The hype for Starfield has somehow maintained a high level since it was first revealed at E3 2018. From Bethesda Game Studios, best known for their entries in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, Starfield has long been the beacon of hope in the distance for exclusive-starved Xbox fans.
Players take up the role of a lowly miner who, after coming in contact with a mysterious artifact, captures the attention of Constellation, an exclusive group of explorers who open the universe up for the player to explore.
The Koalaty Critics agree that Starfield is an incredibly technical achievement and easily the most stable Bethesda game at launch. The critics each found their own joy in the game with some enjoying the main quest, while others got lost in side quests and exploration. While they collectively put well over 100 hours of time into the game, many mentioned that they felt like they had only scratched the surface of what Starfield has to offer. The trademark unsettling NPC close-up in conversations, a large amount of sameness among the non-curated planets and the lack of actual spaceship flying were recurring negatives mentioned.
Starfield is available now in early access with the purchase of the Premium Edition on Xbox Series X|S and PC and fully releases on 6 September 2023.
Here’s what Australian critics are saying about the game.
KOALATY CRITICS — AUSTRALIAN CRITICS
Checkpoint Gaming — 9/10 (Elliot Attard)
The game’s questing varies in depth but impresses in breadth. Simply walking through a town will allow you to hear general chatter from the citizens that points you to new side missions and ‘activities’ that automatically update in your quest log. The game is massively expansive and the missions keep up, allowing you to while away tens if not hundreds of hours pursuing side activities, exploring faction missions, and following narrative threads.
GamesHub — 4/5 (Edmond Tran)
The quiet, humbling awe that comes from seeing and exploring the vast unknown – which Starfield clearly tries to evoke with its broad overall tone, vivid aesthetic, richly detailed worlds, and its tale of eager explorers – is so often drowned out by an unending stream of over-attentive noise and chatter urging you in all directions, and punctuated by humdrum, menu-based tasks.
Player2 — A (Jess Zammit)
The true joy of Starfield comes from discovery, and immersing yourself in the story it’s trying to tell. It’s a huge game, and it’s a huge achievement to have created it, and there is obviously merit in a game being this large also managing to feel so alive. But its strongest moments are in the details, like the objects strewn around the bedroom of an NPC that give you insight into their passions, or the conversations you’ll have with your companions that make you feel like maybe you’ve changed their outlook on something ever so slightly for the better.
Press Start — 9/10 (Brodie Gibbons)
Bethesda Game Studios has achieved the unthinkable. Starfield isn’t just a tremendous role-playing game, it’s one giant leap for a studio that has graduated from creating worlds for players to explore to creating a whole cosmos.
Stevivor — 8/10 (Jay Ball)
Bethesda’s latest offering is by no means perfect, and may not be for everyone. But for the sheer size of it, the beauty of the hundreds of different landscapes you can explore and the always engaging missions, Starfield is a massive technical achievement.
WellPlayed — 8.5/10 (James Wood)
Across the seemingly endless hours you could pour into it, Starfield gives space; space to traverse, space to ignore, space to be yourself, space to be someone else, space to simply be. The things it chooses to put in this space land with dramatically varying degrees of success, the game being both the studio’s most polished work to date and home to some of its weaker choices.
Aggregator Score
