of these concepts well and tries to do them on an aging engine that is clearly breaking down at the seams trying to do things other games have done much better. The game engine is the Creation Engine 2, a successor to the same game engine Bethesda has worked with dating back to Morrowind in 2002, and given its high requirements and poor performance in many areas regardless, it is not a good fit for this game and its concepts.

For example, the spaceship mechanics are a rather blatant ripoff of the same mechanics from No Man's Sky. However, where No Man's Sky featured seamless flight out of and into planetary atmospheres and no loading times save at the very start of the game, Starfield's spaceship mechanics have a clunky interface, some complicated mechanics for redirecting power toward certain ship functions that are a hassle to have to adjust in combat, and flight, unlike No Man's Sky, feels more like an arcade game with a fake feeling of movement than feeling like the natural flight of a spacecraft. The planetary survey mechanics are also rather blatantly ripped off from No Man's Sky but are poorly explained and implemented in such a way they can make combat a bit confusing due to some overlap in control. Even the survival gameplay aspects are a bad ripoff of No Man's Sky's version of the same. In No Man's Sky, how to avoid running out of life support and avoiding damage from hazards is patiently explained and never becomes annoying. Starfield becomes a chore to play with their version of this mechanic simply because even in habitable areas fit for regular human life, these features can easily leave you weakened and damaged. You can turn off a lot of these mechanics or water them down in the game settings, but this penalizes the player from gaining skills and levels as easily without modding.

Graphically speaking, this game barely looks better than Fallout 4, Bethesda's prior title (if you don't include the MMO Fallout 76 on the same engine), and in many ways actually looks worse. The overall graphical tone has this washed-out look with a ton of light and shading filters that are distracting (mods removing these drastically improve visual quality). Clever touches like clothes getting wet in the rain are absent. Faces and bodies of people have taken a nosedive in quality, going from humanoid if a bit scuffed in places to looking ugly for everyone, with potato faces for men and women and body and clothes textures appear as dull and washed out as the world does, even in the nicer areas of the game (mods can alleviate this issue to a degree). Despite this being a futuristic setting with advanced medical technology, it's clear some people have skin tone issues like vitiligo and generally look older than they sound when you don't get weirdness like black men with Russian names and accents. Oblivion from 2006 was another Bethesda game with hideous faces, but those were interesting and amusing in how off they looked, the Starfield faces just look bland.

The music is pretty ho-hum, mostly a lot of ambient tracks with a generic sci-fi feel, none of it really stood out. The sound effects are rather underwhelming, with gunfire sounding pathetic and tinny. The voice acting ranges from tolerable at best to it being so bad you can tell the actors were just phoning it in for a paycheck and didn't care how atonal and listless they sounded. There is a confusing dissonance of accents (like the aforementioned Black Russians) for many characters, many of which poorly fit their apparent speaker.

This game can be controlled with the keyboard and mouse or with any Steam-supported controller. Either way, while the controls are responsive in most situations, they are married to a very clunky user interface with hard-to-read prompts and a heads-up display that can be cluttered-looking. There are mods to improve this, but the stock look is borderline unusable. While the tutorials are good for the basics, some parts are not made very clear. The map interface is almost useless for determining location and direction in most areas, which really does not help player orientation. Traversal in general feels tedious with your player running in what feels like slow motion and space travel as mentioned is nowhere near as responsive as No Man's Sky.

Stability-wise, it does run with few or no outright crashes, but frame rate drops even on high-end computers are common. After looking at the game data structure, this appears to be due to very poor optimization of textures; mods to optimize these will smooth loading times considerably. It runs natively on Windows and will run with some tweaks on Linux, though it is currently unsupported on the Steam Deck. Modding as mentioned has ironed out a lot of problems with the stock game, and was virtually required to water down some of the flaws to the point playing the game was a tolerable experience, but there is a caveat. While the main game recommends only 16GB of memory, the mod tools can require a whopping 64GB of memory in some situations, so bear this in mind if you wish to mod and play Starfield.

Morally, there are a considerable amount of issues.

Violence is curiously subdued for a Bethesda game. While there are melee and projectile weapons, violence is limited to mild displays of blood (which can be disabled), bodies do not disappear yet corpses cannot be rendered naked by taking their clothing. There is also no gore or dismemberment like prior Bethesda titles. There are some set pieces depicting blood stains, but I had to use a mod to remove the mass amount of filtering to make sure they were not giant rust or dirt stains first. You can choose to fight only in lawful self-defense or commit murder, though given the number of NPCs deemed essential, this may be difficult in some areas.

Language can be earthy, albeit such language tends to be rare. The worst of it is some rare usage of bull**** and f**k. There aren't a lot of crude jokes either. Sexuality is also rather subdued for a Bethesda game, though they have a few vague innuendos and veiled references to the act of sex on occasion. Clothing is quite conservative and without mods, there is no nudity of note. It is worth noting there are mentions of homosexuality (not regarded as a negative) and the game offers an option to have pronouns (he/him, she/her, or they/them), but I found this is limited to the choice of the player and this feature is rather broken, tending to glitch out often to the point it's somewhat useless. Males and Females are divided into body types (Type 1 for Males, Type 2 for females), and they allow a similar type selection for walking animations. If the pronouns and body types bother the player and they wish to remove the former and replace the latter with clearer gender/sex names, there are mods for this.

There is a curious lack of actual religion in Starfield, with the setting heavily leaning toward atheism and humanism. There are two religious organizations, one that believes in a "Great Serpent" (regarded in-universe as a cult by most factions) and another, the Sanctum, who believes in a monotheistic God. The Sanctum, however, is a bit vague on the exact nature of God, merely believing they exist and that humanity moving into space is part of what brings humanity closer to said God. The only outright charitable organization, the Enlightened, is openly atheistic. They do make passing reference to the "old faiths" (with the implications most are now defunct). They do, however, have at least one person who practices Judaism, though the purpose for this simply seems to amount to being able to deliver a mini-lecture about the evils of Hitler and the Nazis in a museum. What other mentions of actual real-world faith exist are dismissive at best and disparaging at worst, again having a strong bias towards atheism.

Morally and ethically, this is a typical Bethesda game, meaning you can choose to be a madman criminal, a saint, or anything in between. The former involves defying laws and rebelling against lawful authority, often in violent ways. There are in-universe contraband items, which can only be sold to certain vendors and risk heavy penalties if you are detected with them on your person. There are also depictions of alcohol and rather fantastical drugs with hallucinogen properties which can be partaken of by the player if they choose.


Overall, Starfield is very technically unimpressive. With a weak story, loss of features from earlier better games, bad optimization, and the only good features being bad ripoffs of better games, I thus cannot recommend it. Morally, it's curiously muted for a Bethesda game but still has some concerning strong language, a heavy pro-atheism bias, and the typical option to play as a criminal psychopath if you so choose. If this is the kind of quality I can expect from Bethesda for future games, then I am rather concerned for the future of Elder Scrolls and Fallout and will be reserving judgment on purchases for future Bethesda games, because Starfield was a tedious waste of hard drive space.