I don't think this game knows what it wants to be... When you're wandering the beach, finding resources to pitch your first campsite it feels a little like Stranded Deep. When you're following the clues and tapes left behind by your Uncle it feels a little like Raft, although it makes even less sense. When you've built a raft and you can explore the islands it starts to feel a little like Fountain of Youth, with ancient ruins and shipwrecked sailing vessels... But it doesn't carry any of those influences well at all.

It's not an immersive survival or exploration experience like Sranded Deep. When you try to go into the water they'll just spawn 3 sharks to maul you. There's no sneaking into points of interest while the sharks are roaming elsewhere for example. There is HEAVY gatekeeping on the crafting, so you'll end up gathering a lot of resources that you can't even use for another 2 or 3 crafting tiers, even though they're just OBVIOUS iterations on the items you can already make. There are no evironmental factors to think about, like currents to carry your raft away, or sunburn/heatstroke, or chill from rainy nights.
And the timescales of tasks are all completely misaligned and nonsensical. A process that says it will take 7 minutes counts down so fast that it actually only takes 3 ingame minutes. A banked fireplace that says it will burn for 10 hours will use up all its fuel within 2 ingame hours. Food cooks in 20 seconds, then overcooks after a further 10. Sleeping for 8 hours up until 6am, restoring full energy, will only last you until about 1pm, then you have to either sleep a second time that day, or nap every couple of hours until a reasonable bedtime.

So it's more like Raft then? Nope... This story makes no sense at all, despite being full of cliches and gamefication. From the opening intro, where the pilot of a *floatplane* basically gives up and declares "Jesus take the wheel!", nosediving uncontrolled into the sea instead of trying to land on the abundant thing his plane is designed to land on, it's just a complete and transparent gimmick. The only reason this plot exists is to explain away the random crafting recipes scattered around the islands, and those recipes are essential to the arbitrary and pointless crafting tier gatekeeping. In Raft the story slowly unfolds and informs your exploration, occasionally giving you a key piece of technology to continue progressing. Here the story just exists to handwave away any criticism about technologies being scattered all over the islands, and the fact that you can still be blocked and gated away from them even after you find them, because you didn't do it in the right order.

And so it's clearly not like Fountain of Youth either. The islands aren't distinct *enough* from one another for that, and although the game keeps referencing the Big Bad Corpo somehow controlling everything, it's not up to the level of those shipwrecked survivors trying to understand and survive the mysterious archipelago they've found themselves trapped in.

I really think this game needs to pick a direction and commit to it, because this jumble of influences is never going to lead to anything great enough to stand out.
Personally, I really want a better Stranded Deep. That game always fell short of allowing me to live out the true Robinson Crusoe fantasy of progressing from Survival, to Comfort, to Luxury and finally Automation with all kinds of clever twists on bushcraft and early industrialisation.
But that's just me... A great exploration game needs to reward off-path exploration and risk-taking, not punish and gatekeep it... A great story game needs better writing and voice direction than this.

And finally, for the love of all that's holy: Bronze, Silver and Gold are for Olympic medals, not tools. There's a reason Bronze, Iron and Steel are a convention. History. And you're not being clever or unique by breaking with that convention.

The game is a solid 8/10 right up to the point where you arrive at the Fiends, and then it crashes back to being a 3/10 for a while... Before eventually, thankfully getting back on track again.

But I really want to warn about what happens there, because there's a sudden point where the game takes it's least fun and interesting element, the tactical combat, and then forces you to grind it out more than 30 times back-to-back before the story will get back to being fun and sexy again.
You're maybe 20 hours in at this point, and in that time there have been something like 8 combat scenes, they're paced out pretty well... And then all of a sudden you're committed to 6 hours of doing nothing but combat... Why?!? This makes no sense! Who decided this was a good idea?!?

And lest you think I'm exaggerating or being hyperbolic here, just count them with me: You arrive at the Fiends into an arena combat (1), then there's a second arena combat for HQ's panties (2), then six combats to clear the first sub-level (8), then another ten combats to clear the second sub-level (18) [so maybe this was a bug, but 3 rooms repopulated for me after I went upstairs to use a mattress], in between which there are two solo combats in flashbacks (20), then a Floria boss fight (21), then a second round of Floria boss fight (22), then a Wildfire boss fight (23), you go to the pub, decide to fight for Karen, and then there are eleven more combats with the Fiends themselves (34).

I think this has been the worst pacing shift I've ever come across in one of these adult games, but at least things DO get back on track again like I said in the opening, and it's more about the exploring, sexy encounters, and puzzling out the mystery of what happened to the world during Vibe's absence... So it's still a recommend. Just be prepared for that hard detour away from the fun.

Oh god, that one negative review was actually SO on point... It really does suck.

The writing is clearly machine translated, I'm guessing from Russian? And it makes for some of the most unhinged and unsexy conversations I've ever seen in a H-game...They just drop weirdbombs all the time, out of nowhere. You'll flirt with one girl who just says something back about pulling on your tongue because she likes to drive fast. What? The? Actual? Fudgesicle?

There's only two game screens that I saw... One is the diner where you work 7 days a week serving 3x customers per day in the most TEDIOUS way possible, including time spent waiting for the UI to constantly shuffle around into new positions with every... single,,, action... It's a completely meaningless cash grind, except that your hookups from the club also come into the diner, where you can do fun things like ask the cop that you banged the night before if he enjoyed cheating on his wife.

Then there's the club, where you try to plot a path through conversations that seem like two ChatGPT bots trained on fragments of Monty Python sketches, in the hope of there being a sex scene at the end because at least the animations and sound seemed hot on the store page? Right? Riiiight?!?... Quick tangent: The achievement for having sex the first time doesn't actually have a sex scene, just a derpy picture that makes it look a LOT like something broke in the scripting. But it's fine. Working as intended. You'll get an actual scene the next day. Tangent ends.

Sooo... Those animated scenes?... 2-3 second loops, accompanied by a 2-3 second repeating sigh or moan, with an arrow button to move on to the next one. It seems like there's 4 or 5 per scene, so like 8-12 seconds of content per scene... And let me give you a quick preview of THAT experience:

Ehh!, Ehh!, Ehh!, Ehh!, Ehh!, Ahh!, Ahh!, Ahh!, Ahh!, Ahh!, Ooh!, Ooh!, Ooh!, Ooh!, Ooh!, Ngh!, Ngh!, Ngh!, Ngh!, Ngh!

There you go. Now you don't have to play it. You're welcome.

It's... Actually fantastic... Maybe a little slow to get started? I didn't really feel that way personally, but then I'm the kind of player who starts Skyrim by picking all the nearby flowers and mushrooms, then catching some small fish at the lake, not sprinting straight to Riverwood.

I keep seeing the No Man's Sky comparison (absolutely play that game if you haven't by the way, it's one of the best survival-crafters out there), but it's a comparison that seems intended to be a strawman. They're such different games that it really only functions to nitpick some of the tertiary mechanics of Starfield, it can't compare at all to the insane scope of the roleplaying and narrative experience.

So let me offer an alternative comparison: The Outer Worlds... Do you remember The Outer Worlds, and how much love and positivity it received, its release following so closely behind the disaster of Fallout 76? Obsidian were hailed as the last remaining torchbearers of the true RPG, Bethesda were burned and discarded as unsalvagable along with Bioware? Remember that?
Well it turns out they weren't unsalvagable, because here we are five years later and the truth is that everything The Outer Worlds did, Starfield does better. MUCH better. Like, a decade of heart-and-soul better. The scope is so much grander, the roleplaying deeper and more meaningful, the universe feels vast and full of opportunity instead of small and confined into those narrow UE4 corridors. The writing and questing is deeper, more nuanced and more complex, with unexpected twists and branches sometimes taking you on a romp through the galaxy for what you thought would just be a simple fetch quest. The characters don't all lean into whatever their one gimmick is, they're deeper than that. Pretty much everyone with a name that isn't 'Citizen' or 'Muckymuck Specialist 1st Class' actually has some character to them. The combat is also much better and more varied, with loot progression that's far more compelling, and systems like outposts and shipbuilding which don't even have comparisons. And do you remember what kind of spaceflight or space combat The Outer Worlds had?... Yeah... None at all... You just went to the system map and selected a destination.

This isn't intended to diminish The Outer Worlds. I loved that game, and it deserved all the praise it got... But then so does Starfield. It deserves the praise for being even better, and a massive leap forward in the Space Opera RPG genre, the likes of which we haven't seen since Mass Effect. It's Bethesda's magnum opus, and I'm loving every minute of it.

It's a good game, but let down by a sailing mechanic that completely undermines its own lore.

There are contemporaries in the Survival Crafting genre, like Stranded Deep and Valheim that make their sailing a compelling part of the gameplay and world exploration. Their sailing has genuine hazards of various kinds, a combination of skill-floor and tech upgrades to improve the experience, and yet it plays no real part in either of their lore. The sea is just an environment to be traversed.

In Fountain of Youth there's a LOT of lore built up about how dangerous these waters are. These seas have claimed many ships, and you're a ragtag survivor of one of them, on the trail of other ragtag survivors from yours and previous shipwrecks.
This lore is built and built and built upon continually as you explore across the first island, locate the next one, then prepare to put to sea again to continue on your epic journey of adventure...

Aaaaannnnd then your boat turns out to be a Mario Cart that just scoots along the water, faces no dangers or hazards other than bumping into things and losing a sliver of health, and can be ignored entirely once you build a dock at the other end to fast-travel back and forth.

It's hard to overstate just how disappointing that was. It's boring, makes exploration between islands basically meaningless, and worst of all it DEMOLISHES the game's own lore about the dangers of the sea... I should have died. Preferably two or three times. Or survived and been forced to make a new boat... The waters around these islands should be giving me survival-horror levels of heart palpitations, so that I'm left thanking my lucky stars when I finally DO reach the next major narrative landmass, in one piece and with my boat intact...

But instead I just couldn't be bothered to play anymore. It really did take all the wind out of my sails. Pun intended.

Purchased in the Summer Sale 2014. The launcher crashes when attempting to create a new account, so I created my account through the website instead. Recieved an email thanking me for my transaction and promising a follow-up email when my account was activated, but no futher emails ever arrived. I'm unable to login with my nominated login/password, and the launcher has no forgotten password function (so I can't rule out a typo). And lastly the website has either been inaccessible for a number of days now or my timing is very, very bad. Either way I can't check my account status that way either.

If I didn't know better from watching a series of YouTube videos I'd be worrying about the legitimacy of this game. But as it stands it's simply the worst example of account management that I've ever encountered.

None of my friends that own this game have more than 0.5 hours logged and, although I haven't asked them, at a guess I'd stay they're probably all stuck in launcher/registration limbo... I'd be fascinated to see the global stats on that.

Nearly 1300 hours in... On PC, with modding options out the wazoo, this is still the most engrossing cRPG I've ever played.

While it's true that Bioware, Obsidian and CD Projekt RED are generally better at crafting compelling narratives and memorable characters, Bethesda's strength is in creating worlds and world-building tools that allow for apparently endless explorable depths. I think it's an astonishing feat.