Starfield: Shattered Space review

pcgamer.com:

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