Recent reviews by Mars

Not worth the time.

You likely played a similar game many times already.
But this one has: Boring and poorly told story, boring missions, boring charactrers. You likely won't remember anything, probably even the disappointing ending.

On the plus side: The visuals are great, the maps are interesting, and shooting is ok.

It is December 2023 and in its current state you should avoid this game.

The positives:
The assets are high quality, the starship design mechanic is cool, the graphics are decent (nothing to write home about, but for a BGS game they are superb), I haven't encountered any heavy bugs (twice the game got stuck whens tarting a dialogue - no option to choose, no option to leave the dialogue) and some minor ragdoll/physx weirdness - but they didn't affect my enjoyment. There are some ok-ish quests, which were fun, but they couldn't revert the overall disappointment.

The negatives:
This game is badly designed. The world, story and gameplay, are all below average, inconsistent, they don't work together and are simply not fun.

The world is empty, but not in a "space is empty" kind of way. It is as if someone copied and pasted small village relations onto the vastness of space without ever thinking what this vast space even means. The division of everyone into several factions is also ridiculous. All of humanity, everyone in the galaxy belongs to several unified groups... and this also represents the village scale of the world.

What about writing? Bethesda games were never loved because of their wiriting, but buo, do they achieve an all time low here... what the people talk about, how they talk about it, and what they say are terrible. The dialogue is boring, incompetetently wirtten (this is ChatGPT level of writing seemingly prompted by someone who doesn't write for a living) and to top it off - the pacing is just awful.

There is no character to the people speaking. Everyone speaks slowly, with almost no emotion. It hurts to sit through any conversation. The comparison of the negotiation scene between Starfield and Cyberpunk which you can find on youtube will show you what high-stakes drama in Starfield looks like. Every conversation is padded, it takes a paragraph or more to say "yes". And it is even worse when the ideas are slightly more complex - like motives. Then you get lenghty elaborations even when you weren't asking.
There is almost no choice in the dialogues you are almost always railroaded into one option, and when there is choice it usually boils down to do it stealthily or by force (in general when you choose to do stuff stealthily, your companions approve, when you support forceful solutions they disapprove).

So the characters speak in a boring way, maybe they themselves are interesting? Not in the slightest. NPCs are expoosition and inclusion posts - you could switch any two NPCs and it wouldn't make any difference. There is no weight to any of the dialogue, so you essentially click on NPCs to get quest markers. There is maybe a bunch of characters in the whole game whom you will remember (the collector-captain and I'd have to think long to name another one).

Then maybe companions are good? They are even worse. All are paper-thin paragons, and your entourage does not consist of cool characters you'd like to accompany you on an adventure, characters that are well placed in their role in the setting. You ahve a single-father space cowboy (who for some reason decides to do dangerous missions along with his kid [stowed on the ship, but considering space battles, that wouldn't be very smart]), a ~45 year old lady who is the leader of the organization, but decides to do some field-work. A cult girl which constantly talks about her dark past and how hard it is for her to share that dark past, so please don't ask, but remember that it is very dark. A scientist that gifts you your ship, he doesn't have much going on except for missing his husband very much. Other than that you have a black dude with a russian accent who just happens to be the owner of a satellite station near the largest human habitat. A billionaire co-owner of a huge corporation, who decides to join the whole occult-science group instead of focusing on his duties as the CEO. And the list goes on, suffice it to say that the characters are badly written and misplaced.
Vasco, your robot companion is the least cringeworthy, but it does contain the run of the mill robot-coping-with-human-emotions trope going on.
Oh, and your companions constantly nag about you hauling too much stuff in your inventory, as if BGS didn't know that their playerbase are hamster-explorers in disguise.

So maybe the story is good? The main quest is... uninteresting, it starts to get almost enjoybale right by the end [all those Starfield gets better 15h in, give it some time" memes are correct], which is copied from No Man's Sky. The faction quests are better, but the bar was set really low. You have an alien/starship trooper themed questline, corporate espionage one, firefly/cowboy bebop inspired one and Dead Money (New Vegas DLC) treasure island inspired one. All of them would be better as the main quest. It all feels as if the game was a huge demo for what is possible in the engine and not really created as a coherent game.

So, what about the gameplay? It is a frankenstein of mechanics that are a legacy from previous titles, but they don't really work together. The spaceship creation mechanism is great. Other than that, you can build outposts - which was unnecessary considering that you have a spaceship, the outposts disappear between NG+, you can buy homes in several places in game... but they already had the code from Fallout 4 and people liked building outposts in Fallout. But nobody asked themselves what is the difference between creating outposts in a small finite world where you can visit them often and a procedurally generated vast space, where you have no real incentive to visit your outpost twice. The lockpicking minigame is again, tedious. It is interesting the first few times but considering that you lockpick and hack into computers with the same tool and minigame is quickly overstays its welcome.
Also having to mine for resources on planets or from gathered loot is, once again, tedious, scanning planets and their fauna and flora is also tedious and considering that it doesn't affect the story or gameplay there is no reason to do it unless you really want to. Again, there is a difference in exploring a world which you are going to revisit, learning about the flora and fauna which you might encounter again and doing the same where almost every planet is visited once and forgotten. Also, you do not learn anything from those scans so it is more like a collectathon with no payoff (you can sell the data you gather, but you'll get more by vacuuming the locations you explore).

Character development is based on perks, which you have to get to do certain things in game such as sneaking, flying, using your boost pack etc.

Persuasion minigame is also a step in the right direction as it requires you to convince your opponent in a dialogue, not a static check. At first it seemed that they react more positively or negatively based on what you choose (ie. did you choose the correct argument for that person), but it quickly turns into a stat check (where you can choose basically any option to convince them - up to the point where a key character will give you their safe access card which they were supposed to guard because "you are so annoying").

And last, the combat. It is servicable. There is a decent arsenal of weapons, but all feel basically the same, the shots have no punch, the enemies aren't particularily enjoyable to fight, they are mostly bullet sponges that occasionally deal some damage to you.

To sum up, I really wanted to like this game but in its current state Starfield is not worth the money or the time.

Jagged Alliance 3 is a fantastic return to form, with some QoL improvements, bit of unneded simplifications and tons of charm that are going to keep you plating for hours.
The creators of JA3 managed to capture the spirit of the game, that no other successor was not able to do since JA2. Hope that they decide to continue the franchise.

Avoid.

The game overstays its welcome, the art is ok, but dialogue and the linear plot are tedious and uninspired, characters are shallow and uninteresting. The music seems to be a single looped track, that you are going to have to turn off at some point to keep your sanity.
The amount of picross puzzles is satisfactory, but at the same time, they are mostly small and quite abstract. The size might be a deliberate choice to make the puzzles short, but the abstractness makes the task vapid - you are simply filling in squares as an abstract pattern [based on the picross rules] which then is miraculously turned into an object you were supposed to find as a clue in your investigation.

Works well on the Steam Deck [alas, at some point the option to show inventory items to interrogated characters disappears and you have to go to a menu and exit the menu to bring it back].

I was fearing the worst remembering the old classics, but apart from the budget 3d, which I do not like, the games revive the magic of the old Sierra titles.