This is more of a first impressions kind of review than I'd normally ever give. But I genuinely feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer after just a single 4ish hour sitting. I've never liked Bethesda's in-house games. Skyrim and Fallout 3/4 are some of my least favorite games ever. Their formula was already stretched thin with those games, it's laughable and a tad pretentious that they thought they could slap it onto a literal universal scale. The horrible engine all their games run on has at least seen a pretty noticeable upgrade here.
RPG mechanics both in combat and character interactions are bare bones. The skill trees keep me up at night with how creatively bankrupt they are conceptually. "Wow I waltzed up to a building it told me to go to and got +20 exp, levelling me up. Now I can choose on the flattest, lamest menu I've ever seen which type of gun I want to do 10% more damage". The only thing to note about the gunplay is that Bethesda's finally discovered the bare minimum for how guns are supposed to feel like. Which is to say it's fine, very standard. The dialogue is largely dreadfully dull. BUT there's a hint of almost quippy sarcasm and boomer humor reminiscent of a C-list MCU movie to spice up the flavorless prison food that is Bethesda dialogue. But yeah I can't imagine becoming invested in any character. Scenes where you're just a fly on the wall watching a bunch of experts in their field talk about stuff that barely pertains to you whatsoever. Only for them to turn to you and go Hey newbie, this is our life's work, and I've only just met you 2 minutes ago, but something about you gives me hope. I'm going to hire you to solve the answers of the universe in a nice focus tested 30-40 hour questline Not an immersive world but a series of story beats that simply happen to you because the game design is too shallow for anything remotely immersive to occur naturally.
The space setting is almost entirely just set dressing. If it's not mediocre dogfights you're just digging through clunky minimalist menus. I don't know how you spend so long making a space adventure game and come out with Choose planet to fly to on a menu. Wait for animation masking a load time to teleport you there. Then choose landing point. Load time. Now you're there It's so pitiful, especially after recently playing the excellent Outer Wilds. An indie game that lets you physically fly to every planet and land on them seamlessly with no load times and good pacing to boot. I've played not even a small fraction of the time they want people to play this game and I'm already sick to death of seeing all the Ship taking off/landing/docking/fast travel light speed/character sitting down animations. Imagine every time you fast travel in skyrim there was 2-3 relatively lengthy animations every single time you did it before the loading screens even hit. Their game design has not been updated to accomodate this new scale at all.
In a sense this is the best Bethseda game given the engine improvements. The fast running speed and quick stamina refills alone make the game more tolerable than the studio's other open world abominations. But it's also the most boring Bethesda game at the same time. Didn't know it was possible to be more mundane than Skyrim or emptier than Fallout but here we are.
I'll likely do another few sessions with this game and (a hard maybe on this) finish the main story. If my mind is changed I'll come back on here and write an essay about how much of a d*ang fool I was. More likely I'll be back with an even lower score and more complaints but hey we'll see. Maybe roaming around some randomly generated planets looking for some thrilling hallway Skyrim dungeons will make the game seem filled with unpredictable wonder and awe somehow.
RPG mechanics both in combat and character interactions are bare bones. The skill trees keep me up at night with how creatively bankrupt they are conceptually. "Wow I waltzed up to a building it told me to go to and got +20 exp, levelling me up. Now I can choose on the flattest, lamest menu I've ever seen which type of gun I want to do 10% more damage". The only thing to note about the gunplay is that Bethesda's finally discovered the bare minimum for how guns are supposed to feel like. Which is to say it's fine, very standard. The dialogue is largely dreadfully dull. BUT there's a hint of almost quippy sarcasm and boomer humor reminiscent of a C-list MCU movie to spice up the flavorless prison food that is Bethesda dialogue. But yeah I can't imagine becoming invested in any character. Scenes where you're just a fly on the wall watching a bunch of experts in their field talk about stuff that barely pertains to you whatsoever. Only for them to turn to you and go Hey newbie, this is our life's work, and I've only just met you 2 minutes ago, but something about you gives me hope. I'm going to hire you to solve the answers of the universe in a nice focus tested 30-40 hour questline Not an immersive world but a series of story beats that simply happen to you because the game design is too shallow for anything remotely immersive to occur naturally.
The space setting is almost entirely just set dressing. If it's not mediocre dogfights you're just digging through clunky minimalist menus. I don't know how you spend so long making a space adventure game and come out with Choose planet to fly to on a menu. Wait for animation masking a load time to teleport you there. Then choose landing point. Load time. Now you're there It's so pitiful, especially after recently playing the excellent Outer Wilds. An indie game that lets you physically fly to every planet and land on them seamlessly with no load times and good pacing to boot. I've played not even a small fraction of the time they want people to play this game and I'm already sick to death of seeing all the Ship taking off/landing/docking/fast travel light speed/character sitting down animations. Imagine every time you fast travel in skyrim there was 2-3 relatively lengthy animations every single time you did it before the loading screens even hit. Their game design has not been updated to accomodate this new scale at all.
In a sense this is the best Bethseda game given the engine improvements. The fast running speed and quick stamina refills alone make the game more tolerable than the studio's other open world abominations. But it's also the most boring Bethesda game at the same time. Didn't know it was possible to be more mundane than Skyrim or emptier than Fallout but here we are.
I'll likely do another few sessions with this game and (a hard maybe on this) finish the main story. If my mind is changed I'll come back on here and write an essay about how much of a d*ang fool I was. More likely I'll be back with an even lower score and more complaints but hey we'll see. Maybe roaming around some randomly generated planets looking for some thrilling hallway Skyrim dungeons will make the game seem filled with unpredictable wonder and awe somehow.