Shattered Space has now been released as the first, and so far only, expansion for Bethesda Game Studio’s spacefaring RPG Starfield, which released about a year ago. Letting the player explore the homeworld of the secretive House Va’ruun faction and introducing a few new enemy types to face, the expansion overall feels a bit lightweight in comparison to Bethesda expansions which have come before, and is unlikely to change your opinion on the base game or be especially enticing to anyone other than those really keen on more Starfield content to play.

Once you have installed the expansion, you encounter an unexpected House Va’ruun space station, the Oracle, orbiting a nearby planet. Once you dock with it and clear out the infestation of teleporting ghost soldiers, you are transported to Va’ruun’kai, the moon homeworld of the House Va’ruun faction. The capital city of Dazra has been wrecked by a mysterious explosion in the Scaled Citadel, carving a huge crater out of the city’s centre and the head of the High Council, Anasko Va’ruun, has gone missing. All the while, space and gravity around the calamity appear to be acting strangely. In typical Bethesda fashion, you are heralded as the potential saviour to Dazra’s future despite House Va’ruun’s insular culture, and recruited as a Vindicator to unite the different Houses so that they can pool their resources to investigate the calamity and find out what happened.

It isn’t the worst bunch of missions, and they provide a decent number of classic Bethesda moral choices and factions to side with. It was somewhat nice to learn a bit more about House Va’ruun society, particularly by giving them a bit more nuance via internal conflicts regarding devotion to the Great Serpent religion versus a more secular approach to integrating better into the Settled Systems society. That said, the expansion’s scope remains disappointingly small, ending on a climactic choice that doesn’t have any noticeable impacts once the mission has concluded. At only eight main missions, it’s also pretty short, however, there are a number of optional sidequests to pad out the expansion’s content if you’re seeking to try out everything that Shattered Space has to offer.

The expansion doesn’t really have any particularly notable NPCs to draw the player into the alien setting either; even Andreja, your companion from the base game with ties to House Va’ruun in her backstory, doesn’t get particularly additionally expanded upon or have all that much to say about returning to her home aside from a few unique dialogue options. While the expansion’s reveal trailer teased a sort of cosmic horror angle, the missions aren’t especially scary, with the exception of one or two tense moments.

In particular, if you are a fan of Starfield’s space combat, you may be a little disappointed to know that Shattered Space takes place almost entirely on a single map, within Dazra and its outskirts. While this fortunately gives the expansion’s content a sense of location, compared to how small the rest of the game feels considering the emphasis on fast-travelling across star systems, it feels a bit disappointing that there isn’t really anything to do in the rest of the new star system that you get access to. Not only is there no space combat to engage with, but there also isn’t anything to do on any of the other explorable moons aside from the usual procedurally generated exploration. Ironically, this also negatively impacts any player who picked the Serpent’s Embrace trait during character creation due to lacking opportunities to grav jump, meaning that player characters raised in the House Va’ruun religion are going to find the content more challenging unless they take regular joy rides across the galaxy in between missions.

Similarly to Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, this expansion coincides with some free quality-of-life improvements for the base game. Having not played much of Starfield since its release last year, Shattered Space was a nice opportunity to experience a lot of the free updates which have steadily improved the game since launch. While the revamped maps have been a godsend, the main new addition that has changed the game’s exploration is the Rev-8, a ground vehicle that you and your companion can use to get around. I quite liked the Rev-8, for the most part; it controls a bit better than the Mako from Mass Effect, and its boost jets and laser cannon made it easy enough to rely on to explore the area around Dazra.

While the teleporting phantom enemies could be kind of annoying to defeat, often by artificially prolonging fights by teleporting back and forth instead of actually engaging me in combat, I didn’t find Shattered Space too challenging in general, despite tackling it well below the recommended character level of 35. That said, the game’s spotty enemy AI certainly didn’t hurt in terms of difficulty; many times, enemies just stood there not moving while I filled them with lead. On that note, the expansion is pretty buggy in general, even by Starfield standards, with cutscene oddities like companions turning invisible or randomly floating into the sky being not uncommon occurrences. While Bethesda fans are probably familiar with this by now, maybe don’t approach Shattered Space looking for the most polished of experiences.