The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review (Xbox 360) By paddyboy

9 / 10
01 Jun 2006 at 20:53

Review by: paddyboy

Oblivion. Like saving the world from demonic infestation? Fan of role-playing games in general? This games for you. Finally, a game that has brought the variety of gameplay I’ve only experienced with pen-on-paper Dungeons and Dragons and brought it to a video game.
You start off in prison but your fate has much more in store. After meeting the emperor who gives you an enormous task and seeing him die your off to save the world from the jaws of Oblivion, another plane of existence filled with demonic creatures who want to take over the world. Or not, you can simply ignore the plight of your world and cruise around charming the ladies and building up your character, hunt for deer in the woods or rob houses. It’s up to you and the glory of it is, as you get tougher so does the game, non-player characters level up with you and so do the toughest of creatures. The type of creatures you encounter get bigger and meaner too.
You can be and do and look like most anything or you can think of which makes the replay value a 10 out of 10. I’ve been playing as a stealth archer and can’t wait to play as a straight Mage. The game also awards you with skill and combat attributes you earn by using skills over and over. If you’re a fighter you can eventually disarm your opponents, if you’re a sneak eventually you can sneak around most anything, if you’re an archer, eventually you can knock down and stun opponents with your arrows. (don’t forget to tip those arrows with the poisons you create with your alchemy skill!)The game learns about your character while you learn more and more about the game. It’s beautiful.
It’s graphically stunning. The forests and mountains are more real then I’ve seen before, temples and fortresses are beautify rendered, Caverns are dank and very realistic, and the water effects and lighting refraction are some of the best I’ve ever seen.
the gameworld is huge. The mountains you see on the horizon are really there, sometimes they’re off the map but more often then not you can hike, ride a horse or run to whatever you see in the distance. There’s a fast travel mode so you don’t need to spend hours getting around but 1/2 the fun is taking the slower route as there’s lot’s of locations you can only find that way.
The menus are simple and easy to use, anything you carry or can do is accessible at a moments notice, and the fact that you can “hotkey” up to eight items/spells to use without even going to the menus is genius.
The combat system isn’t perfect but is a vast improvement over Elderscrolls III Morrowind. The power attacks put a bit of variety into melee combat and the ranged weapons act as though they’re real (with long range attacks you need to lob the missile a bit above the target). The variety of weapons you can use is great as are the magical attributes they can have. The same applies to the armor and clothing you can get.
The spellcasting system is great too but I’ve hardly built up any skills in this area yet, I just heal myself a lot. Like I mentioned above I’ll be playing it through again as a mage to experience this area to it’s fullest.
There’s houses to buy and decorate, books to read, NPC’s to befriend… it goes on and on. Well over 200 quests, every fort, cavern, temple you clear out eventually fills up with enemy’s again so if your into the whole Kill! Kill! Kill! Type of gameplay it never ends.
On the downside it’s glitchy, I’ve run into a few glitches that crippled areas, on one quest a NPC wont take the item she needed me to retrieve, the option just isn’t there so my current character will forever be denied access to the Arcane University (Go Wizards!) so I cannot enchant my own items and create custom spells. Bummer. I’ve been in contact with people here (Gamestracker) who have run into other big glitches as well. My advise to avoid these problems is to save your game often, don’t rely on the autosave, if you run into a glitch the best thing is to have a save that you can re-load a bit earlier in the game. I learned that one the hard way.
I really wish my character could climb walls and fly. Flying over the lushness that is Oblivion would be a real treat.
These few little negative things are enormously outweighed by the positives of this game. I think I’m gonna go play right now.

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