I think the best way I can sum up this game is simply; painfully bland. After the last few Bethesda releases were, well; not particularly well-received or well-made for that matter, I kept myself from getting hyped for this. Built off the tired, battered back of the Creation Engine I already had concerns that Starfield wasn't going to live up to the hype. While it's not a terrible game per-say, it's not much better than. The main story is functionally one big fetch-quest because you know how we all love those, most of the enjoyment can be found in the faction quests as well as the Terrormorph questline although even those piddle out near the end. Despite being a game centred around exploration, I found myself going from place to place, following objectives and immediately leaving for the next set of coordinates. Nothing was ever close by and was never rewarding so I had no reason to stay long which is honestly extremely disappointing. I always loved games that heavily rewarded exploration like Skyrim or Metroid Prime but here it's so unbelievably dull. Gunplay is typical Bethesda only this time we don't have VATS to make it a bit more unique. The guns themselves are nothing to write home about save for a few meme-worthy examples. None of the weapons have any real impact or "oompf" to them. They all shoot and feel about the same and damage-wise they're all North of useless anyway as so few of them do any real damage. Modding your gear is even worse. Not only do you need to invest into perks to unlock better mods but now after perking up you then have to research the mods which requires an obscene amount of time and resources to accomplish which in-turn forces you to almost constantly rotate out your weapons or waste resources on weapons you'll never use, and that's before you actually invest the resources to make the mods you actually want. It's the same thing with your space suits, which act as armour in this game. It's an unbelievable amount of grinding just to get a mod you've been wanting. All in all, I don't think I've had such a disappointing experience with a game and I've played utter trash with the likes of Diablo 3 .The whole game feels so...incomplete. By the time I was halfway through the first playthrough I was already struggling to keep myself going and by the end I was excited to actually be done with it. I don't know what I was originally expecting, probably something along the lines a decently set space opera ala Elite: Dangerous but apparently even that was too hard for Bethesda to do. Despite being a fairly big part of the game, ship combat is downright abysmal. The balancing is just gone with the game expecting your dinky little ship to take on enemies several DOZEN levels higher than you with vastly better ships and weapons than you have. The ship building mechanic, despite having a ton of fun with it at first quickly starts to disintegrate once you start seeing the imperfections and arbitrary limitations imposed on it. The GUI in it as well as in other sections of the game are downright unusable at times. It brought me to the point where I broke one of my cardinal rules, don't mod a game until you've played it in it's entirety and God, was I ever quick to break this one for Starfield. Even once I found a reasonably suitable UI mod it still wasn't enough. I want to keep going but much like Bethesda making this game, I just want to be done with this review. Nothing I've said is new and has been parroted to near-death. Outside of testing computers at my day job I don't think I'll be picking up Starfield again anytime soon. Especially considering many modders have already forsaken the game before the tools to properly mod it have even been released. Stay away from this mess and go replay Skyrim for the 100th time, it's still be a far better and more exciting experience Starfield will ever be.