I played a fair amount of Half-Life: Alyx on a friend's old Vive way back when it first came out, and only came back to finish it on the Quest 3 recently (so I could watch the funny gnome series, naturally), so I lost the initial "wow" factor that pushes this into the god tier for most people. After beating it, I started playing the VR version of the Resident Evil 4 remake. It was only then, when I started trying to open every drawer and pick up every object in that game, that I realized what I'd taken for granted. The natural immersion of just being able to interact with Alyx's world in normal, non-"gamey" ways is the greatest trick it pulls, it turns out, and I miss it already.

Besides that, the game's just plain fun. The Jeff chapter is a standout, packed with clever puzzles, pitfalls, and pranks that make the absolute most of the mechanics, but it's a blast from start to finish. Whatever Valve's actual game devs have been doing in their cage, they clearly haven't lost a step in the near-decade since Portal 2.

The cliffhanger ending is absolutely hilarious, though. Valve goes on record saying that they'll only make another Half-Life if it lives up to the franchise's "total game changer" pedigree; they also go on record saying that Alyx doesn't get a melee weapon because testing revealed melee in VR to feel bad (correct); then in the last ten seconds of the game they put you in Gordon's body and hand you a crowbar like they expect you to expect any chance of a followup. Masterful trolling.

In short, the video game equivalent of a prosaic sports coach's platitude laden pep talk prior their team getting steamrolled.

You'd be forgiven for going into Starfield expecting an ambitious game. All the marketing spoke of exploration and wonder on the edge of space, of Bethesda's biggest ever game, and of harnessing the spirit of early human space exploration. Everyone wanted us to believe this was a massive undertaking, something new for Bethesda after a quarter century of middling fantasy and a purchased IP.

Starfield is none of that, however, choosing instead to cling so tightly to the vine the game was grown on that the only result is rot.

At its core Starfield is the cynical combination of Fallout's mechanics teetering on top of Skyrim's narrative structure. The amalgamation presents itself as if a checklist of features from those games was simply devised in a conference room and worked through with little else in the way of thought.

Combat and exploration behaves almost identically to Fallout, with the added wrinkle of RPG-esque aim sway on all the weapons for the purpose of annoying, but rarely hindering, players who have not put points into combat categories.

Like Fallout, melee weapons are useless, no matter how heavily the character is built for them. All but the weakest enemies in all but the smallest groups will chunk away enough health to send even committed players ducking for cover and resorting to ranged weapons - if the lack of variety in a game 5+ years in the making doesn't see them simply falling back to whatever is easiest first.

Stealth in melee range is similarly broken to its predecessor, becoming mostly useless thanks to a game design that does not support that type of play. Even the game's seemingly powerful cloaking armor is fairly useless, having no appreciable impact on whether or not an enemy detects the player. At a distance stealth remains the most powerful option in the game, with the only reason to forgo attempting a sneaky approach being general apathy or impatience on the part of the player.

The weapons even fall into the same categories as Fallout, with a couple of weapon types forced to the forefront due to a lack of ammo for the others. Starfield even replicates the uselessness of automatic weaponry in its immediate gameplay predecessor, with the prospect of chewing through your entire supply of ammunition impotently plinking away at enemy health bars feeling vastly inferior to high damage single shot weapons with stealth bonuses. Dumping 50+ shots into a guy when you could take him out in 2-3 has never been less appealing a decade on.

Insofar as there are any changes to the systems designed for Fallout 4, the changes presented are mostly aesthetic or simply outright bad.

The digipicking mini game at least replaces lock picking and hacking mini games with something more engaging, although replacing both with the same thing all but guarantees it will become a loathed element of this game in time.

The changes to how Persuasion works in conversations, however, are a significant downgrade. An impressive feat considering the process in previous Bethesda titles, or adjacent games like Fallout New Vegas, varied from straight skill check to invisible dice roll. The brainless back and forth, often involving NPCs responding to head scratching player options with equally nonsensical generic voice lines, not only makes the process more tedious, but also succeeds at somehow making talking your way into and out of ridiculous situations even more absurd and unbelievable than in past games; it is hard to take the feature seriously when it almost always involves the other party in the conversation turning into an absolute fool, easily fleeced by the rhetorical equivalent of "got your nose".

At least the days of a single skill check or dice roll let me imagine a more complex conversation occurred, instead of asserting that no, in fact, a pair of absolute goobers engaged in a madlibs skit instead.

The most disappointing mechanical failure comes in the form of the game's building system, something so stripped bare and thoroughly neutered it's a shock Bethesda touted it as a selling point at all. A true achievement considering Fallout 4 settlement building was notoriously ropey and under designed. Even Fallout 76's building offers more variation and interest than Starfield, a game that's willing to charge you 235,000 in game credits for a space so small that it makes the notoriously tiny Dugout player home from Fallout 4 seem palatial in comparison.

It's rather absurd a system vital to the longevity of the studio's previous big release is so functionally inert here. Building options are so few, and limitations so strict, one wonders if even the actually ambitious elements of Bethesda's modding community will attempt to construct something fun, or even less profoundly annoying to engage with, than the desiccated corpse of a concept Bethesda kicked out the door as if attempting to kill desire for it in their player base.

Still more elements are downgrades by way of simplification. Character creation is an unwieldy system of morph target mixing that actually makes constructing a character harder, while aiming for simplification. The UI is simplified to the point of the user experience suffering as a result of its consistent vagueness. Gone are the actual RPG inventory and equipment systems of previous Bethesda games, replaced by a gear spread more resembling the original Mass Effect with all of the players stats tied into a single armor element and a helmet.

Perhaps I'd care more if anyone but the people working on assets for Starfield cared, or the simplification afforded more variance and customization of what is available, but the simmering disappointment in the systemic simplicity of the game faded to apathy when the "grounded" sci-fi world of Starfield handed me a soviet era special forces rifle (a VSS) named "Old World Hunting Rifle" without any sign of irony. Why care about the gear in this game when the game clearly does not?

A good deal of new mechanics seem relatively pointless, or at least under cooked. The zero gravity combat works well enough in the exceedingly rare instances where it appears. The jump pack adds some minor verticality to the combat, but is held back by being bound up in the skill tree and thus relegated to a design afterthought. The same questionable player hitboxes that have made climbing through windows or over any object in an interior space a near impossibility in past Bethesda games render the boost pack mostly useless indoors. It's all well and good a boosted jump can propel a player up to the second story of an outpost atrium, but relatively pointless when they can't fit through the gap between the railing and the ceiling to take advantage of it.

Similarly, the bare-bones bounty system in the game offers little meaningful gameplay outside of make work missions for pitiful amounts of money. Ship combat is shallow to the point of being boring. The contraband system is more an invitation to rote circumvention than meaningful play vector. The vast procedurally generated planets are full of a handful of repeating plants and features, offering little worthwhile interaction.

Although I did get a laugh when I exited a cave that had literally nothing in it to find a man pointing a shotgun at me a screaming about me stealing his claim before turning to fire a mining laser at a worthless rock without another ship or structure anywhere else on the planet.

More importantly though, all of these gestures at systems that don't actually exist feel like things that should be the core of this game's gameplay loop. Excluding the poor balancing of weapons, one can see a world where the limited alteration of systems inherited from previous games was paired with a new layer of interactive elements in the world. More things to do, more ways to roleplay, more customization, and deeper interaction.

Instead, seemingly no work was done here beyond the game's physical structure, which in and of itself resembles more a series of soulless boxes for players to move through, void attempting to be artifice disguising a game that, for its vast footprint, feels smaller and less cared for than any Bethesda game before it.

If Starfield is Fallout with slightly less salt on the mechanic side, on the narrative and world building side it's simply a retread of Skyrim. Two factions, the United Colonies (Imperials) and the Freestar Collective (Nords) coexist in constant tension, though without the impending civil war here. The player, a third party working with a group of independent actors, must collect space powers, one of which - yes - is literally just Skyrim's Fus Roh Dah, as they mediate the relationship between these two factions and the appearance of a third, the Starborn (Dragons).

Most areas lack the strong narrative threads crafted by Fallout 4's focus on more compact spaces, instead favoring Skyrim's loose generalized quest hub approach for cities and towns. The result is spaces with little in the way of tangible identity, never really managing to build a coherent sense of place as strong as the likes of Diamond City or Goodneighbor.

Even beyond that the writing and world building continue to struggle. Absent the well crafted underpinnings vital to the Fallout franchise, which Bethesda had no hand in constructing, Starfield's world presents a profoundly dim view of the future. As it lacks ambition elsewhere, so it lacks it here, not only incapable of constructing a believable post Earth humanity, but incapable of imagining it as being any different than our current times.

Obsidian can take heart that they're not worst of the people making "RPGs" in this vein when it comes to understanding the breadth of even our current political landscape or imagining alternatives. At least The Outer Worlds imagines corporations and the ultra rich as forces for abject harm wont to do it in absence of people resisting it, even as it constructs nonsensical versions of the real world opposition to the forces of capital in service of mealy mouth liberal status quo supporting bullshit.

Sure, they might have failed to come up with a reason for not siding with a communist faction in its game and deployed its only likeable protagonist to guilt the player into not siding with them; but Starfield sincerely trots out the "this corporation is like a family to me" bullshit used to guilt workers into accepting abuse, then heaps an out of character agreement from an otherwise compassionate companion (Andreja) on top, AND forcibly dictates the final word on the matter like my character - raised in the poverty being discussed - is somehow in the wrong for believing complicity in its existence to be a fundamental abortion of morality.

I, personally, would rather they'd given me no option to challenge the characters on the abusive practices of their massive corporation than have the game tell me, essentially, "well yes, they're abusing people, but it's justified because that abuse lets them take care of their 'family' and they pay slightly better". I'm generally happy to welcome characters, even ones with putrid worldviews, expressing those and disagreeing with mine in games. But if the end point of allowing this type of ideological expression is to shut it down when it becomes inconvenient, then there's no point in allowing that deep an ideological expression in the first place. I'd much rather this suit simply dismiss me out of hand without a second thought, than acquiesce to the argument and get bailed out by the invisible hand of the writer when the rhetorical limits of said writer's viewpoint are found.

This general inability to not only engage seriously with the real world concepts its building on, but to even recognize the world today in the breadth of its complexity as it projects it hundreds of years into the future is pervasive in Starfield. There is no deeper meaning to its use of aesthetics, no broader themes, no commentary deeper than a mall fountain.

The result is a game devoid of worthwhile world building, or really any meaningful intrigue. Beyond injecting nonsensical political assertions into loaded topics, and the regular appearance of completely incoherent quest lines, there seems to just be an utter lack of understanding of what elements in our real world inspire the stories from which the game's narrative draws its reference. No deeper thought, no attempt to build upon, just copy paste, find and replace.

Sure, there was a war between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, but that's in the past and no one really ever stops to explain why it even happened. Now there's really nothing going on. They're all too busy fighting generic space outlaws and the occasional bandit to butt heads with each other. Sure there's a big faction of mysterious religious people, better bake them into an unseen corner of the galaxy. Yeah we got pirates, but why would we interface with or tell stories about them beyond the pirate part?

It's a world where actually the corrupt cops are also a path out of extreme poverty for a bunch of gang members, presented unironically as a good thing. A world where an entire city's identity is boiled down to "we built some big walls to keep the mean space dogs out". A world where the billionaire is still a good guy, and corporations can be a family, even as they exploit the player and literally build towering monuments to their wealth over top of the poor in two of the three major cities in the game. Something the game recognizes but refuses to comment on, either for or against. A world where attitudes towards drugs and the homeless are no different from our own time, even in the place where people are purported to care more because they're willing to engage in clearly ineffectual charity.

It is a ponderous chunk of incoherent words, unable to navigate its way past the inherent lack of paths forward that don't conflict with its own assertion humanity's status quo will, and should, simply exist in perpetuity. A narrative that could have been saved by constructing literally any view of humanity, dystopian or utopian, outwardly progressive or virulently fascist, that isn't the vapid combination of corporate mush and stark inequality, but refuses.

Even the most cynical writers rarely manage a less ambitious view of the future than Starfield, especially in the world of science fiction, but in a way that's fitting here. In a game that's wholly unwilling to be anything more than the simple interface of an existing set of mechanics with an existing narrative, Starfield should be this profoundly devoid of broader thought about the human race.

At least its aggressive clinging to the aesthetics of a bygone golden age looks pretty, even if it makes me think about how much better the Fallout games - even the ones from Bethesda - are at utilizing the same type of aesthetic as more than just eye candy.