Everything a action based RPG should be but lacks the immersion
The character creation class gives you the choice of 10 different races each with different abilities. At first, I chose a high elf, and chose to be a sort of battle mage type class, mixing weapons with magic abilities.
You start the game in a dungeon for reasons unknown and you are approached by the king who is voiced by Patrick Stewart saying that your some chosen one or something. I'd have to say that he is probably the best voice actor in a video game. Unfortunately, it is just a brief cameo. After you faff about in the dungeon corridors for a bit you are thrown into the game world. The game world is absolutely beautiful, but once you've seen one part of the game, you've seen it all. The whole world is pretty much just ye old English countryside and towns. There is also the Oblivion world which gives you a bit of a change, but that also gets a little repetitive. The mosters in the world are also all the same, though they change as you level. The basic enemies start off as wolves, then change to tougher "timber" wolves, then to bears, to trolls, and so on. These enemies are tougher but they change as you get tougher so the difficulty curve doesn't change that much. The only good thing I have to say about it is that it gets rid of repetitive grind.
After about a couple of hours of gameplay, I restarted my game because my "battle mage" handled like crap. Using a combination of weapons and spells did not work as easily as I though it would. So I chose an orc for my class and just went as a warrior, specializing in heavy armor and swords, which made the game alot easier to play. I found the gameplay to be really good, and everything was a lot smoother. If you focus on one class in the game, instead of trying to mix and match, the gameplay will really shine.
The story is pretty well written I guess, it's just not executed very well. You can jack around and do your thing at any point in the game. So the sense of impending doom that the story relies on is kind of diminished. I love the fact that I can go 50 hours without touching the story, but 50 hours is like half a year in the game. You would think the prince of Oblivion would've found a way do take the world over in that amount of time.
The best part of the game, in my opinion, would be the guilds. They have some pretty cool back stories to them, and you are rewarded with some cool loot if you complete them properly. For example, the Dark Brotherhood is an assassination guild, a little too bent on their profession, but I digress. If you complete their hits without being spotted, you are rewarded with more money a phat loot. At this point, the stealth gameplay becomes necessary. It was hard for my lumbering orc to tiptoe around, but it added some difficulty to the game, which was nice since the open ended world was lacking any difficulty.
All and all, this game has action-RPG gameplay from heaven, but for a game that tries so hard to be good, it lacks the immersion RPG are built on by almost totally eliminating any sense of progression in the game.