Recent reviews by the_machemer

It's a good game that can be played entirely in coop, but it's a bit sparse on content. 6 main story missions results in a ~10 hr campaign, and 7 operations (6 at launch and 1 added so far) provides some repeatable fun with friends. There is also PVP if that is your cup of tea. Plenty of options for playing dress-up with your Astertes with a bunch of the most famous space marine chapter's color schemes represented. Customization is quite granular so you can make yourself as lore-friendly (or not) as you like.

Good

Problem: My driveway and patio need to be pressure washed.
Solution: Hire a minority to do it for $300 and just buy Power Wash Simulator on sale for $20 instead of buying a pressure washer for $400 and doing it myself. Net savings of $80 after tax! Yes I know I can just rent a pressure washer, SHUT UP! STOP TRYING TO OUT-LOGIC ME!

Good

Place-holder review, waiting for full release.

Good game.

After having played nearly 140 hrs of Starfield, I've finally reached my first burnout and haven't booted it up in about a week, so I feel that I can now give a balanced review. Experientially, Starfield is Fallout 4 in space. If you've played Fallout 4 then you'll know what to expect on a fundamental level.

Story and Companions
I haven't finished it yet, but the main story and side content has been good so far, with some real standout quest lines like the Crimson Fleet. Companions work the same as they do in Fallout, whereby you do things that they like until they tell you more about themselves. You then do this enough times that they give you their affinity quest, a la Mass Effect. Complete that quest and then you become best friends, or more if you so choose. Companion variety is somewhat narrow, though, with a distinct lack of outright amoral followers. The game has a pretty fleshed out piracy mechanic and a whole pirate faction, but if you want to be a pirate then you better leave everyone at home or they will quickly begin to hate your guts.

Lore and World Building
The Fallout games have Starfield beat on world building. Fallout paints a vivid, and often dark, picture of a distant yet familiar past through its set pieces and terminal entries. Starfield has much more limited lore which it prefers to present through character dialogue and, in one instance, a long-winded museum exhibit about a faction's history. Fallout's lore is vast and well documented by numerous content creators, but those same creators can only seem to get enough material out of Starfield to make a scant few videos so far. This does not mean that Starfield's world is lacking, though, as there is still much to be gleaned. One of my favorite details is that the oldest ship manufacterer makes smaller parts with a NASA-punk theme, whereas more modern parts can come from a big list of manufacturers with corresponding themes dictated by the ship's intended role.

Gameplay Loop
Starfield's gameplay loop mainly consists of landing on a planet, traveling to a compass marker, and killing everyone there. Variety is provided by your environment and narrative context rather than your actions. Occasionally Bethesda throws you a curve ball like an intense zero-G gunfight aboard a space casino, but the game tends to stick to the formula. As we all know, landing on a planet comes in the form of an annoyingly unskippable cutscene, but more on that later. Traversal involves more than just mindless running thanks to the newly added boost pack and the different gravity levels encountered on each world. While high gravity worlds start to feel oppressive as you mostly just have to rely on running, low gravity worlds practically let you take flight with your boost-assisted jumps. FPS combat is essentially more of Fallout 4, featuring smooth gunplay like one would expect in the modern era. This is backed by a diverse collection of weapons with lots of potential upgrades. Unfortunately, tougher enemies are once again given massive health pools rather than having enhanced AI or movements, but I suppose this is par for the course.

Bases and Spaceships
Base building is generally slicker than in Fallout 4, but its utility is debatable. In Fallout, you'll want to build settlements for your settlers if you are serious about roleplaying the Minutemen faction, but in Starfield it mostly serves as a money farm. While building up your interstellar resource empire can be fun, you can't auto-sell your products. This means that the amount of money you can make comes down to how many landing and taking-off cutscenes you can stomach as you manually haul your goods to traders across the Settled Systems. Furthermore, making bank from selling said goods can become detrimental to your game experience as it can quickly trivialize the meaning of money. Ship building, on the other hand, is a fantastic addition. The ship builder tool is clunky but serviceable and provides a massive variety of parts with a great degree of freedom on how you want to build. Just a month after game release, there are already countless build videos online where players have been creating ships from other Sci-Fi franchises to their heart's content. Though not a key aspect of the main gameplay loop, ship combat also is a common occurance and has surprising depth without being overwhelmingly technical. While most players will be perfectly happy zipping around space like they're flying a jet fighter, veteran space dogfighters will be happy to know that strafing is not only possible but also a powerful skill. This may not be Elite Dangerous, but many techniques are transferable.

The Importance of Money
This is a personal preference, but I'm delighted that money is an actual contraint further into this game than previous Bethesda entries. While in previous titles the player becomes unreasonably rich after just a handful of hours and can buy anything, Starfield balances its economy by limiting loot and increasing expenses through ship building. These days, I play Skyrim with a mod that charges me heavy property taxes to balance out the immeasurable wealth I quickly accumulate from stripping the dead. However in Starfield, ship building is so expensive yet addictive (at least for me) that it becomes tough to maintain a sizable bank balance. When I start to lose interest in the gameplay loop, I can always focus on the next ship I want to build and how my current activities will help fund that dream.

Bugs
Perhaps I am plain lucky or maybe my hardware jives well with the game, but I have not encountered any serious bugs, and definitely nothing game breaking. I have barely had any CTDs and I have not had a single quest break on me. The worst bug I've had so far is when I shotgun blasted someone so hard that they phased through the wall and I had to use console commands to retrieve the quest objective from their body.

Now let's talk about the part of the game that seems to be the most controversial...

Exploration
The most common complaint seems to be that Starfield is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, to which my only response is "welcome to the space game genre!". Unless you have a PhD in something that beings with "Astro", you will find much of the same in real life if you were to step onto an alien world. Another common complaint is that Starfield does not have seamless space to ground transitions or seamless planet surfaces. Todd Howard may have told us some sweet little lies, but no doubt he did so with the approval of Bethesda's lawyers. We may not be legal experts, but by now we should be experts in tempering our expectations. Starfield is a Bethesda game. It was never going to be a space sim like Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Kerbal Space Program, etc. Anyone who has been deeply invested in the genre for the past decade will likely tell you that Starfield is an attempt to make a well-rounded Triple-A space RPG, and that the devs probably focused on certain features and excluded other due to technological limitations. Yes, Starfield is missing free flight and true planet exploration, but that's because it shifted its focus to its NPCs, story, and RPG elements; elements that are missing from it's competitors. I can understand how many people who are not familiar with space games might have bought Starfield hoping for "Star Citizen but actually finished and having a real narrative", but that's not a realistic expectation right now or anytime soon.

Conclusion
Starfield is a valiant attempt to harness existing technology to make a relatively feature-complete space game. Moreover, it is one of the bigger releases this genre has had and will surely generate more interest in this type of game. Cultivating a bigger audience correlates to more funding, which ultimately brings us closer to the day when we finally get that all-in-one space game that disappointed players thought Starfield was going to be

It's been a while since I've cussed at my monitor for a couple hours straight, but this game definitely made that happen and in the best possible way. I've never played an AC game before, but if this is representative of the franchise, then it must be a damn good franchise indeed.

The combat is fast and unforgiving, but satisfying when you get it right. The mech customization is extremely deep to the point of being bewildering at first, but after a few hours and a few deaths you start to realize why so much detail that goes into making a good build. Speaking of builds, this game is so well balanced that it encourages experimentation while avoiding "meta builds". I'm a simpleton that prefers long-range DPS builds, so I was hoping to play this game as a Skyrim stealth archer, but it quickly became apparent that that wasn't going to work. However, the fluidity of the combat mechanics helped me step out of my comfort zone and try far more aggressive play styles than I am accustomed to.

The graphics are good, even great at times. The world building is simple but intriguing. The gameplay is tough (even frustrating if you don't know what you're doing) and makes you think about how to min-max the game mechanics. The only short coming of the game is that you don't get a good visual sense of scale. Your mech is the size of a small apartment building, but it's so agile that you'd never know it. I couldn't tell how big it was until I realized that sometimes the small one-shot enemies that you destroy in droves with a shower multi-locking missiles are actually main battle tanks.

TLDR, if you want to have a genuinely engaging combat experience that makes you learn the mechanics and optimize your build, GET THIS GAME.

What can I even say?

Physics sandbox, flight simulator, mission planner, modder's paradise, educational tool, unrelentingly realistic rocketry simulator: KSP is all things to all men. I've played the game stock, at 6.4x scale, with more star systems, with Sci-Fi technologies, with our real solar system--the list goes on. While Steam shows my playtime in the hundreds of hours my actual playtime is likely in the mid-to-upper four digits across the last 8 years, yet I keep coming back for more. What started as an unconventional game recommendation ended up playing a role in shaping me into the person I am today, and instilling in me a passion for spaceflight that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

What I really mean to say with all this impressive talk is that KSP offers a level of gameplay depth that I've never experienced anywhere else. It's not an easy game to get into by any means as it takes hours of YouTube tutorials just to gain a foothold, and with realism mods it can require a university degree or two to master. However, if realistic space exploration sounds even remotely interesting to you then I highly recommend trying it out.