Starfield: Shattered Space Review

I can’t believe Starfield released about a year ago, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Even though I, and a lot of other games critics, loved it at launch, I pretty much forgot it existed until recently. For reasons I don’t totally understand, the game just didn’t have the same staying power as a lot of other Bethesda titles, and in retrospect, it probably wasn’t all that spectacular at launch.

That’s neither here nor there, though, because now that its first actual expansion is out, its developers could’ve easily forced Starfield back into everyone’s collective consciousnesses like they did with Skyrim or the older Fallout games. But, at risk of being blunt, they didn’t, because even though Shattered Space isn’t exactly bad, it’s also not exactly great, and is criminally overpriced. 

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‍Starfield: Shattered Space takes you to the homeworld of House Va’Ruun, Va’ruun’kai, and focuses almost exclusively on the religious faction’s troubles. There are weird not-ghosts haunting the planet, and its people are barely surviving, and for one contrived reason or another, it’s up to you to fix both of those issues. But unlike in Fallout 4: Far Harbor or Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts, the way you do that is painfully cliche. Once you arrive on their planet, you almost immediately become the serpent-praising people’s version of a chosen one, who needs to save their one major city while also doing a few quasi-related tasks. Shattered Space’s main storyline is short, filled with bland characters, and involves doing everything you needed to do for Starfield’s other factions and the same things you always need to do in games where your character is given a cool-sounding title and a long to-do list. You save civilians, kill baddies, make a handful of moral decisions that don’t actually matter, and before you know it, you’ve determined the fate of House Va’Ruun’s planet and can leave it behind. 

Strictly speaking, Starfield: Shattered Space doesn’t suck. Its storyline and writing are technically proficient if generally uninteresting, its world is well-crafted enough, the city of Dazra is absolutely gorgeous, and although it doesn’t make any major changes to Starfield’s gameplay, that gameplay is still pretty solid. It’s enjoyable enough to roam around Va’ruun’kai completing quests, exploring points of interest, and shooting anyone or anything that gets in your way. It’s also relatively engaging to sit through its main narrative, which tonally is similar to the Thalmor/elf questlines in Skyrim, and there’s nothing objectively bad or broken about the expansion. For better or worse, then, it’s simply more Starfield content.

But the problem with that content is that there isn’t very much of it. Even though Starfield: Shattered Space costs $30/£30, which is almost half as much as the base game, its main narrative takes only five-odd hours to complete. You can also beat most of its side quests in about a day, there’s only a handful of new weapons to use, and there aren’t any new ship parts for you to tack onto your existing spacecraft. The decisions you make in it also don’t have any effect on the base game’s world, despite the expansion focusing on a relatively major faction within its universe, and it also doesn’t add any new mechanics for you to play around with. Again, nothing in the expansion is necessarily subpar, and there are even aspects of it that are genuinely good, but it’s absurd that Starfield’s first major content addition in over a year can be fully experienced in less than a day.

In hindsight, I’m not actually sure if Starfield was as fantastic as I thought it was when I played it at launch, but I am sure that Shattered Space is in no way, shape, or form worth its asking price. It’s decent enough in its own right, and Starfield fans will no doubt enjoy having an excuse to play the game again. However, in a world where Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, a $30/£30 expansion that included a free update that turned its base game into one of the best ever made, exists, it’s hard to actually recommend Starfield’s shabby attempt at an expansion. If you’re a die-hard Starfield fanatic, then you probably already own it because it was included with the £100/$100 version of the game, if you hate Starfield, you weren’t going to buy it anyway, and if you’re on the fence about it, wait until a sale or until Bethesda realises that it can’t get away with charging an absurd amount of money for an add-on that doesn’t actually add very much.