I got this game for free with some new PC parts, I've now played it for seven (actually more than that, but Ubisoft Connect and Star Wars Outlaws have some serious stability issues) exceedingly unpleasant hours.
Playing on PC, the controls are clunky, even after rebinding them from the default trash they started with, with so many actions having their very own keybind that should've been centralized into a single keybind.
The mini-games are just annoying, fortunately the lockpicking mini-game can be turned off so you can just quick-click through it (there's even a mini-game for EATING, and it is the most nonsensical thing I've ever dealt with in a game, too long, too boring, too many keys you have to hit that have nothing to do with anything.)
The character design is...inconsistent. Early on there is a flashback to the main character in her early teens, but she looks so vastly different I didn't realize it was her until her mother said her name, at which point it was very jarring as the differences are really extreme. To add to that, her proportions change significantly depending on which shirt she's wearing, which is both creepy and jarring.
Me personal, have found the main character to be uninteresting, unrelatable, and unlikable.
I've yet to encounter anything in the storyline that requires locking to a pre-design character instead of having a fully fleshed out character customizer to design a character to our own preferences.
I also don't feel this game should be called 'Open World' as the actual experience has felt more on-rails, in that all the quests have two ways of doing them:
- Guess the intended path then follow it perfectly
- The quest goes very, very wrong, tanking your reputation with a faction until you save-scum...rinse, repeat, until you find the intended path then continue to repeat until you get it perfect
Then the bugs...Starfield felt far less buggy.
The AI is painfully dumb, but to make up for it they'll randomly detect you through walls from across vast distances, despite having their back turned, then an infinite quantity of enemies will spawn until you either die, bum-rush the objective, flee from the area, or the game crashes (this happens a lot, a whole lot.)
The saves are also a mess, I've yet to load a save to find myself where I was at the time of the save. I frequently end up spending several minutes just trying to figure out where I am after loading a save, though sometimes it works out as it ends up loading me into a safe area on the other side of an obstacle...but other times...it'll load me into a swarm of dozens of enemies all firing at me with no cover, forcing me to load an older save, sometimes even having to go multiple saves back due to the weirdness with the way the game handles saves.
I could go on with the bugs, but really don't want to anymore.
The scenery looks great, at first, but quickly gets repetitive, the speeder doesn't help, partly because the controls for the speeder are so full of jank for PC (watching gameplay footage of people playing on console gave me the impression they designed it around using a controller then just slopped together controls for mouse and keyboard without actually testing them, or even putting any real thought behind them.)
Back to character design, some of the characters look decent, but others look like a fan art caricature, like someone threw in an anime character on accident instead of using that actual character model.
I'm glad I got it for free, because I would be very upset if I had spent money on this mess.