Starfield: Shattered Space review

My biggest bone to pick with Starfield was its timid vision of the future. The squeaky clean corridors of New Atlantis did less for me than the crime-riddled backwater of Riften, and on the average planet, points of interest were spread so thin I felt like I was bushwhacking through miles of desolate space just to find something memorable. 

What is it? The first expansion for Bethesda's space exploration RPG, complete with a fractious cult to investigate and their newly explorable homeworld
Expect to pay $30
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Reviewed on Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Intel Core i7-12700F, 16 GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Out: Sep 30, 2024
Steam Deck: Unsupported
Link: Official site 

I didn't hate the game, though—it inherits the strengths of Bethesda's previous hits and restores some of the RPG meat I missed in Fallout 4—which is why I went into Shattered Space with some anticipation. A mysterious, '70s horror-tinged Great Serpent cult is a mite more colorful than Starfield's muted «isn't space neat» baseline, and maybe a more focused experience would allow me to put down the machete and see the potential that Bethesda had previously spread too thin. 

Unfortunately, I think this DLC had the opposite effect on me. The stage is set to dazzle: it's a handcrafted zone densely packed with quests and NPCs with competing interests. There are new weapons to find, unique enemies to use them on, and a fresh narrative far from the shackles of the glib main story. I was locked in for this sandbox to come to life, but instead Shattered Space delivers a bland stew of business as usual. It's largely on rails, light on substance for the price, and committed to a narrative I'm already forgetting the details of.

The high points in Shattered Space are the new environments and worldbuilding on headlining planet Va'ruun'kai. After exploring a derelict space station crawling with vortex phantoms—which is what Starfield calls ghosts when they are