All graphics, no gameplay, purely a time-waster, grossly overrated
Cons - Mediocre combat, winning in combat is determined only by stats instead of skill, gameplay is extremely monotonous, dungeons all look identical, flat and shallow plot. characters and dialogue; grossly overrated
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Oblivion is a perfect example of relying soley on graphics or on the "quantity of gameplay" as a substitute for actually designing a game. While this sadly is enough to sell games to people who think that if you take a boring game, and multiply the boring content by 10X, that it suddenly becomes a "good game", it's fortunately not enough to fool the rest of us.
The game offers a large and expansive environment to explore, however other than the appearances of the different towns, it more or less all looks the same. Rather than designing a few truly good and unique areas of the game, the designers decided just to take several generic areas, multiply them by 10X, and bill it as a "bigger game", even though you're really just playing through the exact same areas over again, with tiny tweaks to make them appear "new".
The gameplay itself is beyond flawed. Even though your character actually battles in real-time rather than turn-based (as in turn-based RPGS), your victory or death is determined only by levels and stats, so you're either pre-determined to win, or predetermined to lose if you aren't at a high enough level yet - eliminating any actual "challenge" from the combat - and the game has no depth of plot or memorable characters or dialogue to make up for the lackluster gameplay either. Other than a handful the game's main quests and "Guild" quests, some of which can actually verge on being fun or interesting, there's almost no reason to play this game.
Who cares if a game has 70 different dungeons to explore, if all of them look exactly the same? Who cares if a game has 300 different NPC characters, if none of them have any personality or anything interesting to say? Sure, it may be cool that characters have their daily routines, their own bedtimes, mealtimes, etc, but who really thinks it's enjoyable to stand around and watch a 3D animated character eat their lunch - in what way is that "fun" or even a "game"? Oblivion is more or less the equivalent of "Farmville" or your typical Facebook app game, expect with much better graphics. I can't see anyone other than the most casual gamers enjoying this unstimulating, overrated time-waster of a game.