The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Greetings from Lithuania.

I'm writing this review, while meantime on the other PC i'm playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. WHAT a game! Can't remember the last time i was SO ADDICTED to a virtual game before. I'm playing for almost 80 hours already (!), and i'm not even in the middle of it yet! The graphics are gorgeous. Writing is top notch. But the game play, the open world, the hundreds of interesting quests, dungeons, dragons, bandits, magic, armors, castles, battles, wars, vampires, werewolves, mags, warriors, ... and so on and so on - it's just UNBELIEVABLE, how in the world creators have put all this stuff in one game! My favorite game before Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was "Fallout 3" but i thing it's time to say that i have a new king of games - SKYRIM. Buy it, play it, LIVE IT - because this is the game for the ages.

Hands down, this a Milestone in Gaming History!

I have been playing video games for almost 20 years now. I have played games in every category imaginable and have had countless favorites over the years.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim surpasses all of these with flying colors.

It is a giant play place. A beautifully crafted sandbox filled to the brim with HUNDREDS of hours of action, dialogue and epic quests. You will climb the highest mountains, crawl the deepest dungeons, wield the greatest weapons and fight the mightiest creatures.

The game is gorgeous. It's landscapes, cities and towns are lush and vibrant with detail.

Skyrim features professional voice acting talent by greats such as Michael Hogan, Joan Allen and Max von Sydow.

Skyrim's main storyline is but a mere fraction of its content and you will easily find yourself enraptured in it's fantastical world; unable to break away as you pour your time into it almost unwillingly.

It is simply marvelous. Words do not do it justice.

And I'm not talking about the quests, but the atmosphere, the feeling it gives, the sheer joy of being there. Skyrim takes what is great from both Morrowind and Oblivion, improving on it tremendously, becoming in itself a huge epic. Nevermind the bugs, the glitches. It is simply breathtaking. I must admit, I am what one would call a hardcore fan of the series, and very pretentious about my fantasies... This is a game in which the hero is a Hero in everything he does. As a player, you will never stop fulfilling prophecies. It is rewarding every step of the way, like no game before it. I have been playing Skyrim since November, finished it in December. Fan or not... I ask you... Why can't I stop (July the following year)? I have my own supposition. Maybe it's because this game never ceases to amaze me. It never ends. Just like the world.

"I'm not really into all that wizards and dwarfs nonsense" I told a friend when he talked about the new Elder Scrolls game, a series I had no interest in and even less knowledge of. The connection to the Fallout games though meant that I knew the basic gameplay would appeal to me since I like the idea of RPG but not the incredibly detailed stats packages that most come with – selecting equipment, taking notes and digging in menus I'm fine with, but too much detail I'm not. As a result I picked this game up, still not totally sure that I would like the loss of guns and dark comedy that I got with Fallout 3 and NV.

Very quickly I was into the game because I love getting caught up in the exploration, getting quests, finding stuff, building up my character and so on, all to the point where I really didn't progress the story very much until I had already played about 100 hours. The amount of quests is ridiculous and most of them do actually give you something to do other than just travel somewhere and come back. There are quests like that (the Thieves Guild "job" quests get tedious before you complete them) but they are the minority. The actual story is probably too short (ironic complaint for a game that I put down after filling the last few months and eating well over 100 hours); I left it at the end of Act 1 and when I returned to it I was surprised by how quickly I moved through the remainder of it to the end. I was also a little bit disappointed that the story did seem to stand alone and that it was easy to lose the plot if I spend ages doing lots of side-quests which rarely seemed to connection. Fallout NV got the mix better in terms of the storyline as so many side quests supported the story. It still engaged me because the vast majority of the quests were really enjoyable and provided lots to do and experience, just that they did fragment the story a little for me.

In terms of the gameplay, it is accessible to the majority, which means lots of fringe players will be upset. So, for example, I would have liked the dungeon puzzles to have been harder, but I know they were still OK so as to be fun for me but not frustratingly hateful for those that don't like puzzles! The levelling up system makes a lot of sense to be – if you keep doing something, you'll get better at it – works really well as an idea and in practice. I know it upsets "proper" RPG players who prefer limits on who you can be and lots more stats, but I felt it worked – I didn't pick who I was at the start, my character grew based on how I played – so my magic stayed weak because I never used it, unlike other games where you just assign points to a skill to make it better. The gameplay is varied but well balanced – so yes there is trading and making potions, but there is exploring, battles, talking to others, puzzle-solving etc – nobody seeking just one thing to be perfect will be happy, but again this is why the game is accessible and enjoyable to more players.

Graphically the game is beautiful. The load screens when entering a new area are fine until you're doing lots of rapid travelling, but in the open world of Skyrim you can walk for hours and hours and hours without ever seeing a loadscreen. The world ranges from snowy mountains to open green pastures and it all looks great. I did miss the humour of Fallout with this and the rather worthy talk of gods and kings didn't always win me over, but it still worked. The voice work is good and I accepted things like "all guards have the same voice" because such compromises makes room for more detail in other more important ways.

Overall Skyrim has good variation in gameplay and is engaging. The world is full of quests and experiences, with so much to do and explore that you will be playing this for days, not hours. Perhaps not for everyone and perhaps not as perfect as the hype suggests, but this is still a very good and very engaging and once you get into it, you'll be playing it for a good long time.

It's been the better part of a year since they first announced that 'Skyrim', the sequel to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, was in production. I was pretty darned hyped, because I absolutely loved Oblivion and thought it was a great game, despite some problems it had.

But as the release date for Skyrim neared I grew a bit apprehensive... I've played enough games from Bethesda that I knew it was gonna be great, but I started to worry it wouldn't live up to the massive expectations I(and many others, it seems) had for the game. Everything I had seen, from trailers to game play snippets to early reviews from those lucky enough to try the early demos all fueled my expectations, and I know from experience that even if a game turns out to be pretty darned good you can end up somewhat disappointed if it's not the masterpiece you envisioned it would be.

Well my friends, three and a half weeks after launch, and some 109+ hours of time spent playing it I can safely say my fears were unfounded. Skyrim is easily one of if not THE best games I've ever played, and I've played hundreds.

I will note that it is not without fault.. like pretty much all massive sandbox games from Bethesda it does have some bugs and glitches, but so far in my experience they are few and far between, and nothing that has distracted me much from the immersiveness and incredible scope that the game has to offer. I debated whether to give it a '9' rather than a '10' because of the very minor issues that have arisen, but I finally decided that the problems with the game are so tiny compared to the positives, that I would be nitpicking if I deducted a whole point; But to be fair, if I could score it out of 100 I'd give it a very solid 98.

Todd Howard may be a genius, but he has some serious work ahead of him if he plans on eclipsing his own high water mark with this work of art. I for one wish him the best of luck. ;) In my 25 years of gaming I've found that it's easy for a well made video game to keep your interest level high enough to be more enjoyable in hour ten than it was in the first hour of playtime, but it's a very rare game indeed that is more fun and more engrossing in hour 100+ than it was in hour 50. Skyrim is that game.