Starfield: The Universe of procedure generation, ghost worlds, and seemingly rushed storylines. However, a galaxy of beautiful graphics, fleshed out characters, and amazing ship vs. ship gameplay.
Starfield is a role-playing game that is set far into the future when Earth has entirely lost its magnetosphere due to human activity, following this humans have conquered the stars and made settlements all over the universe. Being an RPG this game has many roles to play like explorer, pirate, military, farmer, and glorified space sheriffs if you’re so inclined, many of these roles have factions that back them which add on to the depth of the roles themselves.
By far, my favorite part of this game are the ships which can be customized to your heart’s content with new parts and weapons, almost every ship is entirely modular which means you can make your own ship if you want to. However, each ship preset is incredible in its own way with some of them being prepared for deep space exploration or ship vs. ship scuffles with the Crimson Fleet like my personal favorite ship, the Shieldbreaker. Each ship has several categories of weaponry like missiles, ballistics, lasers, particles, and EM weapons, each type of weaponry has its own uses with ballistics and missiles being for hull/part damage once the shields are down, lasers and particles are used to take down a ship’s shields.
Each ship has a category of reactor ranging from the worst which are the A-class and the best which is the C-class, each reactor powers the systems of the ships like shields, engines, weapons, and the grav drive which is this game’s type of hyperdrive if you’ve ever watched Star Wars. The power level of each weapon decides how fast it’s ammo recharges, the power level of the systems like engines, shields, and the grav drive determine how powerful they are. Electromagnetic weapons are the black sheep with them being for boarding ships by disabling their various systems without destroying the ship itself, in practice though this is much more of a gimmick than I expected with a ship almost requiring you to have a type of EM weapon to make boarding possible. Ship v ship combat is great in almost all ways, only when you get into fights do the mechanics ever feel bad. For example, at the end of the Sysdef storyline you’re required to fight a large portion of the Crimson Fleet, however you’re constantly taking fire and at this point you wouldn’t have enough credits to buy some of the more powerful ships like the Shieldbreaker so your shields are constantly down which lets the pirates damage your very fragile hull which is just very frustrating.
The characters of this game are where you see some of the most polish besides the ships which were the selling point of Starfield so it’s understandable. Each character impacts the main story in different ways and the side stories are introduced to you in organic ways throughout. For example when you first start the game you deliver the first artifact to the Lodge then you visit the UC Vanguard headquarters in which the commander offers you a spot with them, this then opens up the entire side story of siding with either the Sysdef or Crimson Fleet in their battle over Kryx’s Legacy, and this is only one of the many examples throughout the game.
In Starfield almost every character has some kind of impact on the main story. My favorite example is in the middle of the game when you just returned with the second set of artifacts, you will see a man that wears a heavily modified and damaged spacesuit that just seems out of place in both the way he talks and how he just doesn’t seem used to interacting with people, this man actually comes back much later in the story in a way you wouldn’t expect when you first see him I actually only realized it was him when I heard his amazing voice.
Some characters like Sam Coe and Sarah Morgan have a very fleshed out romance system that begins with some light flirting from both sides and ends with a marriage/commitment mission in which they become your romance choice for the rest of the game. This romance system puts it into direct competition with one of the best RPG’s in the industry called Mass Effect. This trilogy of games have a very similar romance system to Starfield’s but isn’t nearly as fleshed out, however I’ll go easy on the games since they were released much earlier than Starfield.
Each character has a concise model that sets it apart from the other characters that they share the screen with, Sarah wears a red leather coat embroidered with the Constellation logo since she is the organization’s leader, while Sam wears a cowboy hat since he was the previous sheriff for the Freestar Rangers. These detailed models are important since in a game it’s important to be able to tell characters apart from each other on a simple glance, these models are also different from all the enemies as well which makes it easy to decipher who is an enemy and who is a friend while in the heat of ground combat.
All in all, Starfield isn’t the greatest game I’ve ever played and its characters certainly aren’t the best in the gaming industry either, however I feel that it does bring some interesting things to the table. The space combat alone makes it worthwhile for me since there aren’t many AAA space combat games out there for you to enjoy, but while one is potentially in development you always have Starfield to hold you over until that masterpiece is created.
