Recent reviews by Sébastien Rivière

tl;dr not very bad, just kinda bad.

The tactical part is fine, and even feels good at times. The main problem I have is the none existent consequences of your choices.
Through my first playthrough, I played as humanely as possible, not killing or even hitting a single civilian. After a few mission with 0 civilian casualty, I suddenly had a weird dialogue between the soldiers about how bad they felt from the civvies they killed. I just thought of it as a weird bug of some sort, but still suffered a morale loss (called cohesion in this game). Then a few missions later, I actually went out of my way to try and save civilian (spoiler alert, you can't if they are already dead). Okay whatever, but in the night that followed, I got the merchant coming to cry about his friend being dead and hinting it might be us. 2 choices: confess the killing, or play innocent. I "played innocent" despite fully knowing that I didn't kill a single f.cking one of them. But nope, major morale loss applied to both soldiers who engaged in the talking.
And while there are way to recover some morale, it's like recovering 2 points for 1 character when yet another event removes 5 points out of 2 characters.

I'm fine with a game telling me bad choices have consequences. But I just hate it when a game force feed me some morality BS when I did nothing wrong. And this isn't one of those "there's no black & white in war" kind of game with gray morality, or maybe I totally missed the point here.
Anyway, that alone makes me give it a thumbs down. Don't give me choices if you're gonna act like I never had.

Game is initially fun, it has an interesting gameplay gimmick with having the characters go 2D and while the grind to get all characters is quite long, it's not that bad considering it's free 2 play.
I'm giving a thumbs down though for the lack of a lot of smaller things. Matchmaking is a plague in those games, and after a while the friends I played with noticed a significant increase in "try-harders" playing against us. It's fine when it's the 3v3...v3 matches as we can have a full 3 players team and still kinda enjoy it. When it's demolition or escort mode (5v5), we know we'll have to deal with 2 pick ups on our side, and if on the other side there's a full team of 5 try-harders playing together, we're gonna be in for a long game of not having fun. Particularly in Demolition mode where you have to lose at least 7 matches to be able to finish the session. Another thing here, you cannot leave until the session is over. Rage quitting and coming back will result in you respawning in the game you left.
Lots of maps are at least heavily inspired, if not outright copied and modified, from OW, TF2 & CS but I'm fine with that, those maps were good for a reason. What pains me is the lack of anything else besides that.
The gacha mechanics are terrible, but at least it's cosmetics only. I've seen other reviewers complaining about the fact that unlocking all characters (which is using a currency, not using the gacha mechanics) takes too long, but at the same time, I don't think most players will really enjoy ALL the characters. Even if they do, they can always buy their way through, and most of all, every characters can be tested in the training grounds just so you know which one you'd like to unlock next.

Overall, game is kinda fun, it's refreshing with its original mechanics albeit a bit gimmicky. Unfortunately I don't see myself playing it for months or years (if the game even survives that long anyway) as the novelty effect is already starting to wear out after only a dozen hours, hence the thumbs down.
6/10

Arrival radar disappeared, can't get it to appear back making the game virtually unplayable on any "high" level of difficulty. The absence of keybinds for it or at least a "reset UI" button is really lacking...
Tried restarting the game, setting up custom resolution (through launch options), but nothing worked.

Hehe steam

Played for 10-11 hours.
Open the game after a day at work.
Save is gone.
I'm glad it's not after even more hours but this shouldn't happen, at all. The fact that there's only a single save for every profile without any sort of backup is ridiculous.

Feels like an early access game, seriously the game is now 2 months old and some quest lines are still buggy as hell, some of them unfinishable without cheats / hacks / community fixes. I currently have 3, THREE, quests that I can't finish.
I would be ok with the "underdelivering" part, and even the visual glitches, but having this kind of game that are kind of "completionist" without being able to finish it is just terrible.
They then tell you that the game is still being fixed. They put out 3 patches with ridiculously small changelogs. Even indie devs manage to get more done in a single update.
Don't believe me, just check it for yourself here: https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield/news
I'm still playing the game but really that's only because it cost me way more than I should have ever spent on it.
Maybe the game will be fully playable in 2/3 years. And when it'll be worth 10-15€/$.

Game gets stuck at 1 quarter of the loading bar when starting a new game. Though I say that but since it's my first playthrough I have no idea if it's not also affecting loading saves.

tl;dr: Purchased it to play it with friends, while I assume the solo part might work, the multiplayer part is almost unplayable. 3/10

My steam account shows 3 hours of playtime, but a significant portion of that time was about waiting for synchronization, having to restart the server because of issues (either with me or some other players or the host) and having to respawn (and come back) because the game engine glitched us in an impossible to sort out situation (I spent almost 10 minutes on a single instance of those problems). I guesstimate I spent a bit less than 2 hours actually "playing" the game.
The biggest issue is that there is significant delay between whatever happens to the host and the other players (particularly if you're not super close to whoever is hosting): AI & other players actions are "refreshed" once every half second at best and upward of 5 seconds at worst, which is unacceptable for a third person "shooter".
And while the "janky" factor of the engine might seem like it's funny, more often than not it resulted in poor experience and even unplayable parts.
I'd be ok if it was sub 5$, but at the asking price of 15$ (or 12.5€), that's way above acceptable.
I have no idea how this game reached a "very positive" reviews state. Either nobody plays multiplayer, or are willingly disregarding its flaws. Yes, the noot key is very fun, and I abused it at times, but it's not gonna make me forget about how I glitched through an elevator (and subsequently couldn't proceed with the rest of the level), noclipped through a whole level, aim at a flying pistol because this somehow gets refreshed faster than the entity holding it, crippled my friends every single time we're not at each end of the map because the server didn't refresh their position fast enough for me not to shoot/hit them or didn't manage to get a key in a key hole because the game just didn't want to (we tried for 15 minutes).
I understand that this is an early access game but the amount of problems we encountered barely makes it acceptable as a technical demo. Those issues have been reported for quite a while now, making it more difficult for me to accept.

UWU

Another one of those "I wish there was a "meh" option to those reviews". The game looks fantastic and the first 5 hours of gameplay are great, there's a lot to discover and to do. Then the novelty effect wears off and it slowly but surely becomes a grind.
I lost my first 9 hours game due to the safeguards not working (supposedly when you have less than 6 adults the game spawn adults around your sleeping area, spent more than 1 hour running in circle without finding anything) and a bug (one of my last 2 remaining adults died, got spawn back to the other one at base, he didn't eat, died a second after spawn).
The map looks gorgeous but after a few hours I found it tedious to explore. I totally understand the lack of map and the fact that we have to rely on landmarks and sun's position to guesstimate the North, but the *very* slow speed of movement makes the game a true walking simulator at time.
My second and last game lasted for about 25 hours (my 77h playtime on steam is mainly due to massive amount of AFK to do something else), and I'd say 75% of it was just me using left stick to go in one direction while I watch a youtube video or do some remote work.
tl;dr it's not a bad game, nor is it a good one, its graphics are great but the gameplay elements are tedious after a few hours
5/10