Starfield is many things, and a shooter is one of them. The game’s combat is arguably the best that has ever had, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Starfield wants you to know it. There’s a big combat encounter after you emerge from the mine that opens the game – you fight off𝓡 pirates before you see your first planet proper. This s♔ets a precedent for the rest of the game, where too many otherwise fun missions are marred by combat encounters that feel samey and dull.
I should start off by talking about the combat itself, which is competent, though not particularly exciting. Betဣhesda has gone all-in on ranged weapons, providing players with a host of pistols, rifles, and shotguns that use myriad different ammunition types. Why are there three different types of shotgun shell, multiple energy ammos, and more bullet types than you can shake a particularly stabby stick 🐭at? I don’t know, ask Todd Howard.
For all the options at your disposal, gunfights are pretty pedestrian. I couldn’t tell you what the difference between different ammunitions is, the recoil on most guns feels largely the same in their categories, and there’s no special gunfeel to differentiate between them. Yes, your automatic Sidestar pistol shoots good at short range, but my trusty Grendel SMG does largely the same thing and feels awfully similar while doing it. If Starfield wanted to focus so much on combat, then it needed to look to games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends.
Every one of Apex’s 27 guns feels fundamentally unique. From the recoil patterns to the bullet drop, all of them have their own personality. I can identify each of them by the sound they make. Sure, I&rsq🙈uo;ve got over 1,000 hours in Apex and just 100 in Starfield, but my point stands. If Bethesda wanted this much action in its game, it needed to be better than ju𓆏st okay.
And this is my point. Having okay action would be fine if Bethesda didn’t shove it down our throats with every mission or exploration. Heck, even finding Temples༺ an🔯d Artifacts result in combat encounters after a certain point in the game. Starfield wants you to fight, so it’s a shame it doesn’t feel better.
Fights are rarely, if ever, challenging. Higher level enemies just have more HP, and I didn’t feel the need to upgrade my weapon perks at any point in my three-figure hours with the game. There’s neve♛r any sense of challenge, just more or spongier opponents to defeat. Having lots of combat could be forgiven if fights were interesting or challenging, but they are rarely either. Bethesda is often split between its RPG and first-person shooter identities in Starfield, and therefore excels in neither.
st
Experience also enforces this aggressive behaviour. You get 20 experience points for discovering a new planet, and 25 for killing an enemy. Considering enemies tend to appear inౠ large groups of Spacers or Pirates, the game actively incentivises you to fight instead of explore. If forcing combat on you in the story missions wasn’t enough, it’s also the most efficient way to level up.
The only caveat to this is zero-gravity firefights. Practically everything is fun in zero-G, and shootouts are no exception. Firing a shotgun at a floating spaceman sends you hurtling backwards with recoil, and the gentle nudges to adjust your thrusters and keep your crosshairs on a tough guy’s foreh💎ead add an extra dimension to otherwise tedious battles. However, your opportunities for anti-gravity altercations are limited, and most of your quarrels occur planetside.
Starfield probably has the best combat of any Bethesda game. It’s capable enough, but forced upon you far too much. I went as far as cheesing an endgame mission from a mountaintop because it was more interesting than fighting in the intended manner. It’s not fun to unload magazine after magazine into teleporting bullet sponges, so I’ll just plink away at them from somewhere they can’t get to, thank you very much. There is no way of doing a pacifist run of Starfield. That’s a shame, because that might have be꧂en the most fun way of playing the game.