2023 has been an absolutely monumental year for video game releases, with at least one huge, critically acclaimed title dropping every month. But even while some of 2023's biggest games haven't quite been the critical smash-hits that fans wanted them to be, their releases have still been a huge deal, and that's certainly the case with Bethesda's Starfield.

Arriving on Xbox Game Pass just a few weeks ago, Starfield has been one of the most anticipated games of 2023 since its release date was set. And while critics have been a little divided on it, Bethesda fans have turned up in droves to play Starfield, making it one of the biggest games of the year, and potentially even one of the biggest games of the entire console generation so far. But Starfield isn't perfect, and there's one main story gameplay loop that just doesn't hold a candle to what Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom offered earlier this year.

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Starfield's Temples Don't Hold a Candle to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's

Starfield is an absolutely gigantic game with a lot going on at all times. In classic Bethesda fashion, players will probably spend hundreds of hours with Starfield and never make it past the game's opening set of missions. There's simply too much in Starfield for one thing to hold the player's attention for longer than an hour or two, whether it's ship customization, dogfighting pirates in space, creating an outpost and mining crafting resources, battling raiders on the surface, or solving some of the galaxy's greatest mysteries.

But when players do finally get to Starfield's main story quest, they'll discover it's actually one of Bethesda's best. Though their facial animations are a little stilted, Starfield's core cast of main story characters is a fairly compelling group, and the main hook of a galaxy-wide search for mysterious alien artifacts is an inherently exciting one. Unfortunately, not all of Starfield's main questline is quite as engaging when it comes to the actual gameplay itself.

After a fun set of opening missions that provide a few barebones tutorials and introduce the game's core cast of characters and the central plot, Starfield's main quest tasks players with finding and exploring a strange structural anomaly on a planet. This will lead the player to discover an impressive-looking Sci-Fi temple, and entering it begins a simple but effective puzzle in which players need to fly through collections of light to power up a spinning ring in the center of the dark temple room. Upon entering the ring and receiving a magical space vision, players will unlock their first supernatural power. This quest in itself is extremely exciting and atmospheric, but it soon loses its luster when players are asked to repeat this process over and over again for the next few hours.

Naturally, this Starfield questline brings up comparisons with this year's Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and its own set of temple-related quests, all of which are much better than Starfield's. Though they're not considered the best in the franchise, all of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's temples provide a fun, engaging challenge, with a ton of puzzles, a grandiose boss fight at the end, and the reward of a brand new power-up and spirit companion. Though the overall formulaic structure of each of Tears of the Kingdom's temples is the same, the activities inside each one are usually very different from one another, and the environment each one is set in is completely different. Paired with some excellent visuals and some outstanding music, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom's temples are easily leaps and bounds ahead of Starfield's.

Starfield is available for PC and Xbox Series X/S.

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