Nevil Whitty

This game simply is not fun...the environments and planets are stale and unimaginative. The UI and inventory screens are very cumbersome and unintuitive to use. I felt I was spending more time in the menu managing my inventory or charting courses to other planets/landing sites than actually playing the game. There's maybe 5 unique enemies in the entire game; since the vast majority of the "diverse" planet/moon-life is docile and doesn't do anything. There are about 10 different guns with little variety of abilities nor imaginative attachments. The AI/NPCs are terribly coded; often running randomly into walls, glitching/bugging out, or not being useful (friendly NPCs) or strategic (hostile NPCs) when fighting you. On occasion, hostile NPCs would simply stand still and not even react to me attacking them. The space ships are clunky to navigate, and the ship battles are not fun and extremely repetitive (i.e., disable shields with lasers, hit with ballistics/missiles, repeat) and the enemy ships literally just come at you in a straight line every time. The main quest's plot is not well-written; with large plot holes, characters just accepting circumstances as fact with no questioning, and the characters themselves having bland personalities that you don't feel any emotional attachment to. Some of the side quests were fun, but not enough to make the game interesting. The gun play was fun for maybe 30 minutes, then got incredibly repetitive with the lack of options. Enemy NPCs would simply not react to attacks at times, or would follow the same cycle of peeking out of cover every 5 seconds, me shooting them, then ducking behind again for another 3-4 cycles until you eventually kill them. It's sad because I feel Bethesda and Microsoft spent more money with marketing campaigns that did not reflect the actual gameplay vs. spending that money on the actual game itself. If they had invested the millions of dollars from their marketing campaigns into making the gameplay fun and the AI, NPCs and planets more responsive and diverse, they may have actually made a decent game. I tried to play this game and maintain my interest level and excitement for it, and actually got to about 30 hours of gameplay, but I just couldn’t do it anymore and convince myself that I was actually enjoying it. From my perspective, I would give it 6/10. Any review site or individual telling you otherwise is either a paid actor or trying to cope with the fact that they paid full price for a mediocre game at best. Luckily, Steam gave me a full refund which I gladly accepted. Hopefully, this game follows a similar path to Cyberpunk and the Bethesda devs actually do something to improve it over the next few years. Otherwise, Bethesda will lose all credibility with me moving forward; even as an avid enjoyer of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. I am very worried about Elder Scrolls VI after having played this game…