GamesRadar gave Starfield 5/5 and called it Bethesda's best since Oblivion. The math left the planet.

The math aint mathing. GamesRadar did not merely enjoy Starfield. It awarded the full five out of five, walked into the spreadsheet wearing a NASA helmet, and declared the numbers too small to contain its feelings.

Leon Hurley's review calls Starfield 'the best thing Bethesda's done since Oblivion,' which is a sentence so aerodynamically engineered for box art that it should have come with fold-out wings. This is not criticism. This is a launch trailer that learned punctuation. The review treats scale as proof of quality, as if counting planets is the same thing as evaluating what happens on them. By that logic, a phone book is the greatest novel ever written because it has so many characters.

The score is the real comedy. Five out of five means essentially flawless within the publication's scale. Not 'ambitious but uneven.' Not 'brilliant in places, weirdly sterile in others.' Five. The same mathematical neighborhood as all-timers, masterpieces, games that bend the medium around themselves. Meanwhile, the review itself keeps stepping around obvious review-shaped objects: menu-heavy exploration, repeated structures, stiff faces, loading-screen tourism, and the strange sensation of exploring the infinite universe through a filing cabinet.

This is where review inflation becomes performance art. If Starfield is 5/5, what number is reserved for a game that has scope and momentum? Six? Do we start printing fractions on emergency paper? GamesRadar's rubric here appears to be: one star for Bethesda, one star for space, one star for ambition, one star for embargo excitement, and one star because the PR email said 'our biggest game ever' in bold.

Again, this is not a review of Starfield. Plenty of people had a great time mining rocks, hoarding sandwiches, and disappointing their in-game parents. This is a review of a review that looked at a massive, fascinating, compromised RPG and decided compromise was for peasants. A critic's job is to separate awe from assessment. GamesRadar instead put awe in a little captain's chair and let it fly the ship directly into a 5/5.

Final calculation: 5/5 enthusiasm, 2/5 scrutiny, 0/5 willingness to admit that 'big' and 'great' are different columns in Excel.