Starfield Review (PS5)

Starfield Review (PC, PS5 [Reviewed], Xbox Series X/S)
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Released: September 6, 2023 (PC/Xbox), April 7, 2026 (PS5)
ESRB: M – Mature

I tried Starfield when it launched on Xbox Series S back in 2023 and played it for a handful of hours. I just couldn’t get into it, and so I quickly moved on. I’m not a console fanboy, but I’ve always had a hard time getting into games on my Xbox. Something about the experience just doesn’t click for me the way PlayStation does, and I’m pretty sure it’s the controller. Between that and the game’s rough state at launch, I walked away thinking Starfield might just not be for me. And also knowing it wasn’t coming to PlayStation, and so never thought about the game again.

Two and a half years later, Bethesda brings the game to PS5 with the massive Free Lanes update and the Terran Armada DLC, and suddenly I was interested again. This time determined to give it a real shot, and if I couldn’t get into it again then I would know it wasn’t the controller. So I pre-ordered the Standard Edition, downloaded all 135 gigs of it, and sat down with the intention of actually playing the thing this time.

I’m glad I did. Starfield isn’t a perfect game. It has real flaws that I can point to specifically and say “that shouldn’t be like that.” But it’s also a game that grabbed me once I gave it the time it needed, and I’ve been enjoying my time with it in a way I didn’t expect after bouncing off the first time.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s start with what matters most in any game: how does it feel to actually play?

The shooting in Starfield is good. This is Bethesda’s best-feeling gunplay by a significant margin. Fallout 4 was decent. Starfield is genuinely fun to shoot in. Weapons have weight to them. Different gun types feel distinct. The ballistic rifles kick and sound punchy. The laser weapons have that satisfying sci-fi hum. On PS5, the DualSense adaptive triggers add a layer that makes each weapon type feel even more different from each other, and it’s the kind of thing that once you have it, going back to a standard controller would feel flat.

I’m running a build that leans toward rifles and stealth, and the combat encounters have been consistently enjoyable. Clearing out a Spacer outpost room by room, picking off enemies from range and then switching to close quarters when they push in, it feels like a proper shooter. The boost pack adds verticality that Bethesda games have never had before, and once you start using it aggressively in combat (getting above enemies, repositioning to flanks, boosting over cover), the fights open up in ways that are more interesting than anything in Fallout.

Ship combat is solid too. Not the deepest system in the world, but once you understand power distribution and start actively managing your energy between weapons, shields, and engines during a fight, it clicks. Boarding disabled ships and clearing them out is addictive. That whole loop of fighting a ship, disabling its engines, docking, clearing the crew, and stripping the ship for parts is one of those gameplay loops that just works. I’ve spent more time hunting ships than I expected to.

Exploration is the other big draw. Starfield has over a thousand planets, and yes, a lot of them are empty procedurally generated landscapes. But the handcrafted locations, the major cities, the quest-specific dungeons, and the more curated planetary surfaces are generally interesting to explore. New Atlantis is a real city that feels lived-in. Akila City has character. Neon is grimy and atmospheric. The random outposts and abandoned facilities you stumble onto during exploration aren’t all winners, but enough of them have environmental storytelling, loot, and enemy encounters to make the exploration loop rewarding more often than not.

With the Free Lanes update and Cruise Mode, the space between planets finally feels like something instead of a menu screen. Flying between destinations and getting pulled into random encounters or just watching the scenery go by while walking around your ship, it sells the fantasy of being a spaceship captain in a way the game absolutely did not at launch.

The World and the Story

The main story follows your character joining Constellation, the last group of explorers in the galaxy, on a quest to collect mysterious artifacts that are connected to something bigger than anyone realizes. The story builds to some genuinely interesting sci-fi concepts, especially around the Unity and the multiverse implications of New Game Plus. But the pacing is uneven, some of the early quest structure is fetch-quest heavy, and the main cast of Constellation characters, while not bad, don’t stick with you the way the companions in other Bethesda games do.

I don’t hold that against the game as much as some people do. I don’t play Bethesda RPGs for their main stories. I play them for the worlds. Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 4, I couldn’t tell you the fine details of any of their main questlines, but I can tell you about the places I explored and the things I found along the way. That’s always been the appeal. The main story is a framework that gives you a reason to exist in the world, and the world itself is the actual content.

The world of Starfield is pretty good. Some locations are better than others. The faction questlines are more interesting than the main story in a lot of cases, though I’ve kinda always felt the same about other Bethesda games. The Crimson Fleet pirate faction line in particular is well done and gives you actual moral choices with consequences. The Freestar Rangers questline is solid. The Trackers Alliance bounty content (paid through Creations) is some of the best side content in the game, with proper stories, choices, and a through-line that pays off at the end.

But in terms of world-building and that feeling of being dropped into a place that feels alive and interconnected, Starfield isn’t on the level of Skyrim or Fallout. Those games had worlds that felt like ecosystems. You’d walk from one town to the next and stumble into things along the way. The geography connected everything. In Starfield, the galaxy is vast but segmented. Planets are isolated by design. You don’t walk from New Atlantis to Akila City. You fast travel (or cruise, with Free Lanes). That segmentation costs the game some of the organic discovery that makes Elder Scrolls and Fallout feel so alive.

And in the pure space exploration department, No Man’s Sky does that specific thing better. No Man’s Sky has had years of updates to become one of the best space exploration games ever made, and Starfield’s procedural planets, while functional, don’t match that level of wonder and variety. No Man’s Sky makes you feel like an explorer. Starfield makes you feel like an adventurer who happens to be in space. That’s a subtle but real difference.

What Starfield does that neither of those games do is combine both. You get the Bethesda RPG structure (factions, companions, quests with dialogue choices, loot and builds, a handcrafted narrative) and the space exploration sandbox. No Man’s Sky doesn’t have a ton of NPCs with real stories. Skyrim doesn’t let you build a ship and fly it between star systems. Starfield is the combination, and while it doesn’t beat either game at their individual strengths, the combination creates something that doesn’t exist anywhere else. That’s worth something.

Presentation and Performance

Starfield is a good looking game on PS5. The planets range from desolate to stunning. Some of the skyboxes and vistas are legitimately jaw-dropping. Standing on a moon and watching a gas giant fill the sky above you is the kind of moment that makes you stop and just look. Cities are detailed and densely populated. Weapon and armor models look great up close. Character models are typical Bethesda, which means they’re fine but not industry-leading.

I play in Performance Mode (60fps with upscaled resolution) and recommend it strongly over Visual Mode (4K at 30fps). The combat feels noticeably better at 60 frames, and the visual downgrade from the upscaling is minimal during actual gameplay. If you have a PS5 Pro, PSSR makes Performance Mode look even sharper. For most players, Performance Mode is the way to go.

Now, the crashes. I have to talk about the crashes. During my first couple of weeks with the PS5 version, I experienced a number of hard crashes. Complete freezes that kicked me back to the PlayStation home screen. They happened at seemingly random times, during exploration, in menus, during fast travel. No pattern I could identify. It was frustrating enough that I was keeping a mental count.

Bethesda has since pushed patches that seem to have addressed the issue, and the crashes have largely stopped. But it would be dishonest to not mention that the early PS5 experience had stability issues. Save often. That’s always good advice with a Bethesda game, but especially so with a new platform launch.

Loading times are fast on PS5. The SSD handles everything well. Fast travel transitions are quick, building interiors load fast, and the overall flow of the game respects your time. The PS5 version is a meaningfully better experience than what I played at launch on Series S, which again was only about six hours.

The UI Problem

I have to vent about the menus because they genuinely bother me.

Starfield’s UI is cluttered and unintuitive in ways that a game this big shouldn’t be. The inventory system requires too many button presses to do basic things. Comparing weapons means scrolling through lists that aren’t organized well. The map is functional but not pleasant to use, especially the Starmap where you’re trying to plan grav jump routes to systems that are hard to find because there’s no search function. The quest log buries important information under layers of menus.

The Data Menu from the Free Lanes update helps with some of this. Having a Database that tracks your resources, locations, and discoveries is a genuine improvement. But the core UI, the inventory, the menus, the navigation, still feels like it was designed for a mouse and keyboard and adapted for a controller as an afterthought.

It doesn’t ruin the game. But it adds friction to everything you do. Every time I want to compare two weapons, every time I want to find a specific system on the Starmap, every time I want to check what resources I need for a crafting recipe, I’m fighting the interface more than I should be. For a game that asks you to spend hundreds of hours in its menus, this stuff matters.

And yeah, there are mods that improve it some, but you shouldn’t need to use it. A Triple A developer should make a better UI.

The Free Lanes Difference

The Starfield I’m reviewing on PS5 in April 2026 is a fundamentally different game than the Starfield that launched in September 2023, and like I said, I didn’t play that version enough to really care about later planetary travels. The Free Lanes update, which is free and built into the PS5 version from day one, transforms the game.

Cruise Mode alone changes how the galaxy feels. Flying between planets in real time, getting up from the pilot’s seat to walk around your ship, encountering random events and enemies along the way, it addresses the single biggest criticism the game received at launch. The galaxy doesn’t feel like a series of menu screens anymore. It feels like a place you’re traveling through.

X-Tech gives the loot system a proper endgame by letting you re-roll legendary effects and push gear to a new power tier. Shared outpost containers make the outpost system actually useful. The Database codex gives you the information management tools the game should have shipped with. The Quantum Entanglement Device makes New Game Plus feel like a real progression system instead of a punishment.

The Terran Armada DLC ($9.99, included in Premium) adds a galaxy-wide threat through Incursions that interact with Cruise Mode in smart ways, a morally gray robot companion that fills a gap in the companion roster, and enough new content to justify the price.

All of this is baked into the PS5 version. If you’re buying this game today, you’re getting the best version that’s ever existed.

The Verdict

Starfield isn’t Skyrim in space. That was the expectation some folks had, and that’s not what it is. It’s also not No Man’s Sky with a traditional story. It sits between those two experiences and creates something that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else: a Bethesda RPG with shooting that feels good, exploration that can be rewarding, a galaxy that (with Free Lanes) finally feels connected, and systems deep enough to keep you experimenting with builds and ships and outposts for hundreds of hours.

The main story won’t blow you away. The UI will frustrate you. Some planets will bore you. The early PS5 crashes were a real problem, even if they’ve been fixed. And the galaxy, for all its size, doesn’t feel as alive and interconnected as the best open worlds in gaming.

But the core of the game, the shooting, the exploring, the ship building, the faction quests, the sense of being a person in a universe with things to do and places to see, it works. It works in the way that Bethesda games have always worked: imperfectly, sometimes messily, but with enough ambition and enough freedom that you keep finding reasons to come back to it.

I bounced off this game once. I’m glad I gave it a second chance. It’s an easy recommendation for those who might still be on the fence, provided of course you enjoy the Bethesda style. You can pick up a copy from Amazon if you like having physical copies of your games.

Starfield gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.