Format: Windows 11
Genre: RPG
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Even though the game is fully rasterized with exclusively pre-baked lighting, models are of absurd triangle counts, while the texture detail is off the stellar charts. The indoor areas especially shine, with great material quality and tons of detail. Barren and rocky planet surfaces, with stars and perhaps a moon or two in the distance shining in the vacuum, are very evocative. Fewer compliments can be directed towards the player models and faces, which betray the title's "Gamebryo" engine origins. There is also an immense caveat regarding the game's overall presentation: Starfield has no native HDR implementation, and on top of that the black levels are elevated to such preposterous levels as to wash out the whole image. Hopefully this will be fixed in a patch-- but at the time of this writing, it is a huge issue.

It used to be that game music was used to elevate the experience. Anyone over the age of perhaps thirty-five can remember when it was fun to get to the next level of a, 8-bit or 16-bit release just to hear what the music would be. For the past twenty-odd years however, video game companies roll out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of talentless bozos who make "music" for commercials or Hollywood. Inon Zur is one of those guys, and his work here is typical: Hollywood orchestral, drones away in the background-- the best thing that can be said of it is that one doesn't notice it most of the time. The voice acting isn't great by modern-day triple-A standards either, particularly the awkward exchanges between the cowboy dude and his daughter onboard the player's ship. The combat noises-- gun shots, shouts from wounded-- are well done at least.

Starfield takes the best elements of several titles and dispenses with the lousy parts, molding the whole thing in hand like a misshapen lump of clay into something resembling a game: and it mostly works. It's "No Man's Sky" with instant fast travel and the fiddly survival management removed; it's "Wing Commander" with the combat extracted to stand on its own; it's "Doom Eternal" fun gunplay but with the hectic, stressful "paper-rock-scissors" elements expunged; and most importantly, it's an "Elder Scrolls" game-- complete with all of the dungeons, cool stat-based weapons plus armor, and more knick-knackety loot containers than a spacer pirate could shake a laser rifle at.

"Women are 'oppressed' and 'marginalized' and helpless, so every fiction universe needs to be a wet feminist's revenge fantasy, where all of the soldiers and leaders are strong-jawed independent abrasive women." Yes, Starfield does suffer from this narrative, and yes it is distracting. But there are also some non-ugly female characters and good-guy whiteys, giving Starfield only a bronze prize in the woke awards. With that out of the way and as a video game, Starfield is surprisingly compelling in the manner it stitches so many disparate elements together. The amount of dungeon and resource-filled planets to explore alone is daunting, while the game also manages to hide side quests and little stories in almost every nook and cranny. Like "Skyrim" before it, this is undoubtedly a Bethesda release people will be playing for years.