Starfield review for PS5

Three years ago, Bethesda released Starfield on the Xbox and PC to some rather mixed reviews (see our’s here). Billed as an open world space opera that allows you to do what you want, the game is massive, spanning star system after star system, planet after planet. Does Starfield hold up, or does it get crushed under the weight of its own ambition?

Bethesda is known for making fantastic open world games. I’ve been a fan of the Elder Scrolls games since Daggerfall was released in 1996, which was massive for its time. Starfield seems equally so, with the ability to travel to different worlds, build bases, mine for materials, craft items, and so much more.

Starfield starts you off as a space miner, looking for something on the moon Vectera. This acts as your basic tutorial: pick up the mining laser (your weapon), go blast space rocks (your targets). Eventually the group you are with breaks open a larger cavern with some strange gravity readings. According to your boss, this is what your crew is looking for. While exploring the new tunnel you come across what looks like a broken piece of a map from the Halo games. As soon as you reach out to grab it you see flashes of… something, you aren’t sure what. After waking up, you start character creation.

Character creation has you going through several steps, aside from your looks you can select a background, and traits. Backgrounds give you a starting skill point in three skills, depending on the background you pick. After picking your background, traits are up next. Traits give you a big boost in an area, but at a cost. For example, if you pick Hero Worshipped, you have an (annoying) “Adoring Fan” who shows up randomly and will talk to you nonstop, and if he joins your crew he gives you gifts. Or you could pick Taskmaster, if you have crew trained in particular systems, that system will repair itself if it drops below 50% health (but all crew are now double the price to hire).

Once your character is made, you end up with a ship and are on your way to New Atlantis. There you meet Constellation, a group of explorers trying to find all the pieces of the artifact to figure out what it is. And, really at this point you can basically do what you want.

New Atlantis is a bustling city, complete with undercity, and tons of people to talk to. The first group of people I ran into were refugees. I stopped and just listened to them for five to ten minutes, their lines never repeated, and they never stopped. While wandering around the city, just listening to the conversations happening, I was getting quest requests logged. I even randomly received a quest just walking past a storefront broadcasting a news report about a cruise ship being attacked by pirates. This is a very nice touch.

Menus in Starfield are kind of a pain. While you can use the touch pad to open specific parts of the menu, like inventory and navigation, many times it’s just easier to pause the game and select what you want to open from the five menu options. Space navigation is also rather annoying. Once you open the navigation, many times you have to press the circle button to zoom out. For example, if you are near a planet, navigation will be zoomed in on the planet thinking you want to land, you have to zoom out to the planet and moons, then zoom out again to the star system, then again to the galaxy map. So if you want to make a jump to a different system, many times you are bringing up the map and zooming out 3-4 times. If you accidentally close the map, which is the same button as zoom out, then you must start over.

Flying your ship normally is fun, your left stick controls your roll and speed, while your right stick controls your nose up, down, left, and right. During flight you must manage your power systems, which control shields, energy weapons, and your Grav drive, your faster than light travel. To jump to a different system, you must have at least one bar of power for your Grav drive. If you don’t and then open up the nav map, find the system you want to jump to and attempt to jump, the game says, “assign power to your Grav drive first” and exits navigation. You then must assign power to the drive and redo your navigation, which is very annoying as the game should warn you after picking a destination to power up your drive to jump.

Fighting can be equally irritating. While in a gunfight, it’s hard to aim and very hard to see the enemy. The controls feel almost too responsive, even after I turned the sensitivity down. Ammunition is very hard to manage, most of the time you are also picking up extra guns that you don’t need instead of ammunition. Granted, you can sell off the guns later, but I found myself running out of ammunition very quickly and having a very hard time managing all the guns with all the different types of ammo. To top the whole thing off, not more than an hour into the game I was already overburdened, carrying beyond my capacity, and I wasn’t looting much (just ammo, health packs and weapons).

However, I do like how the Starfield skill progression system works. There are five different skill trees: physical, social, combat, science, and tech and each one focuses on a different aspect. For example, the combat skill tree gives you access to skills that are weapons-focused, the tech tree gives you access to better skills for your ship. I spent points on fitness, which allowed me to carry more stuff. However, even after putting a point into weightlifting, it seemed as though when I picked up one more thing, I became overburdened. Each skill you can spend 4 points in; however, you must use that skill to put points into it. For example: with weightlifting; in order for me to put more points into that skill, I must sprint while at 75% weight capacity, making each level require a further sprint. For weapons, you guessed it, you have to kill a certain number of enemies to advance the skill.

There is a ton to do in Starfield, from building outposts, to designing your own ship, to crafting and cooking. Overall, I think Starfield is just okay, and while it does have some shiny spots, it still has a lot of rust on it too. I like the game’s story, and it grabbed my attention and held on tightly enough where I just wanted to do the main quest, as everything else was just noise to me.  I was not a fan of the non-space combat but both flying, and ship-to-ship combat was quite fun. Overall Starfield just didn’t hold my interest like past Bethesda games did.

Note: Bethesda Softworks provided us with a Starfield PS5 code for review purposes.

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