Score: 8.5/10 
Platform: Xbox Series X (reviewed); also available for Windows PCs
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: Sept. 7, 2023
ESRB: M

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Starfield review: A sci-fi saga for the masses Back to video

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There will be endless shorthand for Starfield, the first game set in an entirely new universe from famed American role-playing game maker Bethesda Game Studios’ in over a quarter century.

Some will describe it as Fallout 4 set in space. Others will suggest that it’s No Man’s Sky with a story, Star Citizen made accessible, The Outer Worlds on a grander scale, or maybe even a slightly less pompous Mass Effect.

These are all legitimate comparisons useful for wrapping one’s head around the game in a general way. But this sprawling open galaxy science-fiction space opera also has its own idiosyncratic personality that begins to emerge once you really start to dig in.

The game is set at the dawn of the 24th century. Humanity has long since spread outward from Sol, fleeing a ravaged and mostly dead Earth to set up colonies on planets and moons circling nearby stars. There have been powerful political movements and terrible interstellar wars, but an uneasy peace exists between the biggest colonial factions.

You enter this milieu as a lowly miner attempting to make a living zapping valuable ore in caves with a laser cutter. However, a quick series of events and a fortuitous encounter with a mysterious man changes your destiny, making you captain of a small ship and thrusting you into the vastness of space on a quest for a series of MacGuffins that will change how humanity perceives the universe and its place within.

It’s a compelling narrative inhabited by interesting characters eager to drop unexpected twists. But the real meat of the game is simply exploring the galaxy. 

The systems you visit are filled with planets, moons, space stations, and starships, many of which you can land on or dock with to explore at your leisure. Worlds are vast, populated with flora and fauna that you can scan and catalogue, precious elements you can mine with your handy laser cutter, and a variety of structures, settlements, caves, and even cities containing all manner of things begging investigation. The sheer size of each of these heavenly bodies can make them feel a little empty, but believably so given humanity’s relatively recent migration to the stars.

Bethesda has made liberal use of fast travel options to go anywhere you’ve been before in seconds rather than making players climb into their ships, zoom through the atmosphere, and spend time travelling through warped space and wormholes to reach their destinations. Some will take issue with this. I don’t. I appreciate the seamless journeys from ground to space and system to system in sim-style games, but this is a role-playing game. I’m happy the focus here is on what you do at each location rather than how you travel to it. 

And there are still plenty of little flourishes meant for space nerds to appreciate. Beautiful docking animations and planetary vistas, varying gravity levels for each planet we visit (which make a huge difference when jumping and boosting about), and maps for several planets based on actual NASA photographs and data. These are just the sort of authentic spacey bits and bobs I need to make me feel like I’m an honest-to-goodness astronaut while playing. 

Also simplified, compared to many other starfaring adventures, is crafting. You can access various workstations to build mods for your suits and weapons, brew up pharmaceuticals, cook food, and research new products. It takes time to collect the resources and prerequisites needed, but crafting turns out to be pretty straightforward. 

An exception to this might be ship building. You can customize your ship’s look and shape by snapping modules onto its frame in the ship builder menu, but you risk making it ugly and, worse, unflyable. It can get a little tricky. Happily, there’s also an option to simply swap out lasers, shields, and reactors, which is an easy way to ensure you keep your craft space-worthy.

Inventory management, on the other hand, is just sort of a pain. 

Starfield, like other Bethesda Game Studios releases, provides endless items within the environment that you can collect and later make use of by crafting or selling them. Everything from spoons and slippers to exotic alien materials. Problem is, it takes a long time to be able to visually discern which items are worth your time and carrying capacity. Not wanting to miss anything important, I almost always collected far too much stuff, forcing me to spend long minutes transferring inventory to AI companions (or the ship’s hold) in order to avoid becoming encumbered.

Though, it’s worth noting, becoming encumbered isn’t nearly as physically paralyzing as it is in other Bethesda series like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout. We can still move around fairly well and fight somewhat effectively, but we tire more quickly when running. 

Still, frequently sorting through hundreds of items slows the pace of the game — as, for that matter, does pausing in the middle of firefights to scour space stations, laboratories, and hideouts for valuable goods.

On the subject of combat, combat is generally pretty satisfying both in space and on the ground. 

You’ll amass a huge range of weapons and get to use some game-changing abilities (which I can’t really mention without spoiling the story) that make battles both strategic and spectacular. As you begin to mod and customize your shooters with better sights, suppressors, and extended magazines, you’ll start to have favourite guns, but will still be nudged to switch between weapons frequently to exploit enemy weaknesses or conserve different types of ammunition. Most fights tend to be pretty easy, though battles against boss-like enemies are more challenging and often let you plan out strategies and make use of environmental advantages, such as mines and auto turrets.

Space combat, meanwhile, gives us just enough Star Trek-style commands to feel pseudo-legitimate. You’ll need to make tactical decisions to shift power between shields, engines, and weapon systems as circumstances dictate, but your attention is generally set squarely on flying like a Star Wars X-wing pilot and blasting enemies to scrap. It’s in keeping with the game’s overall philosophy of satisfying sci-fi lovers without alienating the masses.

I expect players to level plenty of minor gripes and quality-of-life issues, such as the simplistic (bordering on useless) planetary maps, the lack of ground vehicles and mounts, AI companions stealing kills and robbing players of experience points. These problems are fair game for nitpicking.

But I also suspect, as with most Bethesda games, that many of the issues players have at launch will gradually be addressed through updates and expansions. It’s not ideal, but it’s the world we live in. I’ve already recommended to my sci-fi- and open world-loving daughter that she hold off a few months before diving into this one, lest her proclivity to be turned off by niggling problems keep her from getting the most out of the game.

As for me, I’m having a lovely time. All I want in a galaxy exploration adventure is for it to convince the lower levels of my brain that I’m an honest-to-goodness spaceman, the star of an epic and action-packed space saga.

Starfield delivers on this, and then some.