Recent reviews by Argagarg

While the narrative engagement with the Cyberpunk genre is a bit uninspired (preferring instead to just Copy+Paste admittedly cool bits from texts in the genre), Cyberpunk 2077's Night City is without a doubt the best open-world city environment produced in gaming to date. The city comes the closest I've seen to fulfilling the vision of a complex, alive, interactive, city with adequate verisimilitude that gives a "lived-in" feel. That, combined with the tools/toys/mechanics the player receives for playing within the city, elevate this game into something notable and worth your time. When looking at these toys/mechanics, it's clear that the developers have gotten the proverbial memo: see emblematic perks such as "Style Over Substance," which grants automatic crits with throwing knives when thrown from a vehicle in the air. Practical? No. Awesome? Yes. Did I spend an hour trying to get it to work? Also yes. Sure, you can make a character who mashes the Melee button and blenders their way through the game, but 2077 also gives you far more interesting ways to win with style.

Across the entire game, the classic Rule of Cool predominates, and the result is a ludically-rich play environment with an only slightly disappointing level of narrative depth. If you're interested in open-world urban environments or the Cyberpunk genre (plus other near-future genres), then this is a game for you.

I like this game so much that I wrote an entire dissertation about it.

TL;DR: I loved Skyrim back in 2011, but playing a game that feels so much like Skyrim (but with a new paint job) here in 2023 feels incredibly disappointing. Not only were there no real innovations in the Bethesda RPG style, the change of setting only highlighted the lack of thought behind a lot of their decisions. Mods and DLC will likely improve this, but for now I can't recommend it--playing a 2011 game in 2023 just feels depressing.

Long version:
In a broad genre field such as Science Fiction that gives readers/players so many rich and imaginative universes and IPs to compare to, Starfield just feels...bland. It lacks the panache and style of Star Wars, hope and thoughtfulness of Star Trek, gritty character drama of Firefly, insane imagination of Warhammer 40k, and especially the grounded care and sociological exactitude of The Expanse. There are elements of each found in the game as clear inspiration, but the whole just feels inchoate and half-baked.

The same can be said for the mechanics, except in this case Starfield suffers in comparison to mechanical systems implemented elsewhere. The ship combat feels half-baked (and more rooted in space fantasy than the more grounded aspersions its visuals suggest), the cities are large indeed but feel lifeless (as compared to Skyrim with more grounded NPC behavior and behavior cycles), and the gunplay is solid but exceeded by Destiny and the million other sci-fi-ish loot-and-shoot games out there. The RPG systems are fine, but shift the load-bearing elements over to the characters, character models, and overall writing--which is not a selling point here. The base building elements also feel a bit out of place--in my day's worth of romping around looting and selling everything not nailed down I've already accumulated more money than my character could possibly need, and with the most basic research/crafting gated behind skill progression I'm just accumulating resources I'm unable to spend in any meaningful way.

There's also something to be said (so far) about the timidity of the story. A paraphrased version of the line "Service guarantees citizenship!" comes out of a mouthpiece for one of the game's factions, and very little work seems to seriously question or examine the politics of this obviously fascistic reference. Alone this would be fine, but each of the game's factions have similar problems--it's as if the company was deeply afraid to piss off any potential players, so they carefully constructed a universe where every meaningful symbolic referent could be carefully ignored as "just a game." I could forgive a game for not wanting to delve into the political, but the story that we *do* get is the one of the blandest I've experienced in years (not to spoil anything). If you can't say anything meaningful, at least say it well.

If I had to describe this game overall, I'd call it a 20s "Skinner Box for Gamers" designed by a passionate committee of people who all wanted to put a bit of Their Favorite Thing in there, all the while Marketing stood watch to make sure nothing got political or remotely interesting. Put another way: Bethesda is That Guy from your earlier school years who has carefully stayed exactly the same as time has passed; when you were 18 they were charming; in your late 20s it became dull; and now in your 30s it's just depressing.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to the game, and I'm happy to bide my time and wait for mods, dlc, and free updates to push the game forward, but for now my review stands. Todd and the team seem like nice folks, but this game is too bland and inchoate for me to applaud. Play something else--there are plenty of options these days.

If you're hitting the 2010s trail of story game hits, this game is an important (and generally enjoyable) stop. The ludic successor to late-00s teen drama, LiS echoes the teen years from the perspectives of adults long past them, and thus will likely resonate more with an audience remembering their teenage years rather than currently living them. Less broadly, some of the dialogue lines (and most of the graphics) haven't aged particularly well, but many of the game's narrative beats--which managed to produce engaging characters of a kind not often seen in mid-10s games--still stand out today. If there's a particular standout in the 5 episodes, it is most definitely Episode 2, which tells a standalone story that makes the series worthwhile on its own.

Absolutely beautiful; one of the best arguments for games as art that I've seen in years. A must-play.