Recent reviews by Strato Junon

Big fan of TES, big fan of space games. I was expecting to adore Starfield. Instead i discovered that Starfield is a deeply flawed game. If you're just planning to play through some storylines then you'll enjoy it. If you're wanting exploration, base building, a satisfying skill tree, etc. etc. then you're going to be disappointed.

Exploration is basically non existent. Every world outside of the story ones feel like randomly generated with tons of empty spaces. Even the "landmarks" on the planets are boring and not really worth checking out.

Base building is fairly limited and very frustrating to do because your inventory and ship inventory can only hold a small amount of cargo. To build a full base will require tons of inventory management.

I personally felt the skill tree was also very boring, i'd often just have points to spend and not have anything exciting to put points in to. You also need to unlock the next rank of the skill by doing certain things ingame which i feel they just did to stretch out the time you got to play this game.

Ship building is fun, but also very flawed. You can't rotate some objects for some arbitrary reason, ships have very strict requirements when it comes to weight and such. Every ship building NPC has their own stock of parts so you have to fly between them a lot (again to get you to play longer i guess?) You also can't save a ship design, which is frankly daft.

Stealth mechanics feel completely broken, in a bad way. You get spotted through walls sometimes which is just ridiculous.

Some of the story chains are interesting (Vanguard, Ryujin, Crimson Fleet, UC system defense) What isn't fun or interesting however is the main story. It's a load of crap if i'm being honest.

I played it for 155 hours, vast majority of that was spent building ships and getting more and more frustrated with the system. I regret spending so much time on this game, i kept hoping for it to improve and to find a way to enjoy it. I even spent quite a lot of time on building a base, which in the end felt like a complete and utter waste of time.

This game makes no sense, I don't understand how they dropped the ball this hard.

The graphics are beautiful, the music is great, characters are lovely. Story is basic but functional. The thing that lets this game down is the combat. There is no depth, no variety, it feels the same from start to finish. You don't even feel like you're getting stronger. It is staggering how they made such a great game, but then made such an absolutely boring combat system.

Each character starts with 2 skills. you can get up to 4 through playing through the story (not lvl based). On a characters turn you can use basic attack, use a skill use a combo action, or use an item.

Basic attack - Makes enemy drop little orbs, you can use these to boost your next attack/skill/combo. Many enemies are resistant to basic attacks, others resist skills. Using an attack restores 3 mp. Hitting a button with the right timing makes you hit twice (also gets incredibly tedious to do)

Skill - About twice as strong as the basic attack, can do aoe. In combat you're basically just waiting til you can use these again. Every time you use the attack skills you'll need to do a little minigame, that again never changes. Gets incredibly tedious.

Combo - combo gauge fills up, you get to spend it on this. Its just like a skill but doesnt cost mp. No minigame involved in this. but also isn't amazing dmg wise.

items are self explanatory.

Here's how combat goes. You use your skills, if enemies are still up, you use attacks. Got orbs? use orbs. Got combo? use combo. HP low? use item. There's no interaction between any of these. For the first 10 hours or so with the first 3 characters you'll have 4 dmg skills and 2 utility skills (in your team, not per character). They all function basically the same.

One other infuriating mechanic is that enemies can "cast" to do a big attack/skill in 1-3 "turns". You can break or diminish this by hitting them with the correct dmg type. (blunt, slash, moon, sun). but unless you hold your MP for this, and the characters with those dmg types happen to have their turn at the correct time you often can't do anything about it. It doesn't really matter though, because its not like its going to wipe out your group, you'll just have to heal a bit. Its often literally impossible to stop these casts.

The problem with combat in a nutshell is nothing you do matters, everything feels the same, there's no depth, just cook items now and then and use them when your hp drops. Don't bother using skills to heal (except maybe the cook guys one) because they're not worth spending the MP on.

Less of a game itself, more of a "VR space" thing. always felt it was pretty cool but sadly the development team has shown their true colors and are just toxic, stubborn and dumb. A game like this has absolutely no need for easy anti cheat. Especially since people use mods for accessibility features because the game itself has virtually no accessibility features. 100% not supporting this game at all.

Takes what made portal 1 great and just enhances it. Story's a bit different feeling compared to 1 but i love it. Coop mode is also really great.

Flawed in certain areas but it'll keep your attention for a good 60 hours or so though. And it's still being updated so hopefully they iron out some of the flaws. (Base building in specific is very flawed)

Edit: Several years later now. They've added a bunch more things but sadly they all feel disjointed. Feel like a dish made from leftovers and none of the bits really fit together.