Difficulty:

Very Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Skyrim is a Bethesda game, meaning that it comes out with an absurd amount of errors, glitches, and odd little quirks. While some are benign (The giants launching you into orbit), others can completely ruin the play-through. This is a game that is lauded as being fantastic. I for one initially thought this too. But after beating the main storyline with my melee-focused Argonian, then playing a spell-focused Imperial, I realized that the game was very, very easy, and very, very unsatisfying.

As this is an RPG, the main storyline deserves looking at. The game opens with you heading like a sheep to the slaughter at the hands of Imperial militia who seem to like executing people who just happened to be wandering in the wrong place at the wrong time. As you meekly ready to lose some height, a dragon interrupts, and you must escape with either a Rebel warrior, or (if you're very sheepish) an Imperial guardsman. Either path teaches you basic combat and inventory use, and you end up in Riverwood, a quaint little village that served as my initial questing hub. Choosing between the Imperials and the Rebels has no effect whatsoever on the main storyline, as both remain too obsessed with each other to notice Dragons eating the souls of the diseased. So I tracked down and slayed every dragon that I saw just flying around, killed Alduin, and saved the world, and got nothing for it. It was not a story I became heavily invested in. The whole twelve voice-actors in the game deliver the same bland dialogue through plastic, unmoving faces that refuse at all to shift into states of anger, fear, happiness, or anything other than a blank looks. There are side-quests abound that provide much more time-consumption than the main storyline, but most are fetch-quests and rodent squashing.

Combat in this game is very simple, for melee it's hack, slash, block, repeat. Spells are also simplified with a much faster mana-regeneration than in previous scrolls games. Building your own armor can be the most overpowered thing in the game, giving you the same amount of experience for even the earliest tiers. Cooking is useless compared to creating potions, and many of the skills that you can pursue go completely unused. The stealth approach is hilarious in that at max level, you can walk into a town, crouch in an npc's line-of-sight, and instantly kill them, repeating this until nothing but the ever-spawning guards remain.

Graphically, this game is a mess. It's pasty, low-res textures are just an eyesore. The animation is clunky and makes everyone feel like puppets. In terms of open-endedness, Skyrim takes the cake, with a massive, sprawling overworld and many deep, dark dungeons. But I can't experience any of that anymore, as for some reason, when I download it from steam, I get to the character creation and suddenly float into the distance before finding that none of the npc's will move beyond staring idly at me. Updating my drivers and reinstalling did nothing to solve this problem. And the graphics of the game will constantly flicker, becoming even more of an eyesore. I could handle massive graphical glitches with Rage initially, but the game-breaking sliding around makes it unplayable. Until it gets patched and they hire more voice actors, Skyrim is just a very adequate game. And a very standard RPG with a massive fan-base.

A very broken, and very standard RPG.