Recent reviews by canshow

No amount of psychedelics could make me hallucinate as much as the game's AI.

Played it, beat it. Spoilers near the end.

Starfield is basically a total conversion mod of fallout 4 that has some funny dialogue, good voice acting, and decent side content.

Unfortunately, bethesda doesn't know what quality of life is (QoL). It is pretty evident in inventory management, base building, npc interaction (accidentally throwing grenades after dialogue due to shared hotkeys), etc.. You also have the option to crew your ship with companions for various bonuses- but you have to deal with endless arm-chair dialogue that gets really annoying really fast. I opted to de-crew myself because I don't need 3 people talking over eachother the entire time I am handling my ship. Barrett is the worst, and it almost feels like his character was made that way on purpose and tailored to a certain stereotype. Which is kind of ironic considering their inclusion of the pronoun system.

Probably the worst implementation of their QoL is in the POI (point of interest) system for planets, where each base/area is usually a 5 minute walk from your landing area or other POIs. So anytime you are planet side you can guarantee a lot of time wasted on dull travel if you are on a lifeless planet (which there are many). The fact that there is maybe like 6 different types of POIs only adds injury. This isn't an issue in the beginning- but after visiting so many planets and completing the main storyline (see spoilers below) it certainly does become a deal breaker of sorts.

In general, my biggest gripe is the new game+ progression where you start over with nothing but your level and learned perks from where you left off when you complete the main storyline. Instead of being able to pick different traits or modifying your character, you are stuck with whatever choices you made when first creating it. Huge bummer. Todd Howard (CEO) said the game is intentionally made to be played for a long time, but this limitation basically ends the replayability after an hour or so. There's not much else to see after this besides side-content you haven't explored, or different dialogue options. There's no reason to continue besides grinding for steam achievements for experiencing a rare universe.

Overall a decent game if you haven't played bethesda games before. Kind of a let down if you have. Definitely overpriced and I would not recommend playing until workshop is released. At the end of the day I'm left disappointed because this is just basically a Fallout 4/Elder Scrolls conversion mod.

This is a freaking mess.

Enabling certain modes will cause the game to break.
Ending your turn will sometimes cause the game to hang.
+ Abrupt game ends that circumvent victory conditions or disabled turn limits.

Update: It's gotten enough love since release that I can give it my love too. Engaging 4x RTS. Pretty similar to the original, but it's got enough to engage for a couple of play throughs.




OLD: Avoid at this time.

Release buyers had their experiences ruined with constant crashing/freezing. This is still an issue, but it has been patched enough to allow other serious problems to surface and spoil gameplay.

The game lacks QOL features and core mechanics are flawed. There is also an unintuitive learning curve associated with the automation system, which can and WILL break your empire until you've experimented enough (usually through several incomplete games).

MUD - Multi-user Dungeon. Basically a text-based RPG world that you share with other players.

This is my first MUD and I have to say that my experience has been one of the most fulfilling since I began gaming as a kid. The grind for just about anything whether it be experience, money, or skilling is packaged in a way where you always see sight of a goal or benefit. I don't have a great attention span and i'm still playing about ~1000 hours in.

Similar to what other reviewers have written, there exists an established player base with a willingness to help new players get on their feet. One of the cool things is that there really isn't any forced "roleplaying" in the sense that you have to write in the 3rd person or some-such, and generally chatting/partying with other players is fun.

The only downside is that most of the players are vets. There are few newbies. For combat-oriented play styles this generally means;

1) Experience / loot parties are made up of only vets, unless you're dedicated healer/utility.
2) If you're dedicated healer/utility, you're reliant on parties.
3) If you're capable of killing mobs and grinding on your own, you're not useful to vets.


As a result, the player market sees a wide disparity with its listings. If you happen to start during a game event where equipment is scrapped for special items (like I did) it will be a herculean task to assemble even the cheapest dedicated equipment set with-in a reasonable amount of time.


Overall, good content and satisfying to progress your character. Just kind of sucks that I usually can't get what I want from other players.

I couldn't even sit through the tutorial. Movement and combat are choppy and information is missing from quests.

The game is meh. It's your standard 4x MMO with questionable design choices and boring AI.


Turn based. Clunky. Rough.

The graphics and ship models are reminiscent of Space Empires 5, but micromanagement and ship control mechanics are fairly unsatisfying. Battles can be manually orchestrated, automated, or both. After a few bouts of manual fighting in small squad and large fleet formations, my interest in the combat system was largely extinguished and I opted to auto-resolve every battle. Designing ships, whether as part of a 1-design fleet or with several different ship types that complement themselves, feels constraining and not very fun.

Overall, the combat in this game is poor and most other indie titles have done it better.


The majority of this game is spent either on colony building or navigating through an obtuse UI. City building on planets is probably the only good part of this game, however even that has its drawbacks. Unfortunately, information in general is fairly decentralized. You have to go through several different tabs, or do math yourself, to figure out simple statistics or to justify construction choices. One of the more infuriating examples of this is having to go through each individual city screen to figure out how much of the population on your planet is employed/unemployed - which is fairly important because it is easy to run into worker shortages that can cause some serious problems.

In the end, you manage planets until they are fully built, sometimes tweaking existing ones due to advances in technology. Having to manage more than 1 developing planet at a time is exhausting, and becomes tiresome after a while.

Overall, planet building is above average and is, at least initially, more enjoyable than what most other titles offer.
That being said, the UI is just bad.


Research is typical. You have different categories with their own trees, and are locked out of parallel branches most of the time depending on your research choice.

Diplomacy is basic, and only good for trading tech. Which is kind of bad. Empires don't really declare war on each other, or on you unless you refuse to trade with them under coercion of war. AI will often create a "galactic council". Which will result in the same galactic resolutions or laws being constantly brought up for a simple yes/no/abstain vote, which basically ends up feeling like spam.

AI in general is basic. Not challenging in the slightest even on the toughest difficulty.

Notifications (to stop auto-turn ending and the like, because let's face it you will be passing turns like crazy waiting for research or colonies to mature) are annoying. There is no option to customize what will stop turns from auto-ending, and you will either have to decide to play the game by reading EVERY notification of what happens, such as finding a common ore deposit on a planet, or ignoring all of them - there is really no convenient in between.

You can't customize auto-save intervals, and there is no F5 quick save option either. (nor are there any hotkey options or settings for them).
Not an issue until you get perma-freezing 2 hours into a game and have to deal with it constantly reverting your progress.



TL;DR Combat sucks and you spend a lot of your time dealing with annoying ♥♥♥♥.

Pretty fun ship combat sim at this point in EA.

The content and the mechanics are beyond expectations, especially compared to the state of the game a few years ago.

Unfortunately, exploring and enjoying that content becomes an arduous task after a while. The game uses a large amount of resources for texture rendering, which causes large load times and occasional loading screens when traveling. There is now a mod that compresses textures, so there's that, but for me it's a little too late after having spent more than 10 hours in load screens (more so recovering from bugs or crashes than save-scrubbing).

As time goes on, more bugs manifest themselves and crashing starts to occur regularly. Character AI begins to degrade and experience longer response times and interruptions to active orders. Sometimes massive amounts of bodies are left on the field, a massive performance hit, yet there is no game option to adjust the life-time of corpses. Other times you see AI assault forces get stuck against terrain or spawn in an unreachable location. And if you're lucky, you won't have hostiles spawn in your base and murder your home forces when you're supervising an exploratory squad.

Overall the game is good, but there are a lot of small issues that snowball into headaches and I am afraid the developer is too limited in his capacity to do anything larger than simple fixes. One notable issue is that the game crashes when trying to exit it normally, and apparently it has eluded the developer for a long time. When you read something like that, you just have to wonder how sloppy the engine architecture must look after so many years in development.

While there is a sizable modding community which helps offset some of the game discomforts, the mods themselves feel like small patches and the community appears to be relatively disorganized (ergo no project combining a dozen mods into one, or something of that nature.) Maybe it just needs more time to develop, but as of now it has not.

If I had to provide a rating, it would be 6.5/10. Would be a solid 8/10 if the game and AI could just remain stable and functional.

You construct a space station, fill it with crew and modules, try to make money and expand your space station.

After 15 minutes, you have pretty much seen everything. At that point all you are doing is expanding your space station. It gets meaningless because there are some significant bugs which the developer has failed to address.

Not worth purchasing at this time.