The Reviews are in for Starfield – what the biggest names in gaming are saying
Starfield drops in less than a week, and it’s no secret how important the game is to both fans and Xbox alike. It’s the first Xbox exclusive from Bethesda since Microsoft acquired the open-world studio. Bethesda’s last big open-world game was Fallout 76, a critically-panned entry in the Fallout series. It’s Xbox’s only big game this fall, followed by PlayStation’s Spider-Man 2 and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
And the reviews are split.
The early reviews are in for Starfield, and they’ve divided reviewers. Harsher opinions are coming in from major gaming publications like Polygon (“Starfield sterilizes the final frontier” by reporter Nicole Carpenter), Gamespot (“To Infinity, But Not Beyond” by reporter Michael Higham) and IGN (which gave the last Bethesda open-world game, Fallout 4, a 9.5). Meanwhile, outside of trade publications, it’s gotten some near-perfect scores, with a 9.5 from Forbes, five stars from GamesRadar, and countless other glowing recommendations.
So who to listen to? Should you get Starfield or not? We here at Render Distance haven’t touched Starfield yet – we’ll be playing it on launch day with everyone else (with a review later) – but we’ve compiled the scores and words of the biggest gaming publications to help you out.
IGN – 7/10
“It’s never a great sign when someone recommends a game on the grounds that it gets good after more than a dozen hours, but that’s very much the kind of game Starfield is, and I do recommend it. There are a lot of forces working against it, and the combination of disjointed space travel, nonexistent maps, aggravating inventory management, and a slow rollout of essential abilities very nearly did it in. It was the joys piloting a custom spaceship into and out of all sorts of morally ambiguous situations in a rich sci-fi universe that eventually pulled it out of a nosedive. I’m glad that I powered through the early hours, because its interstellar mystery story pays off and, once the ball got rolling, combat on foot and in space gradually became good enough that its momentum carried me into New Game+ after I’d finished the main story after around 60 hours. Like Skyrim and Fallout 4 before it, there’s still an immense amount of quality roleplaying quests and interesting NPCs out there, waiting to be stumbled across, and the pull to seek it out is strong.”
Dan Stapleton
POLYGON – Unscored
“With Starfield, Bethesda has put all of its efforts into exploring the dark, vast corners of outer space. In the process, it has drained a lot of the humanity I was hoping to find in its wake. In trying to do everything, Starfield obfuscates its most compelling mysteries.”
Nicole Carpenter
GAME INFORMER – 8.5/10
“It took me a long time to fall in love with Starfield, and even after I did, certain aspects didn’t work for me. But the things I didn’t enjoy are vastly outweighed by my enthusiasm for this new, original science fiction universe, the breadth of its adventures, and the appeal of its many interwoven stories. Go in with the expectation that it will take some time to find your footing in such a vast gameplay space, and there’s a universe well worth discovering here.”
Matt Miller
GAMERANT – 10/10
“Starfield delivers on everything it promised and then some. It's the ultimate sci-fi game, giving players an incomprehensibly massive world to explore and letting them play however they want. Starfield has what it takes to be another Skyrim-level game that's played religiously for the next decade. It's utterly engrossing, an absolute must-play, and the best Xbox console exclusive in years.”
Dalton Cooper
