Alex C

20 hours in and planets are just empty... I don't know how empty since traversal takes too long to explore empty space, I know that I went 26 minuets in one direction and had nothing happen until a group of over levelled enemies flew in and i was forced to fast travel back to my ship. you know how Skyrim you have a beautiful open world with fun random events and locations with thing to do in them, well in this game they get rid of all that and instead give you a open planet that's usually just rocks with a nice sky box with 3 to 4 points of interest that you scan and then leave, sometimes there will be enemies in a location that you can explore however the only reason to do so is for ep since they seem to have gone with a braindead version of the borderlands approach with instead of 100s of weapons that act in distinct ways you have about 20 that can have slightly different parts for small stat boosts or ammo types that don't feel like anything special. The space travel mechanic is a literal joke its essentially just bad menu management; you click a planet you want to go to hold fast travel you get a pop up you get put into a small pocket of space that you can fly around unable to do anything in, click fast travel to a place on the planet and watch an animation... the game is called starfield and their is no open world space exploration, they need to add a mechanic like in no man sky or outer wilds to allow planet exploration from within the ship asap, this of course would be a lot of work but honestly it feels as if no effort has been put into the universe sized sandbox. The one saving grace this game has is that the writing isn't awful, nothing write home about with extremely generic sci fi elements but it doesn't fail at it hence why its not 1 star, if you like generic Bethesda story then you'll be fine, I will say that so far side missions have been fairly underwhelming with rather poor writing but they're optional so who cares. This review will probably be buried by the myriad of bots Bethesda has bought to hail this mess as a masterpiece, if the game receives an update making space exploration at all fun i will delete this review but until then DO NOT pay money for this game just use Gamepass or buy obsidians outer worlds which is essentially a better version of this game that's 1/6th size and less pretensions if that's not your cup of tea play outer wilds instead that is an actual masterpiece.