Starfield PS5 Review: Bethesda's Flawed Interstellar RPG Rewards Patience

When Starfield launched on Xbox and PC in 2023, it struggled to find the kind of love and acceptance Bethesda games usually do. The expansive sci-fi title wasn't bereft of the rustic charms of a Bethesda RPG, but its rocket-sized ambitions were often held back by the gravity of its inherent limitations. The quirks of Bethesda's Creation Engine that lent a distinct flavour to the studio's previous games became frustrating bottlenecks in Starfield. Frequent loading screens, an interminable game world that often felt empty, and a swath of technical issues meant Starfield aimed for the stars but fell short of reaching escape velocity.

Nearly three years later, the interstellar RPG has finally arrived on PS5, along with a major update that promises to streamline the fragmented space travel experience. There are several other quality-of-life improvements and a wide berth of new features that, Bethesda claims, make the latest iteration of the game the “most complete and evolved Starfield experience.” This is certainly the most complete version of the game, bundling all previous patches, fixes, major updates, content additions and the second story expansion — Terran Armada — in a single release.

But if you're expecting the major update, dubbed Free Lanes, to act as a panacea for all of Starfield's ills, you will likely be disappointed. Yes, you can now travel freely between points of interest in a star system, and space travel is a far smoother experience now than it was when the game launched, but Starfield is still the game it always was: a flawed sci-fi RPG that gets a lot wrong. At the same time, Bethesda's ambitious game does a lot of the important things right. Starfield understands the allure of deep space, of exploring unknown worlds and unravelling cosmic mysteries. And even if it doesn't quite hit the right notes, it has the unmistakable rhythm of a Bethesda game.

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Starfield takes place in the distant future where humans have cracked faster-than-light travel as Earth becomes uninhabitable. Technological advances, unfettered space exploration, and radical new discoveries have catapulted civilisation into a kind of interstellar utopia, where humans have settled multiple star systems and live lives not too dissimilar to the one on Earth today. Instead of nation states, there are factions — each with its own ideology and agenda, and people live in a brokered peace after years of colonial wars.

The game's playground is the Settled Systems, a region of space far beyond the reaches of our own Solar System. And like every Bethesda game, you are the unnamed “chosen one” whose actions will define the course of the entire world. Here, your journey begins as a space miner who stumbles into a mysterious artefact that could hold cosmic secrets about the fate of the galaxy. Coming in contact with the artifact triggers a surreal vision across space and time, and when you awaken from the experience, you're recruited by a group of space explorers, called Constellation, to track down more such artifacts and uncover the final mystery of the universe.

Home, sweet home: the Solar System
Photo Credit: Bethesda/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Familiar but compelling, right? Starfield's premise holds the same invitation that all Bethesda games extend: let's go on an adventure. It's a starting point for limitless possibilities, the possibility of writing your own story, becoming who you want. More than any other studio, Bethesda has always excelled at making it feel like the game world is your oyster. And Starfield does this, too. As in other Bethesda games, in your journey, you come across several factions and have the option to join them, essentially becoming a mercenary in space, taking odd jobs, bounties, investigations, and missions that take you across several star systems.

The idea is to get lost in space. You could, if you want to, stick to the main story — and it's a satisfying questline that delivers a few strong narrative moments, even if it takes a while to get there — but Starfield's distractions are more numerous than the ones in older Bethesda games. Here, you aren't just limited to a single province of Tamriel like Skyrim. Instead, you get over a thousand planets and their moons to explore. You do lose the handcrafted texture of games like Skyrim and Fallout; Starfield's worlds are procedurally generated, and not all planets offer the same depth of content. While Bethesda has addressed the blankness of the game's interminable world through updates, Starfield can still feel empty and at times repetitive.

Starfield's planets can often feel empty and lifeless
Photo Credit: Bethesda

Most planets you'll visit are home to a few outposts or research stations that are often crawling with the Crimson Fleet, an outlaw band of space pirates. But the breadth of experiences on offer is more than enough to sustain you, whether you choose to follow the main quest thread, or prefer to get sidetracked amongst the stars. The PS5 version of Starfield is also a lot different from the game that launched on PC and Xbox in 2023. In the time since, Bethesda has released a ton of content updates and patches that help populate Starfield's desolate planets with things to do, while also making the vast swathes of empty planetary terrain easier to navigate.

What I imagine has remained the same is the sense of wonder that underlines the Starfield experience. If you, like me, are endlessly fascinated by the infinite mysteries of space and inevitably seduced by science fiction, then Starfield will fulfil fantasies that few games can. Early in the game, the main questline takes you back to the Sol system, where Earth now lies cold and abandoned. I couldn't help but put the mission objective on hold and land my spaceship on the Moon. Running and jumping around on Earth's silvery satellite, recreated in Starfield with painstaking accuracy, was one of the most wondrous experiences I've had in recent games. If you take your time and explore the Moon's surface, you can also find the Apollo 11 landing site.

They put a man on the Moon
Photo Credit: Bethesda/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

It's moments like these that propel Starfield beyond its scripted story. Bethesda games work best as a dough of clay in the player's hands. You shape your journey and craft your tale the way you like. You can be an adventurer unafraid of taking an arrow to the knee, or a mercenary on a quest to become the richest a**hole in Settled Systems, or a rogue space pirate smuggling contraband across planets. Starfield allows you to do that and more. The new Free Lanes update doesn't transform the game to what many have wanted it to be — a truly open experience akin to No Man's Sky — but it does reduce the friction that came with space travel before.

Bethesda says Free Lanes is Starfield's most expansive update yet that brings considerable improvements to space travel, progression, ship crafting, customisation, outpost building and more. The most impactful is the Cruise Mode feature that aims to transform space travel in the game, allowing you to freely travel in open space or to points of interest between planets within a star system. The update also adds new space encounters, which makes exploration more worthwhile. Space isn't just a cold, empty expanse between places you need to go. I often found myself chasing rogue ships or lost distress signals when piloting my vessel.

The Free Lanes update makes space travel smoother in Starfield
Photo Credit: Bethesda/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Ship building and customisation in Starfield is one of the most mechanically deep systems in the game. You start off with the Frontier, the starter ship loaned to you by the Constellation, but you can buy and build ships to your liking, arranging ship modules as if they were LEGO bricks. The same depth is seen in outpost building and crafting systems, too. With the Free Lanes update, you also unlock additional tiers of upgrades for your gear. Outposts get a unified container that allows you to share items and resources between structures you've built across the Settled Systems — a sort of shared cloud storage in outer space. These and other quality-of-life enhancements make Starfield a lot less cumbersome than it was before.

Starfield also represents the most refined gameplay yet seen in a Bethesda game. The gunplay here is functional, robust even, despite lacking the feedback and weight of a true shooter. It is leagues ahead of the shooting in Fallout 4. There's a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, both ballistic and melee. Combat encounters, however, do get repetitive. And of course, Starfield's gameplay isn't free of jank. It is a Bethesda game, after all. And the days of Skyrim are long gone. It's now much more difficult to just say “it's a feature, not a bug” and ignore the clunkiness of a Bethesda title, even if you reserve some fondness for the same.

Starfield features the most improved gunplay in a Bethesda game
Photo Credit: Bethesda

Ship combat and traversal, on the other hand, is perhaps Starfield's most polished aspect. Travelling between planets within a star system, whether in cockpit view or third-person camera, feels seamless now, even if the seams become visible when you try landing on a planet. Ship combat, too, feels responsive and fun, though perhaps not as accessible and arcadey as the dogfights in Star Wars Outlaws. But the feeling of captaining your ship across star systems in Starfield, with the ability to customise your vessel to fit the story you've created for your character, remains unmatched.

Despite fixes and updates, Starfield is an experience frequently interrupted by loading screens — whether you're landing or taking off from a planet or entering and exiting a building. There are more egregious issues, too, including technical ones. The massive game world is perhaps impossible to get rid of bugs and glitches completely, but the PS5 version of the game is unforgivably susceptible to crashing. Many players have reported game-crashing bugs; I experienced hard crashes thrice in my time with the RPG. Bethesda has since released a hotfix that should address the problem.

Ship combat feels polished in Starfield
Photo Credit: Bethesda

There are performance issues, too. I played Starfield on the base PS5 on Performance mode, which largely holds up at 60fps during combat, space exploration, and indoor areas. The framerate, however, drops drastically in major human settlements like New Atlantis and Akila City. These drops, while not ideal, are expected, considering the scale of these townships. These are the biggest cities Bethesda has ever crafted in a game. They're heavily populated and are filled to the brim with shops, restaurants, and faction buildings. Outside of these cities, Starfield's performance is admirably stable, considering the scale and scope of the game.

Starfield's visuals are a mixed bag, too. At times, especially when looking at the bigger picture, the game is stunning. When the light of a star hits the hull of your ship as you emerge out of the dark side of a planet, Starfield conjures an image worth remembering. But when you zoom in, uncanny valley faces, a trademark of Bethesda games, stare back at you. It's of course much more refined than previous games from the studio, but character and environment detail in Starfield pales in comparison to modern titles. On the other hand, indoor areas, especially ship interiors, are highly detailed and convincing. They follow a clear visual grammar — Bethesda calls it NASApunk — that lends authenticity to the world of Starfield.

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Starfield is prone to framerate drops in bigger cities
Photo Credit: Bethesda/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Ultimately, despite a trove of new content and fixes, and the Free Lanes update, Starfield remains a flawed experience on the PS5. With its world clearly designed for width rather than depth, the RPG often feels stretched thin, like there's simultaneously a lot to see and not a lot to do. But the Settled Systems can become an immersive, engaging world if you look beyond the flaws to craft your own adventure. That is the true Starfield experience.

And it is difficult to resist the familiar charms of a Bethesda game. If you've spent hundreds of hours in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, you will likely spend a hundred more in Starfield. It might not have the same effect on you any more, but it remains familiar and comforting in ways that other, better games are not. Starfield's evocative score, its cosmic drama, and its inherent romance are enough to make it worth your time. Like every Bethesda game, it exerts a pleasant gravitational force that makes you feel you're on familiar ground. And if you allow yourself to be pulled in, you might just find your piece of rock in outer space.

Pros

• Massive game world
• Engaging ship combat, exploration
• Deep RPG systems
• Trademark Bethesda charm
• Major Free Lanes update  
• In-depth ship building

Cons

• Crashing issue on PS5
• Bugs and glitches
• Largely empty game world
• Frequent loading screens

Rating: 8/10