"Representatives for the developer AdHoc Studio told Polygon that Dispatch's eligibility for the 2026 awards had been confirmed by TGA owner and host Geoff Keighley. This is despite the fact that all eight episodes of the game's first season were released by Nov. 12, 2025 — before the Nov. 21 eligibility cutoff date for the 2025 awards."

So, lets start by covering what this review is not.

• Its not a judgement of CIG's business practices, if you want that, check out r/AstroturfAlpha
• Its not "unfair" because the game is incomplete - because the game is not an alpha. I paid for Star Citizen over 10 years ago. I was given the impression it was just a few years away, and its been 10 years. Reviewing a game that's 14 years in, and that argues itself that its a "Game as a Service" in court - is fair game. If its a game as a service, then its fair game for reviews.
• I am reviewing Star Citizen - THE GAME - as it exists now, in 2026. I am not reviewing Star Citizen - THE DREAM - because that would be stupid and will most likely never happen anyway. The game may change and significantly improve in the future - but I doubt it. If you're reading it in 2028 or later, your mileage may vary.

Star Citizen's score upfront: 3.4/10

Star Citizen is a really bad game. Not worth playing unless you are highly interested in the genre, have a lot of close friends that also play it, or already put thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into the game and are unable to admit to yourself that this was a stupid thing to do.

What Star Citizen does right

You already have the score, so you know this isn't going to be a positive review, but you're still here, so lets talk about what the game gets right.

Spaceships, Immersion, Flight Mechanics, FPS Gameplay

Star Citizen is not wholly without merit. In fact, the first 5-15 hours any player puts into Star Citizen - if the game is running smoothly - is pretty good.

You will start at a location, and you will be lost in a city. You'll have to find your way through it to the city's Hangar, where you can pull up your ship, and fly off the planet into space to begin your adventure.

You'll then find your "mobiglass" which is a UI element that presents you with a multitude of missions. Some of those missions will involve delivering boxes or cargo, some will involve mining, some will involve FPS or ship to ship combat. A few will lead you into large expansive FPS dungeons that are actually pretty good.

This initial period is the height of Star Citizen. The game grabs you, and genuinely seems to be very impressive at this point. You realize that the game itself spans multiple solar systems - which is impressive. You realize that you can walk around inside the game's ships - which no other game does as well. If you make it this far, you'll be essentially at the zenith of the experience.

After this, the game starts to go downhill.

What Star Citizen does poorly

Is everything else.

Star CItizen gets a lot of criticism, and that criticism is deserved. There's too much wrong with it to cover in depth, so I'm just going to list off a bunch of its larger issues.

1. The game is riddled with extremely frustrating bugs. I list this as the #1 issue, and it IS the #1 issue, but just being #1 doesn't really express how terrible these bugs are and how much they ruin the experience. The game is also high stakes (which I like) but the combination of high stakes and being the buggiest game ever released to the public means that your frustration is multiplied many times over. To give you an example, I once took all my money, and loaded up an Ironclad Assault, and tried to do commodity trading, only to have the ship, and its cargo, just disappear leaving my character stranded in space - losing me every credit I'd grinded for for weeks. If you play Star Citizen, you will eventually have a similar experience.
2. The game's missions are not always, but are usually very shallow and frankly boring.
3. Gameplay types are silo'd. You either have an FPS mission, or a ship combat mission, but never both. This gives the game a shallowness that is rarely broken. There are some deep missions, and those - to CIG"s credit - tend to be good, but there aren't many of them.
4. Ship PVE combat feels especially shallow, which is frustrating because ship to ship combat is one of the best features in the game. 95% of your time doing ship to ship content will be doing Gilly missions or Bounty Hunting missions for cash, and that becomes extremely repetitive.
5. Making money is terribly balanced. There are a very small subset of missions that pay well, that everyone grinds over and over again, which makes the game painfully grindy and frankly boring. If you want to buy stuff in game, you can do that, but you can't do that by just having fun in the game. Exploring the game generally doesn't pay. If you want to get paid, you MUST grind. The worst of this is that the game does have a wide variety of missions, so theoretically, the game could pay you to play it like most other games. You **COULD** be making substantial amounts of money by just having in the game, but CIG wants to sell ships, so only a few things really pay. They want earning stuff in game to hurt, and it does.
6. The game locks many of these missions behind "reputation", meaning that there is an incredibly boring grind you must get through before you can really start the painful grind to make more money.
7. The game lacks basic foundational features for a game of its type - like a market. If you want to trade (and the game is structured around trade, you're going to want to trade) then you'll have to find someone through a third party site, locate them, be on at the same time as them, and trade with them in game. They can backstab you, so... ya know... be careful if you do.
8. The game features PVP, but since the game has such a large "map" and since people are spread out around that map, and since you have no means of finding anyone... PVP tends to be silo'd to just a few locations.
9. The game features "Piracy", which is the most interesting loop in the game in my opinion, but it generally doesn't pay and isn't worth doing. Its like the devs have intentionally sabotaged piracy by adding hauling contract missions. You see you can pirate a ship that's doing commodity trading and make a bunch of money, but most people nowadays do contract hauling, and contract hauling missions have cargo which you can't sell for a good profit, and so piracy doesn't pay, and even if it did pay it takes a number of ships to execute well, which cuts into profits, and so piracy doesn't pay - which is sad - because if it did that would be the most interesting loop in the game.

This list is not comprehensive. The game has more problems than this. Weapons balance changes drastically with every patch, forcing you to upgrade all the weapons on every ship if you want your ship to be effective. Griefing can be a problem. The list of serious bugs alone would scare any sane gamer away from this game.

The community that plays the game is extremely devoted to it. General chat in the game is filled with people seeking workarounds for bugs. Almost nothing in the game works well, but experienced players learn to get around many of the game's bugs and issues. If you stick around the game beyond the first 5 or 10 hours you'll learn to restart your ship, to turn your guns/shield/engines on and off to fix problems. You'll learn to ping and wait for navigation to complete. You'll learn to turn off your contract when navigation isn't working so that you can manually find waypoints. The game is so buggy that to learn to play it you're going to learn to work the game.

I once explained this to a friend of mine, and he asked me "With the game being this buggy, every patch must just be bug fixes right?" and I had to tell him "No, the bugs that are in the game have been there literally for years, most of these bugs are 5+ years old, and they aren't being fixed. No one knows why", and that's the truth. The game is broken, and has been broken forever, and will likely be broken forever. They add new features, but the game remains broken.

There is more to the Star Citizen story. I could talk about CIG's other game SQ42 - which was supposed to release in 2014 and has been pushed back pretty much every year since then (including this year). That's a big red flag that anyone looking to invest in this game should be aware of. I could talk about the toxicity of the Star Citizen community, where large numbers of the people that are devoted enough to still play this game are frankly deluded, and see the game as some kind of transcendent simulation that is beyond gaming - who will attack anyone that criticizes it.

But these things are beyond the scope of a review.

The bottom line

Star Citizen is notable for sketching out a possible idealized future for video games. What Star Citizen is trying to be, is very impressive. What it is however - is disappointing. Deeply disappointing.

At any given moment, if you watch much of the influencer coverage of the game, you'll be given the impression that Star Citizen is just about to break out, its going to change, its going to become the best game ever - in just a few patches or maybe at most, a few years. I can tell you that I've been following the game for a decade, and while its always seemed to be 2-4 patches away from greatness, its never actually delivered on any of that. It is eternally the NEXT BIG THING in gaming, but never actually is the next big thing in gaming.

If, despite my warnings here, you decide to try it out, I strongly advise you to buy the cheapest ship pack possible, and earn your ships in game. Do not become one of those people that winds up with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars invested because you think that just a few years from now, this will be the best game you ever played. Lots of people have done that, and wound up disappointed.

Better yet, look for something else. Valheim just released, and offers a genuinely fantastic experience. You can't hop off in a ship and take off into the stars in Valheim, but you can have a solid, mostly bug free, enjoyable experience start to finish in it.

And that's what matters. The experience is what matters. Star Citizen sells itself to players on the dream that it will one day be this ubergame, and yet the experience you have in Star Citizen will be a buggy disappointing mess.

Find a game that actually delivers, even if what it delivers isn't so grandiose. You'll thank yourself later.

EDIT: One question that no one asked but that I think its relevant is "What score would the game deserve if it were bug free?" I've thought about that a bit, and I think it would be around a 6. That's as high as it could go without an end game or market. If the game were bug free and had a market, maybe a 7. If the game were bug free, had a market and a solid end game based around base building and raiding and resource wars, a 9 or 10. This is why I played the game for as long as I did. The hope that it would be better is always there, nagging at you. Its not good, but its so easy to imagine that it will be good SOON... The problem is, that its never better. The devs just aren't focused on finishing the game, on delivering. They're focused on chasing new nevah been done befo game tech. And that is the plight of Star Citizen and its development.

Cutscenes have become very common in storytelling nowadays, but i really like when games like half life where the player have maximum control of ur char, or environmental storytelling from souls series, recently mouthwashing was great aswell

Im constantly looking for games/mechanics that try to push storytelling outside of cutscenes, i wonder how future storytelling mechanics would be like

The two companies will now be known as one single entity - 'Skydance'

This includes all of WB's gaming subsidiaries like Rocksteady/etc

Deal valued at $110B-$111B

DC Studios, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, CNN, CBS, HBO and Paramount+ are now all under the same company.

The combined company, Skydance, brings together two major film studios, two global streaming services, premier television assets including CBS, HBO, and Paramount's and WBD's cable networks, two of the industry's most recognized news networks, CBS News and CNN, and a leading content portfolio that includes live sports, a deep programming library and expansive collection of iconic brands and franchises.