An exercise in corporate blanditry.

Profoundly unsexy. Sterile, hostile UI. Bland companions with bland romances that lack any sort of passion or intrigue. They stand around in your ship making bland water cooler talk and after a while it sinks in...you are at work. This game is a job.

Every successive Bethesda game since Morrowind has been a slow descent into corporate sterilization. Now in Starfield you literally span the galaxy just to go to board meetings and lawyer offices, in between gunning down bandits at the copy/pasted planetary outposts. Mass Effect Andromeda was a better game than this. We all owe it an apology. Hell I even owe Cyberpunk 2077 an apology in comparison to this. At least the outfits and photo mode were fun.

Other terrible things:
-The loading. It will take up a huge amount of your playtime. In cities every little room is in a loading zone. Quests needlessly require you to march in and out of loading areas 6 or 7 times- it's mindless, thoughtless inconsiderate violence upon the player. If you thought Faridah's quest in Deus Ex: HR was aggravating you ain't seen nothing yet.
-The writing. Quests are worse than ever, people talk like HR zombies and you get a choice of three different libertarian responses to choose from every time. City guards say things like "Private sector is where the money is!" The game offers you about 7 different ways to be a cop. The way the npc's condescendingly praise you like a toddler after every quest is so mortifying.
The future they've imagined 300 years from now is just 2023 office culture with a reskin. People still use current lingo or have pronounced earth based accents. There is no humor or cleverness in any of it from the grand design to the smallest dialogue. The future is just one big USA corporate office park, complete with an underclass in every city who we still haven't gathered the will to do anything to help. A profoundly depressing and bleak conception.
Fallout 4 at least had a few good side quests that were full of weird shit like the old days. I've found maybe two like that out of hundreds so far. The way the game opens and just tosses you into the story is so lazy and derivative, just totally careless, cynical and joyless. Then you get further in to your 'powers' and realize it's just reskinned Skyrim except with no interesting coherent world to lose yourself in. The Starborn are dumped on you in the same unceremonious way as the intro. None of the factions differ from each other in any meaningful way. None of your quest choices mean anything at all. Even building your character is pointless, if you play long enough you can unlock everything, there's no strategy to it.
-The haze. Why does every single game have to have a thick haze over everything now? Is the future on other planets polluted too? it sucks shit and I hate it. Let me see clearly please.
-The hundreds of planets you can go to are boring and mostly identical, and you can't even fly to them or between them. Just more loading screens. Scanning them is sort of fun but almost every single one of them is already heavily colonized with copy/paste outposts, so it doesn't make any sense.
-Speaking of copy/paste, where are the dungeons? Even the Fallout games had unusual places for you to stumble on and explore. The pre-marked outposts you sometimes run into on planets amount to three or four different quests that repeat over and over. When I say they are copy-pasted I mean literally every pixel down to placement and type of loot and location of mobs/npc's. It makes exploring completely pointless. Even some of the official quests in the game send you through the same abandoned mine over and over. Shades of DA2.
-The level scaling makes no sense. You will take down a level 24 starship then get creamed a few days after by a level 4. The terrormorphs that everyone is so terrified of die easier than some spacer bosses. I gave up trying to see any logic in it, just keep shooting until things die.

I could go on. So the question is why am I still playing? The old addictive loop I guess, of filtering through loot and selling it. Hoping upon hope I find one of those fun side quests that made Fallout 4 barely worth it. I really should stop. When you find yourself sitting there running through the long list of quests in Neon yelling "This is dogshit! This is busywork!" at your screen then you really should just stop...but I've been in anticipation of this for so long I can't quite give up on it yet even after 90+ hours. It's a degrading feeling.

Maybe it will be worth a damn in a year or two when modders have made it into something fun.

I like tinyBuild generally but this is a really embarrassing disaster. Game is utterly broken and shouldn't even be in early access in it's current state. You can't play through the early game for even an hour without bug after bug. My first time through everyone died because there was a cold snap and somehow being indoors with a roaring fire didn't stop anyone from freezing to death. Massive pathing and framerate issues too. I didn't even get far enough to experience the horrendously broken save system everyone's complaining about.
I will gladly come back and readjust this review if this is ever fixed because I long for a decent space sim. It seems to be a cursed genre however, as there are soooo many that are broken, abandoned or just suck, going all the way back to Spacebase DF-9. Still waiting on Signs of Life, Maia and many others that have been in development hell for years and years. Why is this one genre so impossible?
And bigger question: Why was this rushed into release in this condition? It's a small game, and there's no way they didn't know it was a mess. Nobody would have been devastated by a delay. Why rush it out, burn all your goodwill and piss everyone off? I really don't get it.

I've played so many stardew/harvest moon clones at this point, and the biggest problem they all have is a refusal to deviate from even the least appealing aspects of those games to try something new. If it's not a little different, why am I bothering?
This one drew me in with a promise of more exploration, various islands to explore etc, but you don't get very far into the game before you realize that the exhaustion meter/daily sleeping requirement will take every last bit of fun out of exploring them. Plus there is a town you have to visit constantly with a cast of people with birthdays to remember. Please god, not more birthdays.
It's all too familiar, the creators here were not willing to deviate enough from the formula to make the new elements they wanted to add shine.
Worst of all, the controls are wretched and buggy. There is no real way to pinpoint what you are striking with a tool, you have to just sort of aim your body in a direction and hope for the best, even in combat. Sometimes your mouse cursor is on screen to help you with that, other times it inexplicably vanishes for no reason. Using a controller is even worse.
My advice: stop trying to cram every stardew element into your game and focus on the basics that make playing fun, like fluid controls and simple intuitive UI.

Would never have even tried this if I had known it was a timed game. There is no more unpleasant and anxiety-inducing game mechanic than a timer to me, especially as a player with a few disabilities to contend with. The play area looks fuzzy on my PC even on the highest graphical settings. It's much more of an area-restricted puzzle game than I was expecting as well. I was expecting Factorio type stuff with train logistic components but that isn't what this is at all. Whether the description of the game was unclear or my reading comprehension sucks is up for debate but i did not enjoy this. If you like timed puzzles, have at it. Leaving an extra star for possible user error.

Played this years ago and found it too unfinished and esoteric. Picking it back up now that its out of early access, It looks lovely and has a pleasing Minecraft-like progression that requires some struggle. At times it is still a little bit too esoteric for me; pages of instructions and even in-game videos that sometimes only add confusion when you want a simple answer. Or things like the multi-tool, which you have to make in order to do very basic things like pick up and move objects you've placed...only to find out it requires fuel to operate and that fuel is difficult to find without an even more advanced tool. It's a bit unnecessary.
I would have much rather had a bigger focus on aesthetics and crafting since all the elements are there; Sims-lite meets survival in space.
Still, it's very enjoyable if you can let yourself sink into it. Not everyone will want to do that, but if you liked Astroneer or Planet Crafter you may dig it.

There are quite a few games like this now, downhill bike racers. I play them all for a few hours and really enjoy the tactile sensation of riding the bike and the lovely tracks and scenery, then I quickly hit a skill wall where i find it impossible to do the tricks the game requires. Too old or never had the motor skills to begin with. I cannot do most of the tricks here to save my life and the game doesn't even tell you how do to a lot of them. Every one of these games is like that. I wish there was one I could play and enjoy cause for a little while they're very nice!
Also the second level of this one on the career run is just non-stop haze all the way through the biome (forest) making it completely impossible for me to even just run down the track. I've been loudly anti-haze in games and continue to be, its a shitty lazy ugly mechanic, stop putting haze on everything!

Two genres I dislike somehow combined into a good game. Proven wrong again. One big leg up over most visual novels is the option for fast text. The main reason I clock out of most visual novels after a few minutes is the intolerable little dribbles of text slowly rolling across the screen. I just don't have the patience for that.
This has a few redeeming qualities though. The puzzles are good, the writing is not bad, the art is nice. Some puzzles and conversations are bugged and have to be fiddled with or repeated a few times to function. But nothing game-breaking.
What has finally made me tap out of the game before completing are the timed puzzles. Who wants timed puzzles in a game like this?? Partway through act 3 they annoyed me enough to stop playing. A shame, this would a have been a very chill game without them.

I will never not give a chance to any Terreria/Starbound adjacent project. I was really enjoying my time with this one which has a bit more of an RPG focus, until I got to the fourth town when things suddenly seemed to ramp up in terms of the amount of content but also the amount of aggravation.
The fourth town is split in two and not only has an endlessly labyrinthine sewer system but it has a huge amount of fetch quests which require you to run all over both halves of the city looking for specific NPCs. Previous areas may have had you look for one or two people but getting hit suddenly with a long string of quests that had me running up to every single person in the city over and over again to check their names, looking for 4 or 5 people each time, was too tedious and I was fine with tapping out and ending my journey with the game there.
The overarching story is not so compelling or unusual that it could propel me forward through the tedium, (look for head bad guy running a cult of necromancers or something- which is awkward if you've decided to become a necromancer,) and the game loop as you progress through each unlocked part of the map becomes quite predictable by then. Ramp all your crafts up another ten levels with the new ingredients, rinse, repeat.
Doing all your various crafts is mandatory to progress through a lot of quests but the game makes it not a big deal as the scrolls you can find all over the place in treasure chests give you boosts. Still, it takes away a bit from the idea that you are building your character as you wish and concentrating only on what you want. You must become an expert in everything.
With all of that said I did find the art pleasing and enjoyed the build-it-myself home base and "unlocked" areas that function much like the games it borrows from. I think to work as an RPG with this 2d format, the game loop needs a bit more variation and the quests need to remain simple enough to draw you through without wearing out their welcome.