Recent reviews by Pojomania

Sony, a company known for awful security procedures, is demanding we create an account to continue playing this game.

If Sony continues this horrible move to try and bump up their userbase by leeching off a game they published, I will issue a refund and hope Steam has the player's best intentions in mind by allowing me to leave this game.

Unfortunately for Arrowhead they are trapped under the thumb of Sony and their game is going to be hit hard because of it.

Game was fun, but their publisher is ruining it for us all. We do not want a SONY account, just take the money from the game and microtransactions and leave us be.

Thankfully, now that SONY has backed off, I can make this a positive review. FOR DEMOCRACY!

I really wanted to enjoy this game, and for a short while, I did! I played through the game multiple times (in the way the game wants you to if you know what I mean) and I did genuinely have fun.

However, the game lacks so, so much compared to other games which I have recently tried to enjoy. A common thread with Bethesda games is that you will hear someone call them "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" which is taken to an extreme with this game. Exploration is limited to the same handful of tasks which grow repetitive. Quests, even handcrafted, feel like whiteboard level concepts that were never pushed far past that.

Loading screens are plentiful and overbearing, I have played several sci-fi space games and it Starfield is unique in the utter lack of immersion in traversing space. It feels like I am on an elevator, clicking buttons to move to my destination and finding any possible way to metagame and speed up the amount of clicks.

Bethesda developers have gone on record saying the game was only 'fun' to play a year or so before launch, and I believe them. Given the tight-lipped nature of all the teasers, release material, and content, it feels like they never had much of a game together until they got too close to the deadline. There doesn't seem to be a core to the game, everything is sort of just mashed together in a way that feels like the design document (if there ever was one) was a single page saying "space game with pseudo-elderscrolls factions, Fo4 building/customizing, and dragon shouts" which is bread and butter for bethesda, but with a NEW universe, there's no depth, no lore, NOTHING to look back on and call from!

The game has a portion which, to this day, utterly shocked me. I don't want to spoil things, but imagine if you will a world where quite literally nothing mattered, everything was going to be destroyed. You are roleplaying in this world. What might you assume you could do if NOTHING, and I mean literally NOTHING mattered in the end? I, personally, assumed I would have free reign to be as reasonable or as psychotic as possible, play like a person or go full murder hobo. Not so.

The game not only has a shockingly high amount of essential NPCs, there are now NPCs that simply ignore your attacks. They will stare at you, dimly, and shrug off your attempts to kill them. What is shocking, is that the main storyline does not require you protect or keep ANY npc around from what I can see. Killing everyone would have no effect on the function of the main quest. An example of the essential NPCs biting me badly is this:

I am tasked with buying a magical banana from an eccentric, slovenly fellow who does not wish to part with it. My response? I shoot them. To my utter surprise, not only is he dropped to the floor, simply begging for me to leave, I cannot coup de grace him! I can presumably dispatch about 90% of his ship, but I must leave him reclining on his chaise lounge forever, angry that I stole the magical silver banana from him. Why? Why is it so necessary for me to let him live? At no point did I ever return to him, I never wanted to, or had to.. I would have happily accepted the game simply failing some quests if I did. Even so, if I DID want to handle him again, there is a built-in way for me to do so on the same character.

All in all, the game feels uncoordinated, relies far too much on me playing the 'good guy' to even consider me taking a violent path, the exploration is dull after an hour, travelling is an elevator ride, the quests are often poorly thought out or lack any depth for roleplay, the lore and history are borderline nonexistent.

The game feels like it is an alpha meant to have dozens upon dozens of releases to add to the game, but I highly doubt they will. I expect modders to have to handle things from here, but I hope they don't. I'd like to call Starfield ambitious but that would require ambition. I can only liken their 25-year-in-the-making pitch to someone thinking of cola with cherry 25 years ago, then adding cherry flavour to an already existing soda and then saying you've created a whole new experience, 25 years in the making. You didn't, you just made the packaging look better and tweaked the taste.