Starfield: Shattered Space review – much Va’ruun for improvement

PC, Xbox; Bethesda Softworks
Bethesda’s gigantic space RPG’s first major expansion only highlights the game’s fundamental limitations

The first story expansion for Bethesda’s big, bold, rickety space RPG arrives after a year’s worth of incremental updates that have already ironed out the game’s most egregious flaws. Those quest-breaking bugs have been squished, there are now vehicles to make planet-side travel less of a chore, city maps are at least partly useful these days, and there’s now a 60fps mode for those playing on Xbox Series X. But Starfield’s fundamental problems remain – turgid, rubbery NPCs; the baffling profusion of loading screens – but just as the Phantom Liberty expansion finessed Cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety, Shattered Space arrives poised to improve upon what came before.

It appears that Bethesda has acknowledged that travelling across space by selecting planets from menus and watching a cutscene was a bit rubbish, because Shattered Space mostly takes place on a single map, much like Skyrim or Fallout. This new, self-contained narrative concerns House Va’ruun, Starfield’s slightly tiresome cult of space-serpent-worshipping zealots. The player is whooshed towards the secretive society’s homeworld after it has suffered a cataclysm, heralded as the civilisation’s potential saviour – which, naturally, means everyone has plenty of chores for you to do, busy as they are standing around staring at walls or genuflecting in courtyards.

Starfield: Shattered Space is out now; £29.99 on Xbox, £25.99 on PC