What’s up gamers! I hope all is going well with each of you and I’m super excited to finally get a chance to play some solid games that have been coming out recently. This weekend I’m diving into the highly anticipated Starfield, a title I’ve been waiting on since I first heard about it at E3 2018. At this time, I’ve put in about 17 hours into the game and its been an awesome ride so far. The crazy thing is it feels like I’ve barely even scratched the surface. This post will be focused on my first impressions of the game and a mini review of the first hours of the massive space epic.

Origins of Starfield

Starfield has been in development for about 25 years, by Bethesda who is well known for their large scaled open world adventure RPG’s such as Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Their experience in this genre really stands out, and the foundation of those games is very apparent here in Starfield. To be clear though, Starfield is unlike any of the previous games they’ve made before. From the beginning, it feels much more cinematic and sets a very different tone for the story. The opening moments guide you through the tutorial which features a mining tool you can use to break up minerals or elements to be collected and stored for crafting. This whole tutorial/intro area instantly reminded me of No Man’s Sky. The mining mechanics seemed pretty straight forward at first, but as you learn more about the game, you can end up investing tons of time just mining elements for crafting should you choose.

First Space Flight

After the mining tutorial, you get to customize your character and assign your base skills / traits. And in true Bethesda fashion, they nailed the character creator and you can spend lots of time making all kinds of funny or cool looking characters. Shortly after, the game guides you through the first space flight and space combat mechanics. Here is where I was underwhelmed about the game. With the way Starfield was first promoted and explained, I believed I could take my ship and fly from planet to planet and explore as I wished. They kept mentioning that game featured 1,000 planets so I figured this was going to be completely open for me to fly to these places. Quickly I found out this was not the case. While there is space flight, it is VERY limited. So unfortunately, you cannot fly to other neighboring planets even if they are within range. At some point, I decided to go for it and just keep flying, and eventually you end up stuck or flying in place, and that’s when I figured out that the game is not as accessible as I thought.

While this might be very disappointing for many players, it actually doesn’t end up being such a bad thing. Since the main way to get anywhere in the cosmos is to use the menus and select where to warp drive and where to land, it does save a lot of wasted time floating around in space aimlessly. I realized then, that Starfield is more of a straight forward narrative game instead of completely open world sandbox in the way most of us probably expected.

Space Visuals, Storytelling, and Combat

After I got over the let down of no real freedom to fly through the cosmos, I started to focus on the missions and gunplay. At first I could definitely see elements of other games, most noticeably No Man’s Sky and Mass Effect, but if you run through the game in third person (which is an amazing feature btw) the game can even be reminiscent of Dead Space or Resident Evil. I also couldn’t help but notice the font and some sounds that reminded me of Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. Perhaps all these titles helped to influence the game, yet Starfield still holds up on its own, with its unique style of cinematic and sharp visuals.

Next up is its diverse options in conversations, as it allows you to choose your path through some interesting missions. This is where Starfield truly shines, its storytelling through dialogue. There are some really cool missions that allow you to decide how you want to play, and there are consequences to your actions, but deciding to go wild and blow things up where you’re not supposed to can lead to some of the best moments in the game. In some cases I just decided to follow along with all the storyline, learned as much as I could, then pressed NPC’s with new dialogue options that were not open initially. These kinds of conversations can lead to getting rewards and bonuses that I was not expecting and at some point I was dying of laughter with the results.

The gunplay in Starfield is a little slower paced and weighted than Bethesda’s previous games. Guns feel heavy, and some gun sounds are just delightful to hear. They have a nice realistic popping sound and energy weapons have sharp blasting noises which make them feel powerful. The game also features a weapon ranking loot system so you can end up with multiple variants of the same guns in one area, but if you keep looting or fight a boss, they could end up dropping an enhanced version of that weapon. The enhanced weapons usually feature attachments like suppressors and sights which help give you an additional edge in combat. In some cases, the game also allows you to use the level to assist you, although this may not be the case on every planet or environment.

This short gameplay clip shows a mission where you are tasked with activating turrets in order to take down an alien boss that destroyed a town.

Mini Review

Like I mentioned earlier I’ve only put in just over 17 hours and at this point I still have so much more to uncover. The game may end up being a 40 – 60+ hour game give or take, but I can easily see players putting in much more time on the ship editor, character customization, home base editor, and mining. Not to mention trying to complete all side missions and exploring all unknown areas. This game could take weeks or even months to fully complete. My initial impression of Starfield is that it’s pretty impressive, and so far I’ve been loving the game overall. Now this is not to say that the game is without flaws in any capacity, as there are still bugs and glitches that occur, but they were not enough to interrupt my gameplay at any point. At this time, considering the game’s scale, and what works with storytelling and gameplay, Starfield is a solid single player experience with awesome expansive spaces to get lost in. I’ve had a blast looting and exploring the beautiful and claustrophobic environments and I’m expecting to experience a lot more of these fun dialogue moments.

Early review score: a solid 8.0 out of 10.

This screenshot shows a glitched moment I experienced with my time in the game. Just random NPC’s levitating out of nowhere, which was hilarious and just odd since everything else was running fine.

I hope you enjoyed this post and consider picking up Starfield whenever you decide to take a chance on a space adventure game even with its flaws and all. The official release date is September 6 and early access is available now for players who pre ordered the deluxe version of the game.

As always, thank you so much for your time and support of my blog. I am planning on posting some more mini reviews of other new games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Immortals of Aveum, and Armored Core 6. It’s just going slowly since I have limited time to run through all these games with work. Baldur’s Gate 3 alone is close to 100 hours and I’ve only been able to play for about 11 hours since it came out. I’ve had even less time with the other games I mentioned as well, but hopefully I will find time to finish them all when I can and add onto the upcoming mini reviews for a full in depth breakdown. Thanks again for reading, for now have a great weekend!