Skyrim - The public beta. Cool game, but Bethesda's QA department should be restaffed. Wait for the GOTY edition.
The story starts off good but digresses into mediocrity after the 1st 5 hours and slips into utter boredom eventually. Not to say Skyrim is a total write off because it's not. Bethesda writers have put a lot of thought and attention to detail in the way NPC's interact and respond to your various actions and decisions, whether good or bad. Side quests are what this game is all about and the various guilds and brotherhoods you can join definitely add flare to shortcomings of the main quest. You can spark a romance, get married, buy a house, have your spouse cool you a meal and feel like you part of a living breathing fantasy world straight out an English folklore tale. The only problem with all this variety is that you never feel truly rewarded for achieving multiple fetch quests which include, explore so and so cave, retain important item, kill so and so, rinse, repeat.
Dungeons more or less have the same layout, with the exception of one or two and using the map to traverse the outerworld of Skyrim slowly becomes a chore even with using fast travel. Sure you can ride on a horse, but even that can be a good or bad thing depending on our circumstances such as certain enemy encounters or random spots you assume you can traverse but discover you can't.
Combat is where Skyrim utterly fails. The ability to map weapons and spells to each arm and having full control of both hands is great but not when you are unable to see who is behind you and having no way to really see behind you without turning the camera at the same time. 3rd person perspective (which is my preference) doesn't help to much either since TES games are intended to be played in 1st person perspective. Expect to do a lot of backing up from multiple enemies instead of standing your ground and simply blocking attacks straight up. Melee attacks are very slow while range attacks are not always precise. Scrolling through UI menus to access magic spells is more of a chore than a quck process. Hot keying spells and weapons is your best bet.
Leveling up can go horribly wrong if you are not careful where you invest experience points. Spreading your points too thin trying to create a 'balanced, jack of all trades' character will most likely leave you very vulnerable to more powerful enemies such as dragons and giants later on. Avoid investing points into somewhat useless skills such as lock picking since you will earn experience points for picking locks every time you successfully pick one. Get it? There is currently no way to reset skill points so be smart and create a save file before leveling up every once in a while. Get too far in Skyrim and realize your character sucks, and you will have to start over most likely. Do not be overwhelmed by the various skill trees when leveling up. Take time, think about what kind of character you want and focus on a few specific skill trees. You will never be able to level up every skill tree in a single playthrough.
All in all, Skyrim is a worthwhile experience but not at the hype fanboys make it out to be. Eventually I'm sure Bethesda will patch everything to where Skyrim can be played virtually glitch free on the PS3 but until then, if you're interested in playing, either rent it 1st to see if it's worth your money, try to find a cheap price for it or wait until later this year or early 2013 when the GOTY version arrives.
Update: Patch 1.4 fixes a ton of lag issues and broken quests. Finally makes the game playable. Some kinks still need to be ironed out but after 3 months of collecting dust, some free DLC should be in order.