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Starfield is an excellent RPG in the same mould as Skyrim and Fallout, but with a sci-fi spin. It features a deep skill tree and rewarding side quests to eat up your free time, as well as fantastic gunplay. But it hasn’t quite reached the high expectations for space exploration, with technical limitations and countless bland planets making the journey into the stars a rather mundane one.

Introduction

Bethesda has become a household name in the gaming community thanks to the immersive world building and deep RPG mechanics of popular game series such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. 

For its latest game, Bethesda has rocketed up to space for its most ambitious project yet. Starfield takes the same RPG blueprint that Bethesda is renowned for, but adds a sci-fi spin. It’s a more grounded approach than the likes of Mass Effect or Halo, with humanity in the early phase of its ascension to the stars. 

Starfield also adds a number of twists to the formula, allowing you to visit over 1000 different planets across 100 star systems. However, in order to accomplish this technical feat, Bethesda has been forced to make a number of compromises which arguably diminishes the appeal of space exploration. 

Therefore, Starfield isn’t quite the groundbreaking next-generation triumph it was hyped up to be, but will nonetheless become another fan favourite for those who enjoyed previous classic Bethesda RPGs.

Story

• Takes less than 24 hours to complete story campaign
• Story missions quickly become repetitive
• Oodles of great side quests available

Starfield is set around the year 2310. There’s no longer life on planet Earth, with the once green and blue planet reduced to a desert wasteland. Instead, humanity has ascended to the stars, journeying into numerous star systems to form the Settled Systems. 

A generous character creator tool not only allows you to mould the appearance of your character to your liking, but also sets their background, providing stat-boosting perks to start you off. No matter what identity you give the protagonist, the story kicks off the same, as you join a group called the Constellation, with an obsession with exploring uncharted space. 

You soon discover a mysterious object called the Artifact, providing strange visions to whoever first discovers them. Assumed to be of alien origin, it becomes your objective to track down every single artifcat scattered across the universe. 

This quickly becomes an arduous task, with each planet usually inhabiting little else but basic lifeforms. There’s generally very little to do on these planets other than complete the job at hand, which has a frustratingly repetitive formula: simply follow your tracker to a temple, collect the Artifact and then fight off one or two enemies.

What’s worse, you won’t encounter the real villain until roughly halfway through the main campaign, which took me less than 24 hours to complete. It has a plodding pace, with little stakes to up the tempo. There are the odd few missions that are genuinely entertaining, with high points including a space station trapped in a multi-dimensional rift and becoming the mediator in a Western-style bank robbery. 

Sadly, these high points are the exception to the rule for the main story campaign, with it mostly consisting of fetch quests and the exploration of barren, lifeless planets. The ending is also extremely underwhelming, feeling little more than a way for you to access the New Game+ mode. 

Starfield shines the brightest with its sidequests, and I’d advise you to prioritise these over completing the main story. My personal favourite involved being blackmailed by the police to become an undercover space pirate. Doing so impacts the wider universe too, as space pirates stopped attacking me while I was a member of their clan. 

There are countless other entertaining side quests here too, each offering a short story that was far more interesting than the main plot. I’ve helped smuggle illegal goods, sabotaged a brewery company and answered the call of numerous distress signals. There’s often a good reward for your troubles too, be it a bounty of credits or even a new weapon.

Exploration

• Most planets are a bore to explore
• Space travel is limited mostly to fast travel
• Spaceship customisation and combat is great

One of Starfield’s standout features is the ability to travel through space in your own custom ship, and visit over 1000 planets. It sounds too good to be true… and sadly, that arguably is the case. 

Bethesda certainly hasn’t lied or exaggerated – you absolutely can visit that many planets, but most of them (reportedly 90%) are lifeless, with little to do but mine resources. These planets differ in numerous ways, such as the strength of gravity, biomes and temperature. But after visiting one or two of these planets, they become increasingly more boring to explore.

Bethesda has used a technique called procedural generation in order to create these planets. It’s an impressive technical feat, but the lack of environmental storytelling and engaging side quests see these planets void of any memorable points of interest. 

Bethesda has smartly incorporated hand-crafted events that can randomly occur on these lifeless planets to make them a little more interesting. Sometimes you’ll encounter a station full of pirates or marooned explorers pleading for a ride to the nearest colonised planet, but these instances are frequently recycled, so the novelty wears off quickly. 

You’re also able to explore many other planets that do inhabit life, but these quickly become a chore to explore too. You’ll generally find around four or five species of animals to discover on these planets, but I rarely encountered anything larger than my own character. Killing these creatures can be useful for amassing resources, but that’s the only fruitful interaction. Scanning all of the available animals and plants on a planet can provide you with a financial reward, but I personally felt this was such a chore that I rarely bothered. 

I was also put off exploring random planets due to the heavy restrictions on space travel. When I first jetted up into space for the first time, I was bemused to find that you’re not able to fly from planet to planet. If you want to fly from Mars to Jupiter, for example, you’ll need to open up your space map and trigger fast travel.

This means when manually flying through space, you’re restricted to a planet’s orbit. There are still plenty of things you can do in this space, including visiting space stations, trade with nearby explorers and hijack spaceships. But fly too far out of a planet’s orbit, and you’ll hit an invisible wall, which is frustratingly restrictive, especially when compared to games such as No Man’s Sky. You also can’t fly down into a planet’s atmosphere to land, instead having to click on the planet and select a landing point, which impacts the immersion.

That said, I adore the ship customisation in Starfield. You’re not only able to save up your credits to buy a new spaceship, but you can also build your very own from scratch. There’s a number of ways to upgrade your ship too, including increasing the max speed, selecting different weapons, improving shields and boosting the Grav Drive so you can travel even further across the galaxy.

I also loved how the interior of the ship will change as you increase the size. I started off with a tiny little ship with all of my crew crammed into a single room, to a massive one with multiple areas and interactive crafting stations. 

Spaceship combat is an exhilarating experience that feels straight out of a Stars Wars movie. You’re able to use up to three different weapon types to deplete enemy shields, and can even target specific parts of an enemy ship once you have the required skill.

However, there are large difficulty spikes for space combat throughout the campaign, so it’s important to remember to upgrade your ship, otherwise competing against several ships at once can become a frustratingly difficult challenge.  

Starfield is at its best in heavily populated areas, with lots of human characters to offer side quests and engaging stories. Highlights include the crime-ridden Cyberpunk-esque city of Neon that’s plagued with a drug problem, and the cowboy town of Akila which looks as if a town from an old American western film has been randomly plonked onto an alien planet.

I just wish Starfield had more populated areas of this ilk to explore rather than focusing on cramming in as many lifeless planets as possible. 

Combat 

• Fantastic variety of weapons
• Multiple options to tackle each mission
• Expansive RPG systems

Starfield is both a first-person and third-person shooter, depending on your preferred perspective. My early impressions of the gunplay were mostly negative, with cramped spaceships making it difficult to avoid incoming fire, and the slow reloading of pistols proving irksome.

However, combat improved considerably as I invested in my skill tree and amassed a greater arsenal of weapons. The jet pack skill (Boost Pack Training) makes a huge difference, allowing me to soar up into the air in the middle of a fight, and land behind them for a shotgun blast to the back of the head. 

There’s an impressive variety of weapons here too. They’re not quite as grandiose as those from Halo or Borderlands, but I loved using the likes of the incendiary shotgun and laser rifle. During the late game, it was always a thrill discovering a new weapon with a unique ability. You’re even able to level up your skills for a massive variety of weapons, from pistols and shotguns to grenades and mines. 

Bethesda’s notorious overencumbered feature makes a return, as carrying too many heavy items will cause you damage whenever your stamina meter is depleted. While I understand that Bethesda wants you to think carefully about the equipment and weapons you bring to each mission, I still found it to be an incredibly infuriating distraction even after maxing out my strength skill and making full use of my ship’s cargo space.

Like any other Bethesda RPG, you’re given numerous upgradable skills to allow you to pick non-lethal methods to overcome obstacles. One of my personal favourites includes the Security skill, which gives you the ability to unlock doors and vaults that may be hiding valuable loot. You can even hack into terminals to force enemy turrets and robots to fight for you. Unpicking a lock involves a mini puzzle for you to solve, which is both challenging and rewarding at the highest difficulty levels. 

However, not every skill is made equal. I wasn’t too impressed with the stealth approach, as some enemies were far too static in their patrols, and there’s no option to silently incapacitate them when sneaking behind unless you have a really powerful melee weapon or a muzzled gun.

Bethesda has also attempted to improve the Persuasion ability, as levelling it up will increase your odds of defusing a tense situation without the need for combat. But since it’s purely random, and you don’t need to do any pre-sleuthing as you do in games such as The Outer Worlds, performing a successful persuasion feels akin to entering cheat codes. I was even able to bypass the final boss fight by getting a lucky dice roll in a persuasion attempt, which felt anticlimactic and unrewarding. 

Nevertheless, I’m impressed with how many skills there are for you to upgrade in Starfield. I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the available abilities after completing the story campaign, with the New Game+ mode allowing you to retain progress and tackle missions with a new approach. 

Performance and graphics 

• Mostly free of bugs and glitches
• Crashed a few times during loading screens
• Smooth performance, even on Xbox Series S

Bethesda has proudly called Starfield its most polished game yet, and that looks to be the case from my experience. I only saw one notable glitch during my playthrough, where an NPC’s legs morphed through the ceiling. Otherwise, it’s remarkable to see how bug-free this game is when considering Starfield’s sheer scale.

Starfied is not without its technical faults. The game crashed on numerous occasions, generally during a fast travel loading screen, or when I opened up the settings menu shortly after loading into a game. This forced me to reset the Xbox Series S, but because of the frequent autosave feature, I rarely lost much progress – if any at all. Starfield even allows you to configure the frequency of autosaves, preventing the crashes from ever becoming a significant issue. 

Starfield is a good looking game, especially when gazing down at a planet while up in orbit, or admiring the horizon of an alien planet. But while character models have improved considerably from the previous Bethesda entries, they’re still not on par with modern games such as Baldur’s Gate 3. That said, I reviewed Starfield on an Xbox Series S rather than a Series X or high-end PC, so that may be a major factor. 

Bethesda has opted for a grounded NASA-like artstyle for Starfield’s sci-fi setting, and it does a great job of tying everything together, no matter where you are in the galaxy. I personally wasn’t a fan of the grainy filter that Bethesda has added over the display, although you can easily turn this off in the settings.

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Final Thoughts

Starfield is one of Bethesda’s most ambitious projects to date, but it’s clear that technical limitations have held it back from delivering the expansive space exploration sandbox that it’s been hyped up to be. It’s certainly impressive that you can visit thousands of planets, but the lack of engaging content and over reliance on fast travel makes exploration a chore.

Starfield really starts to shine with the RPG elements that Bethesda is renowned for. There are hundreds of excellent side quests to discover, while there’s an expansive skill tree that allows you to approach each mission however you fancy.

If your main hope for Starfield was to explore a seemingly endless universe, then you’re better off sticking to No Man’s Sky. But if you simply want to play a new RPG in the mould of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, then Starfield should still be an enjoyable venture into the stars. Check out our Best Xbox Games list for more options.

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Final Fantasy 16 ticks plenty of boxes – fluid combat, epic boss battles and an engaging story – but for every win, there’s a spectacular fail, be it the bland semi-open world devoid of much to do or the uninspired fetch quest-style side quests. It’s a game at its best when its focus is narrowed, but that doesn’t happen often enough.

Introduction

After falling in love with the Final Fantasy franchise with Final Fantasy 15 and thoroughly enjoying the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, it’s safe to say I was excited about the prospect of a totally new Final Fantasy experience to sink my teeth into. 

The Final Fantasy series is beloved for its layered stories, hand-crafted worlds and, most importantly, the epic, heart-pumping grand battles. But while that’s still somewhat the case with the latest title in the series, I find myself yearning for something more. Here are my thoughts.

Storyline and campaign

• Set in a quasi-medieval continent
• Suffers from tired cliches
• 40+ hour campaign

Final Fantasy 16 aims to be grittier than the standard ‘teens trying to save the world’ affair common among FF titles, evident from the very start of the game.

The title’s prologue centres around a teenage Clive Rosfield and his brother Joshua, culminating in a battle within castle walls that sees betrayal, slaughter and the particularly heartbreaking death of an especially brave Chocobo. 

The world of Valisthea is a complex one; the quasi-medieval continent is threatened by in-fighting between warring dynasties backed by their Dominants, essentially vessels for god-like creatures to channel their energy in epic-scale wars. 

But, from relatively early on, you learn of a second, more ominous threat; the Blight. Threatening to destroy the entire continent by destroying all fauna and flora it touches, it’s down to Clive Rosfield, his dominant and a growing roster of allies to save the world and its inhabitants. 

It’s supposed to be more grounded than those that came before it, and while the prologue and other particularly memorable parts of the game helped sell this well, vast swathes of the game fall back onto that growingly tired cliche of a group of people able to take on anything and survive by simply believing they could. 

That’d be fine if it were a relatively short campaign, but over the course of 40+ hours until the credits, the notion of ‘teamwork can make the impossible possible’ became a little tiresome. 

That’s not to say the story isn’t entertaining; it has all the typical flare and plot twists of a Final Fantasy title, complete with unforeseen betrayals and a story that is hard to predict until you’re practically at the end of the game. 

It is a story of incredible high peaks and astonishingly bleak lows; when it’s good, it’s amazingly captivating and exciting, but when it’s bad, it can be a challenge to power through – especially with no ability to skip most cinematic cutscenes, some of which go on for more than 10 minutes. Classic Final Fantasy, amirite?  

Exploration

• Semi open-world feels lifeless
• Little incentive for exploration
• NPCs aren’t very reactive

Final Fantasy 16 is designed in a similar semi-open world fashion to Final Fantasy 7 rather than the fully open Final Fantasy 15, which was a bit of a disappointment considering how vibrant and lived-in the kingdom of Eos felt. By comparison, Final Fantasy 16’s Valisthea feels almost barren – and that’s not by design.

The semi-open segments of the world are at least varied in terms of their design and the flora and fauna that can be found, but it doesn’t really encourage off-the-beaten-track exploration. There’s very little in the way of secrets to find, interesting side quests to stumble upon or even the incredible in-world boss battles that were present in Final Fantasy 15. 

You do, at around the midpoint of the game, begin to discover particularly strong beasts in the open world but these pale in comparison to the ‘main’ boss battles in FF16, as well as those that you’d randomly come across in FF15. There’s nothing like the mountain-sized tortoise, Adamantoise, here.  

Even the various settlements that you discover feel stagnant and rather uninspired. The NPCs repeat the same one or two lines of dialogue while constantly performing the same task regardless of the time of day or whether there’s a war going on just outside their walls. In an era with incredible open-world games like Elden Ring, The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, the open world here seems basic; something that’d probably pass in the early 2010s but certainly not in 2023. 

Combat

• Challenging multi-part boss encounters
• Huge arsenal of unlockable combat abilities
• Excessive cutscenes

Final Fantasy 16 is at its best when the semi-open world aspect morphs into a more linear setting, with constant Hollywood blockbuster-level cutscenes and a charming roster of British voice performances (including a few celebrities) that helped keep me interested.

It’s also where you’ll find some of the best boss battles in the title. These are challenging multi-part battles that’ll likely take you multiple attempts to tackle, with impressively powerful counterparts that, at times, seem impossible to deal with. 

But with an ever-expanding barrage of melee combat skills and Eikon abilities that let you hurl lightning bolts, scorch the earth or even freeze enemies solid, you can slowly chip away at the daunting health bar. 

I wouldn’t describe general combat as particularly challenging though; there are no real skill combos for you to take advantage of, and even in the toughest boss battles, features like completely replenishing your potions between attempts can quickly change the sway of a battle. 

Combat is at its best in these high-octane boss battles with incredible environments, elemental effects and explosions that’d put a Micheal Bay movie to shame. Quicktime cutscene actions mean you never quite relax during a battle, even when control is taken away from you. 

My only complaint is that some of the most epic parts of these off-the-scale boss battles occur within cutscenes, which can be a little disheartening after spending 10 minutes slowly chipping away at a Dominant’s health bar. 

That all said, Final Fantasy 16 is a game with an obvious formula; overcome some kind of adversity, advance on a mother crystal, battle an Eikon and gain access to new combat powers. It’s essentially the same process copied and pasted several times. 

There’s nothing particularly wrong with this concept, but the repetition feels very evident here, with the only real changes in the way of differing environments and enemies you face off. 

Side quests

• Repetitive side quests take up bulk of game
• Special side quests offer more well-written stories

Frankly, there’s a dismal offering of side quests available in Final Fantasy 16 – some of the least inspired I’ve seen in any game in recent years. 

The vast majority of these side quests have little to no impact on the story or world you live in, with most boiling down to what are essentially fetch quests. Go here, grab that thing, save that person, slaughter that creature and bring the spoils back to me. It’s the same idea over and over again, even as you progress further into the story, so much so that I completely ignored most side missions from early on in the game. 

The only exception to this is special side quests, which are slightly more involved and well-written than the slew of low-quality quests that smatter the semi-open world environments. However, even they are only there to serve as a way to upgrade your equipment. Collecting rare herbs allows for creating more potent potions, while helping your depressed blacksmith result in new, powerful equipment available for smelting. 

It works well as a gameplay mechanic to improve base stats and make more difficult late-game enemies a little easier to handle, but it’s not woven well into the tapestry of Final Fantasy 16’s campaign; in fact, they’re very easily missed unless you’re constantly examining your map.

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Final Thoughts

As a successor to the hugely popular Final Fantasy 15, Final Fantasy 16 leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. Sure, the crucial elements of a Final Fantasy game are all present and accounted for – engaging boss battles full of impressive visual effects, fluid combat and an interesting storyline – but for every win, there’s a massive fail, be it the bland semi-open world devoid of much to do or the frankly uninspired never-ending list of fetch-style side quests.

Charming voice acting, a plethora of twists and turns and Hollywood-esque cut scenes helped keep me entertained through the majority of the 40-hour campaign, but once it was over, I was done. There was no urge to explore the semi-open world or even dive into the new Game+ mode. It’s very much a one-and-done affair, which hasn’t been the case for previous Final Fantasy titles I’ve played.

Check out our Best Games of 2023 and Best PS5 Games for more options.

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