Skyrim If it isn’t broken..

November 11, 2011 | by Custard Trout | Reviews

So we’ve all been waiting on Skyrim, but is that because you’re a fan or because you want to be popular? It seems more and more that people are just buying the game because they want to talk about it, which means they’ll say the same thing as the next person like a bunch of sheep.

Here’s our full thought on it: The game is a lot crisper, as we mentioned in our Eurogamer coverage and if you have a powerful TV you can see every piece of fur, and a great change of tone in colour in the scars, eyes and dirt.

The game as you can imagine throws you right into the action, with burning buildings, giant monsters, and decapitation. Because everybody loves decapitation. The atmosphere is a little slow to gain because it’s basically a giant cutscene, but it quickly becomes a good one!

You can almost feel the chills as you emerge onto the mountains, the world is giant with hundreds if not thousands of caves and dungeons to explore. Each one with difficult puzzles and great awards.

There’s a heck of a lot of enemies, giants, dragons (obviously) and of course mud crabs. The battle system works in the same way as they have for the past few games, and it’s pretty easy to force a character to be how you want, and as ever the game play is pretty fun like Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall and arena. There’s been a lot of games in this series but it still feels like they’re failing in certain areas.

It seems that in each game they drop something else, spears and shurikens don’t appear in Skyrim and there was a bit of a fuss about them during the Oblivion launch on various forums. There’s also some graphical issues that need clearing up like NPCs that slide around and the odd disappearing enemy. We often see these in games, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they cleared it up. You can also have arrows stuck through your head and just take it, something that they never cleared up in Oblivion

There’s seemingly no physics in the game, which is kind of lazy. There’s little new improvement over Oblivion, they’ve changed the levelling system which is nice, and it looks all snazzy! But I can’t help and think that the game should be a few steps higher, it’s progressed from Oblivion, but not past Morrowind. Only graphically.

The quests are very diverse and moderately easy to find, doing small things like killing an enemy can lead into a giant expanse of more quests, and the story is slowly developing but never boring. It’s not the most gripping story in the world, but keeps the player entertained.

A few issues highlighted from various people are repetitive combat, and a few unlucky moments with dragons where they’ll be attacked on either low health or very close to the start of the game.

There’s a few other new things like race choice, and of course dual spells, which is bloody awesome.

My main issue with this is that a lot of it is just repainted Oblivion, some of the soundtracks are from Oblivion performed in different ways, and it feels too much like Oblivion, which felt nothing like Morrowind.

All in all, they do free roam better than anyone else, but the hype was not deserved for this, it’s good and fun with many hours of gameplay but not brilliant.

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