Is Starfield fun? Not really, not for most new players. Starfield scores 4/10 for fun. The jetpack fights and ship building are good, but menus, load screens and empty planets eat the hours between them.
Where this score comes from: Steam player reviews, last checked against the 200 most recent English reviews in October 2026. Starfield on Steam
Starfield is Bethesda’s open galaxy RPG: a thousand planets, factions to join, ships to build and a big main story about strange artifacts. Three years after launch it costs $49.99 on Steam and is usually cheaper on sale. The question here is simple. Is the moment-to-moment playing any fun?
Starfield scores 4/10 on immediate fun. Long-time fans keep the overall Steam rating afloat, but players in their first 20 hours are mostly negative, and their complaints are about the core loop, not the late game. Several say the first couple of hours have that old Bethesda magic, then the routine sets in: take a mission, open a menu, fast travel, land, fetch something, open a menu again. One player was eleven hours in and the plot had barely moved. The fans who love it often say it takes hours to click, and many of them play it heavily modded.
Moving around. The boost pack makes ground fights feel lively, and gunfights are decent for a Bethesda game once you find a weapon you like. Ship building is the part even angry reviewers praise. People lose whole evenings designing a ship module by module.
The faction questlines get real love too, and players who click with it describe the classic pull: you start for an hour, get sidetracked by a quest and a planet, and several hours are gone. A few who hated it at launch came back after the updates and now can’t stop.
The travel. Going from a building on one planet to a building on another you already explored can mean four loading screens and three cutscenes. One player figured most of their eleven hours went to load screens between doors. Space flight is mostly a menu, so the thrill of wandering that made Skyrim work never shows up.
Then the emptiness. Planets are huge and mostly bare, and the same abandoned base layouts repeat across star systems. New players also call the dialogue flat, the inventory a chore and the tutorials thin, with one alt-tabbing to Reddit to learn basic systems. And some can’t play at all: recent reviews report crashes on “New Game” with newer AMD cards, and others crash every ten minutes.
Only on a deep sale, and only if you already love Bethesda RPGs and don’t mind modding them into shape. Players say the Nexus collections and the big total conversion mods turn it into a different game, but that is the community’s work, not what you buy. If you want a Bethesda-style RPG that is fun from the first hour, Fallout: New Vegas scores 8/10.
For comparison, we rated Fallout 4 9/10 and The Witcher 3 6/10 on the same fun-only scale.
See where it lands in our list of overrated games.
Starfield scores 4/10 on immediate fun. Great ship building and jetpack fights. Menus, load screens and empty planets fill the hours in between.
Load screen loop. Empty planets.
One question: did it deliver immediate fun? Graphics, story depth, difficulty and critical acclaim are ignored. Pick-up-and-play accessibility is rewarded; anything that makes you wait for the fun to start is penalized.
How we score: We don't care about graphics, story depth, or critical acclaim. One question — did it deliver immediate fun? We reward pick-up-and-play accessibility and penalize anything that makes you wait for the fun to start.