Recent reviews by Soulraven

So far i have enjoyed every bit of content that i have come across. The visuals are stunning, combat feels really nice (mage) and i do generally have a great time with the game. That said this is only 10 hours into the game and something may change down the road. i will update this review with my final thoughts once i have finished the game.

So far if you enjoyed inquisition or dragon age 2 i think you will enjoy this one.

A really fun and enjoyable experience. Pro tip: Press tab

Great game through and through. Having a blast :)

Great little game, enjoyed my time with it :)

With Sony backing down and no longer making psn account mandatory i highly recommend this to everyone for a great bit of fun and action :)

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Original review below! (This no longer applies)
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If you don't mind linking your steam account to sony/playstation you will love this game and everything in it.

If you don't want to link your account to a service that frequently has data leaks as well as introduce another account to a game that worked perfectly well without it, just go find something else, there are plenty games to chose from ^^ (Which is what i will be doing now, so long Helldivers.)

I proper enjoyed my time in this game from start to finish. I recommend that you give this an honest go once in your life if you enjoy star wars.

I have now played this game for 200+ hours and experienced 1 full playthrough and a bit of new game +, here is my opinion now.

--------- TLDR---------
-Weakest main quest in any Bethesda game. A lot of repetitive fetch questing.
-Loads of dialogue that all have the same outcome and a lot of time you get the exact same reply from the npc word of word in 3 out of 5 options in the dialogue tree.
-Very immersion breaking random chatter in the world where an npc turns to look at you and start spew random facts about the area they live in.
-Game lacks a lot of ingame options to tweak graphics etc
-Extremely poor performance on high end hardware, solved with a mod but that is not a pass.
-Loads of loading screens everywhere.
-Exploration is very repetitive and limited to cells you can’t travel between without traveling with ship.
--No seamless travel anywhere. Loading screens to do anything. To and from planet surface? Cutscene. Travel between two planets? Cutscene.

All in all I think this game disappoint in so many areas because you see the potential of what it could be, but just isnt because the designes are lazy. They have spent way too much time into recording dialogue that bloats the illusion of choice. Voice acting is ok but would probably be better if they got to actually act out any meaningful dialogue. You see so many things in this game that could be amazing if they were worked on a bit more and you end up thinking “I hope mods can do this later on” and when you think that about the entire game, I just have to admit to myself that while I enjoyed the game, it is ultimately disappointing.

If it were not for the performance issues i would give the game a 6 out of 10.
Currently a 4 out of 10.

Main Story i find it to be one of the worse ones bethesda has done, it picks itself up a bit but it is a chore until the end. I don't want to write too much as to not spoil anything, but it is a very repetitive quest line and i find it to be the weakest point about the game other than performance.
The rest of the games various storylines and side quests are pretty fantastic though.
However there is something I need to say, there is extremely little you do in the game that have any kind of impact and very few of the things you pick in dialogues that changes the outcome. Very often you will be presented with 4 dialogue options where 3 will have the same voiceline replied to you and some times when you decide to attack, someone else might just take that final choice away from you and refuse to let you engage them in combat. Ultimately the dialogue system is very shallow with a lot of extra dialogue for no reason.

The game will handhold you the entire way from start to finish, there is no running around and figuring things out on your own, if the game wants you to solve a mystery, it will take you from a, to be then take you to c, and instead of letting you take the clues from around you to solve the mystery, you instead get a popup box with a text that tells you the solution to the mystery instead.
(I have only found one place so far where this was not true and you had to actually read stuff to get an alternative solution that is better than the two alternatives you are presented with that had no handholding or hints in the UI at all.)

Voice acting is nothing to write home about its pretty average.
Visually its pretty OK, not great but not bad either.

Gameplay is pretty fantastic, its very much fallout in space, completely unleashed and just straight up fun probably what I enjoyed the most in this game. Just straight up mess around with different weapons and killing enemies.

That said the variety of enemies are very low. Most of the randomly generated creatures have similar combat styles which is not surprising and the main monsters and enemy npcs in the game have a very small variety of each that you will meat over and over through the entire game.

I find the weapon variation to be a littlebit slim, specially the laser weapons. i found none of them interesting and basically stuck to ballistic weapons from beginning to end.

Same could be said about space suits.

Outfits have a fair variety to choose from, not all equal but there are choices at the very least.

Spaceship and space combat was great in my experience and i really enjoyed the experience, there are lots of things to play around with here in term of weapon loadouts and approach to combat.
That said like the rest of the game its not very deep and most of the time you can just straight up skip encountering any of it but just fast traveling everywhere. Feels like a very optional thing they just tacked on the game.

I love open world exploration in games. Take any of the new Assassins Creed games up to valhalla. Insanely interesting beautiful worlds to explore. Ark survival evolved, it has lots of maps and I love exploring them. Baldur’s gate 3. Cyberpunk. Skyrim. Fallout 4. Even Fallout 76. Elite Dangerous.
I love them all.
But starfield is just straight up boring. Very much like no man’s sky you see the same buildings dotted around everywhere. And I mean everywhere. You can travel to the most barren out of reach planet or moon in the game, and you will see the same amount of buildings and the same npcs. Dungeons are ofcourse the same too. The amount of times I have encountered the same dungeons with the same notes and items inside it is insane. I lost count. Likewise the places you go to are open world to a degree, but they smaller instances with a boundary. Like Elite dangerous and No man’s sky I do appreciate that there are objectives and rewards for exploring, but unlike the two above, there are no seamless travel anywhere. You can’t drive around on a planet as you will reach boundaries and you do not have a vehicle to drive around with. Unlike ED and NMS You can’t pass from one area to the other because each area is randomly generated when you land in it based on its biomes and seed. Landing and taking of are cutscenes and the same goes traveling between planets. That takes us to one of the things I really hate about this game:

There are quite a lot of loading screens and you get more based on how you play the game. It does however let you focus on whatever mission you are doing and let you travel to some of these locations skipping 3+ loadingscreens by using a fast travel button inside of the quest log, i am very glad about that, but at the same time the game does get a bit mindless and it comes back to the handholding you through everything in the game.

Performance is without a doubt completely garbage, absolute disaster. and because of this, the game get dragged down to a 4 out of 10 for me. If it were not for the DLSS mods the game would be virtually unplayable for me (and i have friends who decided not to buy or refund because of these issues), i have a fairly high end pc by todays standard so there is no excuse for this game to run this poorly.
(Also Todd, its not technical innovation if its just a hindrance to many, specially if so many other games does the same thing that works, looks and performs better. Maybe it is innovation in term of the engine you are using, but maybe its time to maybe see if the engine is holding you back.)

I hope i can come back and change my opinion on some of these things as patches comes out and some of these performance issues are fixed, but i am not going to hold my breath, bethesda has a very poor track record of fixing performance issues outside crashes for any of their games.

This game also just have straight up problems that would take years to fix and I doubt they would do it.

This time i have had enough and i won't let it slide and just go "Well with this mod i can play fine".
This was an awful release and it will make me reconsider buying the next games when they come down the line, i am frankly tired of the state games releases in these days.

TLDR: I think this game is amazing, an easy 9/10 for me, I have enjoyed very much every aspect of the game so far.

While i can imagine some people will find some aspects of the game a bit harder than what they are typically used to, specially if they have not played many similar games before. However this game is an absolute playground to as far as how to handle anything.

You can speak your way into benefits, or you can scare an enemy away, you can set up an elaborate ambush or you could just straight up polymorph some of the stronger enemies and yeet them off a cliff to their death on turn one if you wish.

How you approach combat is very much up to you and there are plenty of environments to give you various advantages and disadvantages.

You can pick up items that you can use to your advantage in combat, such as candles, if you don't have a spell caster in your party, dip your weapon on them to get fire. Or bring along boxes you can use for cover or to stand on to create artificial high ground advantage. This game let's you be in charge of your experience.

Camera can be a little fiddly in some areas and there are times where you might feel that you are missing every shot, but the game have solutions for all of this either through feats, spells or simply moving your character to a different spot.

I have not come across many issues with the game so far, it runs very well, though i have had a couple of small issues;
The one that bothers me the most is that thieflings have white horns, no matter what i do. Larian has said they are going to hotfix this but it has not been fixed as of me making this review.
Occasionally the barter button in the store breaks and the game looses track of your gold, its there in the inventory but you have to manually put in the gold you require to purchase an item. A restart fixes the game not recognising your gold but still have to do the manual input until that too fixes itself randomly.

I have not finished the game yet, but i love every moment i spend in it and i already have multiple different runs in my mined lined up for when i do finish the game.

Larian absolutely nailed it with this one. They are not afraid to put in some adult content for those that want it, its not in your face if you don't want it and have toggles to disabled it if you don't want it.

Not every character is equally liked, but i don't actively dislike anyone that i have met so far.

Visually the game looks great, absolutely no complaints.

Like i said this is an easy 9/10 for me and easily among top 10 games of all times that i enjoy.
There are no live service nonsense, no micro-transactions, no purchase this and that. Just straight up "Here is your game, go and have fun". and oh boy is it fun.

-This- is what video games should be like. Not the ♥♥♥♥ that we have been getting the past 10 years.
We need a lot more of games like this, elden ring, cyberpunk etc, games that don't ask you to buy anything extra, just straight up game on and thats it.

I hear game companies out there asking us to look at this as an anomaly and not a new standard and to that i say:
NO. This game and games like mentioned above is the standard, its not even a new standard. This is how games used to be and this is how games should be. This game shows that you can make a good product that don't sell us less for our money like you are all claiming that you can't.

This is the golden standard for how a game should be:

A game playable from start to finish, no cash shop, no premium free to play mechanics, no locking all the best gear visuals behind a premium currency, no live service. Just a straight up simple single-player/co-op experience that is playable with minimal issues that is worth the 60+ dollars you are spending on it.

Thank you for reading and here is to more games like this in the future :)

There is very little i dislike about it and i love everything else, a very solid 9/10, will come back and update this review when i have finished the game :)

One of the best mmos i have played in many years. Having a lot of fun.