The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Review

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the finest games of recent memory, and one of the best of all time. It blends an amazing open world with fun mechanics and long engaging side quests.

Gameplay

The Elder Scrolls: V Skyrim’s gameplay is not perfect, but is great overall.

The open world of Skyrim allows you to carve your own path through the world, going to new places, making allegiances and doing side quests, you can even negate the main quest all together. The world is actually not as open as it seems, with impassible mountains and cliff faces funneling you around, but this is not ultimately a bad thing as it allows the developers to take control of the environment like in a more linear game, while still preserving the feel of an open world. There is so many small activities to take part in in the world without making is seem like a checklist.

Skyrim is an RPG, and the RPG mechanics are the best ever. Many long time RPG fans will complain about how Skyrim has a ‘dumbed down’ RPG system, because of it’s lack of classes and spending points on certain attributes. However, Skyrim counters this by having your ability to do something increase as you do it more. Instead of grinding on enemies until you level up so you can upgrade your smithing, like in many other games, in Skyrim, you actually do smithing to level it up. The RPG mechanics allow you to build your character around what you like doing throughout the game, rather than having a set option from the get-go.

The main letdown of Skyrim’s gameplay is it’s combat. Sure it’s fun to do, with a great feeling of weight and power, but it gets repetitive as it is basically you pressing one button over and over again, taking breaks only to heal. Although this does not impact the experience too much as it feels amazing.

Presentation

Skyrim is not a very good looking game. Sure the views of a landscape put you in awe, seeing all things happening off in the distance. Up close, however, it’s a different story, with low resolution textures and bland colours. This can be fixed with a few mods on PC however.

Story

Skyrim’s main Quest storyline is not very good, with weird moments, cheesy dialouge and and an anticlimactic ending, it is not the best part however. However, many side quests have long, expansing stories much more interesting than the main one, and almost as long. But the best story is your story, all the great moments you will have.

Overview

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a game about your connection to the world. Despite it’s graphical, mechanical and story problems, this is one of the most immersive games you will ever play. The depth of the world will allow you to practically live there, from the time you trudged through the snow fighting off wolves, to when a dragon attacked you while you were in a meeting. It’s moments like these that will make you form an emotional connection to the game, that very few games can achieve.

10/10 – Incredible