Starfield: Shattered Space Review – Lateral Step

I fell in love with Starfield when I played and reviewed it last year. Obviously, Bethesda’s space-faring RPG is a divisive game, and even its biggest fans – myself included – will tell you that it does suffer from some serious flaws. But even with its flaws, it was an absolutely magical experience for me. From its vast scope to the rich lore, from its ship building mechanics to the tight combat, from the satisfying progression mechanics to much more, there was so much about it that massively appealed to the Bethesda fan in me.

Obviously, then, I’ve been keenly waiting to get my hands on the game’s first pain expansion, Shattered Space, especially thanks to its promise of an experience that blends Starfield’s setting and mechanics with the more deliberate design sensibilities of past Bethesda titles. And while I have certainly enjoyed my time with Shattered Space, it does admittedly feel like sort of a half-step. Yes, it does deliver a significant chunk of new content, a lot of which I’ve had plenty of fun with- but does it deliver the sort of significant improvements and enhancements on top of the core formula that many would have hoped for? Not really, no.

"Shattered Space does deliver a significant chunk of new content, a lot of which I’ve had plenty of fun with- but does it deliver the sort of significant improvements and enhancements on top of the core formula that many would have hoped for? Not really, no."

Starfield: Shattered Space kicks off with you receiving a distress call that leads to you and your crew investigating the Oracle, an abandoned space station that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. As soon as you enter, it becomes clear that things have gone horribly wrong here, with everything from corpses to strange, teleporting enemies, to mystical vortexes distorting the environment in legitimately unsettling ways. A short introductory mission in the space station later, you find yourself on Va’ruun’kai, the homeworld of House Va’ruun, where an experiment gone wrong has caused widespread havoc, with space-time rifts, weird anomalies, and bizarre creatures appearing everywhere around the planet. And once again, it’s up to you to put things right.

The new campaign added to Starfield with Shattered Space is a solid one. I wouldn’t put it up there with the best of the best that Bethesda has delivered, but it does its job well enough. The story told here isn’t particularly spectacular, but it does fill in the gaps with a lot of House Va’ruun related lore that was left shrouded in mystery in the base game. Learning more about the enigmatic faction, its origins, and its homeworld is undoubtedly one of the biggest draws of the experience, but at the same time, I do understand that someone who, unlike me, didn’t care for the base game’s setting and lore won’t find too much to want to invest in here. Much of the main story in Shattered Space is perfectly serviceable, though it doesn’t often rise above that level. From the quest design to the breadth of the expansion in terms of how much content it offers, there’s plenty here to keep you busy and occupied, especially if you were already a Starfield fan to begin with.

The setting of Va’ruun’kai, however, is definitely a much brighter highlight. One of the biggest criticisms leveled at Starfield by many was its excessive use of procedural generation, with only a handful of its planets being handcrafted locations. All of Va’ruun’kai, however, has been handcrafted. The entirety of Dazre city and everything surrounding it – all points of interests, all bases, all caves, everything you see on the map – all of it has been deliberately placed.

"From the quest design to the breadth of the expansion in terms of how much content it offers, there’s plenty here to keep you busy and occupied, especially if you were already a Starfield fan to begin with."

Thanks to that change, exploration feels much more compelling and, in turn, rewarding in Shattered Space than it did in most of Starfield. Bethesda’s RPGs tend to have a very particular flavour to them in how they lead you from one distraction to the next, and how all of that always seems to happen so organically. Many found the lack of that style of exploration in Starfield disappointing, so to see its return in Shattered Space is surely a welcome change. Is the content that you discover while you’re exploring the new planet exceptional in any way? No, but it’s always at least a certain level of fun, so there’s enough there to motivate you to keep playing.

With a decently sizeable map and about 10-20 hours of new content, Shattered Space definitely feels like a sizable addition to Starfield, but in other ways, it feels a little less generous. For instance, there’s little to no unique new weapons or gear to equip, and what has been added is fairly standard and unremarkable, to the extent that there’s a good chance you may not even end up using any of it beyond a very limited amount. There’s no new companion character, no major new gameplay mechanics have been added, and even the new enemies that you fight are, more often than not, reskinned versions of familiar foes, with a couple of new abilities up their sleeves (like being able to teleport, annoyingly enough).

Even as much as I loved Starfield’s base experience, I felt that with its first expansion, it had the perfect opportunity to really swing for the fences and maybe try and convert skeptics into fans, Maybe expecting something on the level of Cyberpunk 2077’s turnaround with Phantom Liberty would have been foolish- but I was certainly expecting the overall Shattered Space experience to feel like a step up over Starfield. And while the addition of a new, handcrafted map does do a little bit of that, by and large, the expansion feels like a lateral step, and as such, something of a missed opportunity.

"While the addition of a new, handcrafted map does do a little bit of that, by and large, the expansion feels like a lateral step, and as such, something of a missed opportunity."

Even on a technical level, Shattered Space hasn’t made too many improvements. Things such as excessive loading screens and static conversations with the camera zoomed directly into NPCs’ faces are obviously hard-coded into Starfield’s very fabric at this point, and I’m not expecting those issues to be fixed with an expansion. But there are plenty of other technical issues here that should have been fixed. NPCs keep walking into each other, enemy AI during combat can be spectacularly stupid at times, there are abundant animation glitches and texture pop in, and worst of all, performance can be a mess, especially when you’re trying to drive your rover or use your jetpack out beyond the outskirts of Dazra city.

Given the fact that it gets rid of Starfield’s procedural generation in favour of a more handcrafted approach, it feels strange to say that Shattered Space is ultimately more of the same- but that is what it is. It has a lot of the same strengths, but it also has many of the same issues. If you enjoyed the base game, as I did, there’s a good chance that you’re going to have plenty of fun with its first expansion. If, however, you were disappointed in Starfield and were hoping Shattered Space would be a significantly better experience- unfortunately, it’s likely that you’re going to be disappointed once again. Whether or not Bethesda will be more ambitious with future expansions for its sci-fi RPG remains to be seen, but in the here and now, Shattered Space is a safe and fun, if unremarkable, addendum to Starfield.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X.