Spoilers for Starfield and its latest expansion, be warned!
“Oh, we’re on the brink of breaking apart, so this stranger is going to come and help us because she’s just arrived here? Are you mad??”
The sentence above may or may not be accurate to one of the words spoken within this new DLC for Starfied, the one game that I still feel surreal to play and complete, multiple times over. And while the bar for this latest expansion doesn’t need to be that high…
But why do I feel like I’ve played this already?
Waylay Beforehand
First, though, we take a bit of a detour for some catching up on how Starfield is doing after its first year, with some rather fascinating additions for the base game that you don’t really see done for a single-player game.
Like remember how we talked about the maps being quite barren for some reason and traversing around the planets does feel troublesome with how big the scales are, well in the subsequent updates after launch, we have gotten a map revamp with distinguishable landmarks now visible, and an actual vehicle that can hasten traversal ten folds. 
However, I am curious how these two main complaints are the ones that were on the dev team’s radar and have to be addressed. Perhaps a directive from the folks upstate, aka their bosses?
But who knows, the quality of life improvements that you would expect from a mod are now an added feature, which is a welcome change, along with the man creation mods that you can overload your copy of Starfield with after its own introduction late in the summer of this year as well.
And what about the performance side of the game on consoles nowadays, you might say? Mind you, it launched on a fixed frame rate of 30fps on both Series X and S, which did have some screen-tearing and slow-downs in some cities during its launch.
Those have also been patched with 60fps on both consoles, though those slow-downs still pop up within the Series S version, of course, considering how low-power it is but still impressive that the Dev team has been working on optimization still.
The Chosen One (Again?)
So the meat of this whole review is the latest expansion for the game that brings our Starborn to the House Va’ruun to solve a dispute as their leader goes missing. Now if this sounds familiar to Fallout 4’s expansions quest where we joined into the Raider game and became their big honcho, then you are right.
It’s fascinating to see them going back more or less on this idea, but with the sci-fi twist that sees you becoming one of the Va’ruun as well, which if you bring your companion Andreja, you might start an interesting conversation with her, since this is her home as well.
But does it add to the overarching story of being able to New Game Plus multiple times over? Somewhat, with some unique dialogue choices if you redo it once again, much like how the main game does, and it feels cool to be saying stuff like, “Maybe next time I should rule it” like a bonafide supervillain after the expansion proceedings ends, which will make your companions laugh with worry.
The homeworld itself is quite beautiful when you discount the chaos that’s happening outside, with the phantoms and zealots aiming to get rid of you. The hue from the blue-ish color of the ooze that created this conflict feels like something out of “Colors Out of Space” where the moment you lay your character there, you start to take damage and perhaps even lose yourself.
It’s persistent through the whole expansion, with some NPCs that you have to take the battle against already bathing on that glow, rendering them almost invincible with the power of quickly respawning each time after a combat encounter.
Nevertheless, the expansion itself, much like the Nuka World expansion in Fallout 4, feels lackluster in execution. Like getting into the nitty gritty of the internal politics within the Va’ruunites sounds incredible on paper, but it’s something we have already played almost a decade ago, but without needing to take out a slice of the faction because they disagreed on your appointment.
Conclusion
So if you’re already not keen on learning about the factions on Starfield, or aren’t even that interested in this game after finishing it once or twice, then there’s no value lost from not playing this one. But for those who do, it’s an okay addition to the fun weirdness that is in this game.
Played on Xbox Series S, expansion was purchased by the reviewer.