When I first heard about this game coming out, I immediately got very happy and very excited about its arrival. It was inevitable really. My love of Bethesda’s RPGs is well known and well documented with my previous reviews of Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas praising each of the games. So needless to say my expectations were quite high for this game, considering it’s lineage and did it meet those expectations? Absolutely.
Some may consider this review to be somewhat in haste considering the vast amount of content that Bethesda’s RPGs are known for and the game itself has only been out for less than a week. However thanks to some previously mentioned vacation time and doing pretty much nothing but play Skyrim, eat, drink and sleep for the past week, I have played over 60 hours on my first character, with it becoming the head of the thieves guild, reaching level 26 out of 50 and completing the main story line and am well underway with my second character.
Let’s discuss the main story first and thankfully it’s not as convoluted as it was in Oblivion. Dragon’s are coming back to life and messing the place up with the flying, fire breathing and the general destroying of towns and as the most recent prisoner turned hero in Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series and also the only Dovahkiin around, its your job to find out what is causing the dragons to come back and sort the whole mess out. I don’t want to go too far into it for risk of giving away spoilers but what I can say is that the story is very enjoyable to play through, and is somewhat shorter and less repetitive than Oblivion thanks to not having to close down an oblivion gate every 30 seconds. There are also numerous other story lines throughout the game with the guilds and the civil war that is raging across Skyrim but again, I’m not going to speak on those either, partly again due to spoilers but mostly because there are just too many to go through and I didn’t go through all of them.
If you have played Morrowind or Oblivion, you know how to play Skyrim because the mechanics of the game are virtually identical. However there has been a somewhat large change in the fact that casting a spell can be done with one hand rather than always with two. So what this boils down to is the fact that you can have one spell in one hand and a different spell in the other. You can still keep the same spell in both hands and cast them simultaneously and if you choose the appropriate destruction perk, the damage is greatly increased by doing this. What I really, really love about the change is that you can wield a mace in one hand and a spell in the other. It makes for new and more interesting ways to play the game and I don’t think I there are enough ways for me to praise this change.
Character selection and development has also undergone a change with the whole thing being stripped back somewhat and I think for the better. You are no longer able to define your stats, abilities and star sign at the beginning. In fact the only thing you choose right at the start is your race and there is no “are you sure that you’re happy with your choice” 10 minutes into playing the game. Some may raise the eyebrow and wonder why something like this would be done but it does add something to the game by taking away what was unnecessary. You level up your specific skills as you normally would and when you hit the next level you choose to either increase your health, magicka or stamina and then you pick a perk. Now unlike before when you hit a certain milestone say 50 in sneak, you would get a passive bonus that comes with the appropriate skill level. However in Skyrim, you pick what bonuses you want through the perk system which operates similar to the talent tree system in other RPGs but because you only can get to level 50, you can’t max out all perks in all abilities and become some sort of demi-god among men. Also thanks to the new system, the perks are somewhat more varied and can be tailored more to your play style, albeit only slightly in the grand scheme of things. The star signs that were in the old games have been replaced by blessings come from stones which you can change at anytime simply by going to and getting a blessing from another stone. The other major new gameplay component is that of the shout. You learn various shouts through finding dragon words around Skyrim with each shout having three levels, increased by finding an additional word in the shout. The shouts themselves are nicely varied and useful to have around in a pinch or in boss battles.
Thankfully the whole levelled difficulty that I spoke about in my oblivion review has gone away. Now when you wonder around Skyrim and if you stumble across an enemy much higher than yourself, you could end up in 18 different pieces if you don’t run away fast enough. You still can’t access the highest leveled items straight away and you have to level up high enough before you even begin to see them but I think that along with the strong enemies wondering around creates a great sense of achievement as you play through the game.
The quick select has been revamped from oblivion and rather than having yourself limited to 8 items, you can now have as many as you like with the quick select accessed by pressing up on the d-pad, a change which was very enjoyable.
Melee now also has a very impressive looking killing blow which shows up every so often and while it does look very impressive when you beat up a human, it’s even more so when you climb onto the neck of a dragon, leap into the air and smash down on the dragon’s head in order to kill it.
However the game itself is not perfect and it is crying out for a dodge button along with block in order to mitigate damage. There is a surprising lack of gold around with most vendors holding around 1000 gold or so. The graphics haven’t improved that much since Oblivion but they may be due to the limitations of the Xbox 360 and may be better on the PC. There is also occasionally large amounts of lag when doing any interactive that requires a menu such as looking up quests and going through your or someone else’s inventory which can get very frustrating. There are also a few bugs throughout the game. An classic and hilarious example is that if you get hit by a giant, it could possibly send you flying through the air Team Rocket style. There are a few other bugs that are mildly annoying throughout but I can’t fault the game too much as having minor bugs is par for the course for Bethesda RPG series and while I’m sure that the developers would love to have no bugs whatsoever, it would be difficult to achieve such a goal in a game as large and as complicated as this.
But for all my praise and minimal criticisms there is only one way I can truly get across how good this game is. I have been on vacation since the game came out on the 11th of November. On the date of writing this review, I have played 52 hours on my first character and 23 on my second totaling 75 hours. I have had the game from approximately 173 hours. This means in the past week, I have spent 43% of my time playing Skyrim. I haven’t hit a play time ratio since World of Warcraft and I absolutely loved that game. Imagine what it says about Skyrim.