If you want to pretend to be Boba Fett, you can do that. Tweaking your shield and weapon power levels to try and get an advantage in fights feels crunchy and satisfying, while you can also board disabled ships and take them for yourself if you’re that way inclined, making space combat a satisfying diversion to scuffling around planetside.Ĭonversely, on-world combat feels very similar to Fallout 4 or Fallout: New Vegas, although many planets have their own gravity and the addition of boost packs - a jetpack, proving that a rose by any other name does smell just as sweet providing the rose is a jetpack - means that firefights feel quite different to most other games. When this goes wrong, and it likely will, you’ll get into dogfights that feel thrilling but also mechanically complex. There’s even ship-based stealth, where you cut the power to all of your ship’s systems and chug slowly forward in the hope of avoiding detection.

The way parts of your ship slowly thrum to life as you power up various systems is satisfying, the clunky way you power through space makes fights feel tense, lasers and ballistic rounds bouncing off your shield as you keep an eye on the all-important hull strength. Building spaceships is one part of Starfield that feels expansive and, even on a controller, toggling power between your ship’s different systems is easy to do but feels surprisingly intricate. Whether you're blasting through a zero-G casino or engaging in space dogfights, its high points are some of the best committed to binary.If they’re on the ship, they’re getting a ticket to the main event. Ship-building is incredible, as you tack infirmaries, turrets and the like onto your rig, while classic Bethesda RPG fodder such as lock-picking and persuasion mini-games have never been better. Exploration is simple – after landing on a planet, the game generates points of interest – mainly caves and the like – which often contain mini-quests. Pilfering from Hollywood, there's a funky retro sci-fi vibe here, with themed planets that rip off everything from Westerns to Cyberpunk. However, after 10 hours, and with a big gun and bigger ship, Starfield sinks its teeth into you. Without quests or travel points, the early game is pretty sparse. It doesn't put its best foot forward, though, and can be overwhelming at first. While you can finish the main story in around 30 hours, that's just the tip of this iceberg, with a sea of side quests and, well, just stuff. You can land anywhere on any of Starfield's thousand planets – so if you want to see everything on offer, good luck setting up your console in the old folks' home.

Space casino starfield