Coming back to a game like Starfield – or indeed any Bethesda RPG – always begins with a series of inevitable questions. Where am I? What the heck am I doing again? And why can’t I fast travel anywhere to get my bearings? Oh yes. It’s because I’m over-encumbered. .
Starfield: Shattered Space reviewDeveloper: Bethesda Game StudiosPublisher: Bethesda SoftworksPlatform: Played on PC Game PassAvailability: Out now on Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass and PC (Steam, Windows Store)
So begins the process of revving up that old Starfield muscle memory – wading through its copious menus to rid myself of inexplicable lumps of cobalt, nickel and other assorted sundries lining my pockets, all while trying to coax back half-forgotten memories of how I ended up at the bottom of a mineshaft dressed like a comic book mantis character. Ah yes, there was an attack on the capital by those big, horrible Xenomorph gloops that was quite exciting, and that big bank robbery that started me on the road to becoming a Freestar deputy alongside my mate Adam Jensen in a cowboy hat was pretty good, too. I was obsessed with Chunks, the most fascinating foodstuff in the history of video games. And how could I forget my terrifying space dad?
Outside of that, though, Starfield’s call to adventure left me mostly unmoved at the end of last year, and much of what I did during the 30 hours I spent traipsing through its yawning chasm of repetitive, grey story missions (nearly all of which took place on equally grey and repetitive planets) has since fallen beyond the event horizon of its unerring blandness. Starfield’s new paid expansion, Shattered Space, does its best to revitalise this enormous morass of an RPG, taking us to a new planet whose sky perpetually shimmers with hot pinks, deep reds and dark shades of purple, and putting us right in the morally-conflicted heartland of one of its most mysterious factions: the serpent god worshippers of House Va’ruun, whose citadel has just exploded in a mesmerising ball of ruptured space-time.
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Visually, it’s certainly the kick up the bum Starfield needs to tempt back wayward players, and it’s the kind of immediate, graphically arresting world building you wished the base game had led with as well, instead of parping you out onto the beigest and most barren rock face this side of the known galaxy. Even before you get to the planet of Va’ruun’kai, Shattered Space makes a surprisingly good first impression, as simply travelling to any non-mission-critical star system after completing the opening prologue will kick off the expansion’s initial distress call, luring you into the bowels of a large, cathedral-like spaceship that’s all twisted up inside with bright glowing tentacles of space-bending energy rifts. Ghostly apparitions beckon you in further as you navigate its zero-g corridors, and if you weren’t already getting big Alien (and specifically Prometheus) vibes from this place, then its climatic shootouts will leave you in little doubt of where Bethesda has drawn most of its inspiration from here.
As an opening salvo, it all feels like a tantalising glimpse of what’s to come – and it’s easily one of Starfield’s most memorable sequences to date. Fights with teleporting space ghosts, tense exploration, frantic, gravity-defying gunplay, and an unusually fraught encounter with a trash compactor. Finally, Starfield has a pulse. But just as it starts to get going, Shattered Space plunges headfirst in the same old problems that plagued Starfield’s original campaign, taking you on missions that once again turn inward and away from the exciting horizons that draw your eyes upward, and back down into the dirt and identikit lab facilities you’ve stomped through a dozen times before, making it feel like more of the same rather than something new and distinct.