Starfield begins with your character as a rookie miner exploring the depths of a mine. However, an incident puts your player in a position where they need to fight to survive, and they manage to not only fight off the pirate invaders, but also earn some praise in the process. This incident ends up with you getting a free Starship under your command, and you also get to design your character along the way, while attaching attributes and skills to them. In fact, this game has such deep integrations that I recommend reading about all aspects before setting up your character. It should also be said that the first three to four hours of the game can be mind-numbingly slow, and you have to go through all of it to get to the good stuff.

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The main storyline acts as a kind of soft tutorial that you may or may not have to follow, but you can quickly progress in the game if you finish the main quests. Not to mention, level up with skills needed to navigate the hash Starfield world successfully. 

Like any good RPG, the Starfield world is littered with lots of gear and knick-knacks. Some have a good chunk of change, while others are worthless in terms of monetary value. This makes having crew members, and a vast cargo hold pretty crucial throughout the game. Considering it is almost impossible to play the game when encumbered with heavy weights, you can, over time, sell all of these things and earn enough to upgrade gear, ships, outposts, or anything else you desire. 

The Starfield world is full of quests other than the main ones. These quests add hundreds of hours of additional gameplay to the main game. You can also join factions, including space pirates. There are several ways to complete quests as well, and these include going around killing everyone or you can persuade people to change their ways or give up something they have. You can also go full stealth and steal things. Personally, I prefer going stealth or persuading, but every once in a while, it is fun to go in all guns blazing. There are, of course, consequences to each action. For instance, I ended up killing someone during a quest, and the entire base was out for blood. I had to reload a previous autosave to avoid that situation since I did not have nearly enough ammo to kill an entire town full of people. 

The autosave, however, is not the best thing to rely on. It almost always saves just after you have done something stupid, and then you are stuck in an eternal loop of spawning, just to be killed again by angry citizens of the planet. You can’t even kill all the people on a particular planet; people who are key to the storyline don’t end up dead, only injured. To avoid these problems, you have to either save your game before doing something stupid or load an autosave from god knows when. The moral of the story here is to save before doing something stupid.

Combat is pretty fun, though there are several weapons to choose from. From time to time, you will discover rare or legendary weapons that will enhance a bunch of stats or deliver unusual damage to the opponents. With the drop rate the way it is, I also like the fact that this isn’t an MMO game where I would eventually have to pay to get something powerful. Instead, I can just steal it or craft something exceptional. Space dogfighting doesn’t hit the same level though, I found it very difficult to aim and shoot with the Xbox controller. It feels like a system that would work well with a keyboard and mouse. 

Unfortunately, this game doesn’t support keyboard and mouse on the Xbox. Another disadvantage of playing on the Xbox is that you cannot cheat in the game. There are several cheats available for the PC version, but they cannot be accessed on the console, and Mods, the lifeline for a game like Starfield, is also unavailable on the console version.

The universe is huge and while it doesn’t compare to the actual universe, this one is big enough, according to me. Though you can’t always directly jump to a far-away undiscovered planet, travelling between worlds can happen through wormholes. I love the wormhole bits from the captain’s seat, it looks spectacular, though after a while, I would like the option to skip watching the animation every time I dock, undock, land or take off from a planet or space station. The animations are way too long and not skippable. 

Interactions with the crew and with people during quests are pretty nuanced, and the voice acting is very good. Some of the animations could be better, but it isn’t something you will notice after a few hours into the game. I absolutely love trying to persuade people. The points system for it is well done, interestingly, there is a mod online that now takes over conversations for the perfect outcome every time. 

Starfield is rough around the edges, but has a lot of potential. It is a play that I would definitely recommend to anyone looking to sink a couple of months into a single game. If you are willing to do that, Starfield is definitely rewarding. Needless to say, it is in much better shape than Cyberpunk was at launch. Starfield is free to install and play if you have a game pass, so you might want to hop on that, but if this is a game that you will be playing for a few months, maybe purchasing it is the best option. 

Starfield
Rating: 4.5/5
Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platform: PC, XBS
Price: Rs 4,999