Starfield - Terran Armada: The Definitive Review

After what seems like a decade of zero information, Bethesda has finally launched Starfield’s second official DLC chapter, Terran Armada. This comes alongside a much-demanded overhaul of spaceflight and in-system navigation, which now allows for really quite clunky traversals between planets and moons instead of the fast-travel hops of the original release. In a somewhat predictable turn, this has led to the community both celebrating and shrugging at the new ‘cruise’ mode. For some it completes the entire proposition and makes Starfield the consummate all-rounder it should have always been. For others, and that includes me, it’s a fairly trivial addition that adds little more than a layer of delay and boredom to interplanetary spaceflight. Having written about Elite last week, I can assure that I am no stranger to watching starfields whizz by as you patiently await arrival at where you actually want to be, so you can get on with what you actually want to do. That travel time was necessary to add peril and/or discovery to the proceedings of Elite and while that also applies to Starfield’s cruise mode, it’s not as if it didn’t already have all that with the old fast travel method. The difference for me being Elite on the C64 would play The Blue Danube Waltz whereas Starfield plays you nothing. You just sit in your flightseat, waiting. It’s a weirdly static activity, watching distance counts (in light seconds) whittle down as navigation markers and tiny spheres move around in your view, all before the autopilot disengages cruise mode and you’re back in the ‘old’ game. It’s almost like a fugue state, or emerging from a medically-induced coma of sorts, thanks to that sense of feeling passively stuck in place while the supposedly exciting travelling happens. It’s barely convincing, in part thanks to the sober photorealism that Starfield approximates.There’s some delight in having planets and moons zoom in at terrifying speed, absolutely recalling that one bit in Return of the Jedi when the rebel fleet emerges from hyperspace at Endor. Unlike Lando’s arrival at the scene of an ultimate battle, there’s an obvious switching of modes in Starfield that adds to the sense of ceremonial clunkiness and there’s only the vaguest sense of actually moving, despite apparently being at a considerable fraction of the speed of light. Interestingly, roughly the same sensations don’t feel quite as jarring in No Man’s Sky, mostly because of its specific and proud artifice. Its sense of the paperback cover painting universe feels more suited to implausibly short flight times, as it feels so much more like a glorious, epic-scale train set than Starfield’s attempt to paint a region of the galaxy as if it’s real. But this is the Free Lanes update, a part of the larger patch that underpins Terran Armada and is free to all users. It brings a bunch of new ship encounters and some quite cool locales (mining installations on asteroids and everything) and fixes a fair few bugs and glitches. But yet, I still cannot find the fucking ECS Constant.

Terran Armada does cost money, much like Shattered Space, but I can confidently say it’s worth it and particularly if you’re already a Starfield pervert. From what I’ve played, it’s actually better than Shattered Space in several ways. Where the first DLC was concerned with a new planet and fitting out the capital’s immediate locale with a denser map than anything seen in the base release, Terran Armada introduces a new enemy faction and a set of spawning procedural challenges. Some are trivial, some involve some of the most bitter and taxing combat seen so far. The latter comes from invading battleships that you’re tasked with boarding and clearing. These can throw out various layouts, with one set being a superbly tight collection of corridors and spaces filled with high-level enemies that will absolutely fuck you up. Once you’re confident in battle against this new faction, that class of ship becomes a thrilling breakneck chase through the vessel until you reach the bridge and kill the commanding officer, retrieve their codes and set the ship to self-destruct. You feel like an absolute badass slicing through battledroids and the aggro human crew with this singular focus in mind. The bridge also holds all the best loot, so it’s nearly always a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. It may lack the explicit sci-fi noodling of Shattered Space’s main quest and side content, but it feels so much meatier as a gameplay proposition that it almost fills a void that you could be forgiven for not noticing - challenging combat in tight spaces. It’s a nice standardisation of a previously optional side-activity. That of aggressive ship boarding. You needed a craft with EM weaponry to disable your victim, or to creep onboard a landed craft. But pound for pound, combat aboard Starfield’s spaceships is the most intense and unforgiving when the enemies are at suitable levels and in suitable numbers.

A big step up from Shattered Space’s wibbly-wobbly spacewarping and quasi-spiritual noodling, Terran Armada is much more grounded in the nuts and bolts of muscular combat, scary death robots and fascistic militaria. It fits Starfield’s cassette futurism aesthetic like a glove, where Shattered Space seemed more interested in laying out a thin and wooly exoticism to add a more twee, new age sensibility despite the specific codings of House Va’ruun as implants taken from Star Trek Romulans and Babylon 5 Centauris. Terran Armada even sounds like a mid-80s toy line or 2000ad faction, and it strongly recalls 2001, Alien, Outland and all those other movies where the enclosed environment and the tech-heavy corridor represents most of the liveable space. The actual story missions for the DLC are similarly brutish in construction and ally themselves well with Starfield’s love of the morbid vivisection of colonists, workers and scientists alike at the hands of interstellar criminality. The heavy repetition of locations and their identical interiors burns that grimdark sense of nothing being sacred into your soul, seen in the sci-fi walls splattered with blood and gleaming floors littered with bodies of the innocent. When you’ve put enough hours into Starfield and seen those scenes a hundred times, that sense of self-interested, materialist brutality mercilessly executing the idealism of a 70s techno-utopian future becomes existentially tangible and the Terran Armada content slots in perfectly alongside it. In a way, the unrelenting sense of unfair, cruel horror at the hands of humans being awful humans makes it all the more important to have an outpost on some serene, faraway paradise to give you a sense of sanctuary. After all, when you’ve just slaughtered 20 crew as you walked through their living quarters as if they were the cops and you were the Terminator, you probably need to cleanse your palate a little.

While the new content is exciting by virtue of being new content, it’s important to note that I’ve come back to Starfield nearly a year after deleting it. In that time, Bethesda has been quietly adding this and that. There’s a fairly constant stream to the Creations mod store, there have been incremental additions to the random location - or POI - catalogue. Between picking out content to play from the store and the wider abundance of buildings in the procedural planet maps, the Starfield of April 2026 is a subtly different creature to the Starfield of Shattered Space and offers quite a lot of shit to do. As such, I’m oddly delighted and found myself sinking back into my old ways and behavioural loops with remarkable enthusiasm. Old whims re-emerged as creaking synapses suddenly remembered which skills I desperately needed to grind XP for, which weapon mods I wanted to make and so on. Imagine the horror of realising that after all these years, you still haven’t maxed spacesuit crafting! On that subject, Free Lanes and Terran Armada introduce a new grinding currency called X-Tech, which unlocks another tier of improvements for gear and your spaceships. The fun part is that the X-Tech mods also cost shitloads of money, so Bethesda has craftily reinvigorated its grind economy for those of us acquisition pervs who absolutely must have the most optimal stuff in their inventories. Get the new shit and make money, motherfucker. Add to that some funky new clothes and spacesuits, a whole new set of faction guns and a new sniper rifle and you can probably guess that I have quite a lot of work to do. I couldn’t be happier - but I do lament all the other games I could (and should) be playing instead.

The oddity of course is that none of this changes the fundamental proposition at the heart of Starfield, nor does any of it atone for its sins. As with Shattered Space, there’s nothing transformative or redemptive in Terran Armada. It’s more of the same, but it’s good more of the same, and that counts as far as I’m concerned. It’s interesting to try and consider where Starfield actually sits these days. Is it better than Skyrim now? Unbelievably, I saw a claim that Starfield has more authored quests than any other Bethesda game. And despite my own scepticism, I can’t deny that the modern Starfield has a shitload of content to play and a shitload of stuff to collect. For me, it’s one of my favourites of the current generation but as I’ve pointed out many times, a lot of that is down to it coming close to fulfilling childhood wishes for the ultimate sci-fi videogame. In some ways, it surpasses my prepubescent expectations and I was still finding myself occasionally dumbstruck at the sublimity the worldsim can accidentally create. Emerging from an underground facility onto a rocky plain to be greeted by a ringed gas giant filling the sky, its rings so impossibly close that you can see the individual ice shards as they arc diagonally across your view. It stops you dead in your tracks and you gawp in wonder at the sheer scale of the thing. The creaking engine may be old and utterly inadequate when it comes to map sizes, but the lighting model works miracles when the variables align - and experiential joy is sometimes more profound and more satisfying than any metricised achievement or currency gain. And again, Starfield excels at nailing a particular sci-fi aesthetic style, and does so consistently. Some of the new POIs are superb works of environmental modelling, right up there with the industry’s very best, with the interiors having prop placements that convince with ease. Bethesda does seem particularly adept at evoking the messy workplace and the lived-in quarters. It’s just a shame that the repetition of them breeds such contempt because on first contact, they’re generally great. The same goes for the terrain and I’ll concede that often, it’s the starker and rockier environments where the renderer does its best work, but that work can be absolutely stunning in the right light and the right confluences of component parts. So I beg you to wade into Starfield’s waters if you haven’t already. The realisation I had after settling into my return might be the clincher - the flaws are always there and the glitches are just as bad and potentially game-breaking as ever. Save often. But the virtues are manifold and they are fucking great when they click. Terran Armada absolutely adds more to the happy pile, and Free Lanes helps plenty. More, please! Ultimately, the realisation I had is that the essential Bethesda magic is deep in Starfield’s bones and if you know how to access it, then you’ll realise that there isn’t anything out there that comes close to this. As I’ve said many times before, to love Bethesda open-worlders is to accept the jank is part of the journey. It’s hilarious that after nearly three years, that jank is as bad as ever, but then the good shit is better than it’s ever been.

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