Full Review for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion by imaloony8.0

Introduction

Well, well. After playing Fallout 3 and hearing so many positive things about Oblivion, I was sure that this would be the next game I'd play. I was sure to buy the game of the year version to get the DLC and get the full experience.I haven't made it through the whole game quite yet, but I've played it enough to get a feel for the whole game. My final result? Well, you'll have to read my review to get the whole shabang, but it's not too good.

Graphics

Starting this review off on a positive note, however, considering when this game was made, the graphics are actually quite nice. Everything from the buildings to the weapons look very nicely constructed. Everything is built well, except for the character's faces. Some seem really well made, but others just look like bricks that have been bashed against another rock for a while. Other than that, my only complaint here are that all the the environments seem very samey. One of the reasons I loved to explore in Fallout 3 was because it seemed that very place was unique, exciting, and traveling there was an adventure, but everything in oblivion seems to be copy and pasted from somewhere else in the game, and that makes manually traveling very boring and tedious, actually DISCOURAGING exploration in an OPEN-WORLD game.

Sound

This was something I thought Bethesda should have gotten easily. However, the background music is very repetitive and quite annoying. All of this dull music that only changes to an annoy faster paced music during the midst of battle reminds me of how much I loved the radio on my Pipboy 3000 in Fallout 3. That old music on it made my heart sing and made it much more enjoyable to do quests and hike through the landscape. The sounds of battle are quite limited as well, with the only noise you'll be hearing is metal clashing (Which got boring after only a few seconds anyways), your grunts as you get hit, and the bad voice acted insults of your enemy. And speaking of bad voice acting, yup, you guessed it, the voice acting of the NPCs in Oblivion is atrocious. I almost wanted to tear my ears out just to save myself the trouble of having to listen to these morons talk. Especially when I had to listen to the actually talk to EACH OTHER. It sounded like two robots with damaged circuits attempting to talk to one another. On the plus side, the sounds of the spells are cool and fun, but not much else here. Right, so this section fell flat on it's face, but the next section... Aw hell, it doesn't do much better.

Gameplay

Ah gameplay. How you failed me. Let's cut right to the chase and dissect the combat. Sword-on-sword and hand-to-hand combat is quite disappointing. It boils down to either mashing RT as fast as you can until everything in front of you dies, which fails miserably if the enemy is holding so much as a butter knife as a weapon, as they have master the only other way of melee combat, which is blocking, waiting for them to bounce off of your weapon, and then slashing them while they stumble back, and repeating, which is a tedious, time consuming, and flow-breaking combat system that is the exact opposite of my favorite combat system, Fable II's, which had so much flow and fun in it that it was impossible to not like. Even worse, even on the normal difficulty, the baddies are quite hard to kill, and your only hope is to fight them one-on-one, which isn't likely, significantly outclass them, which also isn't likely, fight an enemy who doesn't have a weapon, which doesn't happen as often as you might think, or master the horrid ranged system. Now, I quickly found that it was quite hard to aim with the slow moving long ranged weapons. Perhaps it was because I simply didn't practice enough with them, but they also seemed to do jack crap in terms of damage or actual use, other than Hunter's Sight, which allows you to see in the dark and see enemies through walls for 60 seconds. Now, let's move onto a bright side of this, which is the quests. The quests are surprisingly fun and imaginative, and it actually makes you care about some of the bad-voice-acting NPCs, and is a bright side in this section. On the flip side, however, the main quest is a sack of crud, with very bad story telling, boring characters, and some truly annoying quests you have to do for next to nothing. Now, I wish to talk about the leveling system. Remember the awesome leveling system of Fallout 3? How each level was balanced, allowed you to pick out a perk, plus distribute your skill points exactly where you want? Well, imagine that, only much less awesome. Oblivion relies on grinding for skills. Yes, that's right. I have to heal myself a billion times before I have enough skill to use a slightly more powerful healing spell, or pick a million locks before it makes it slightly easier for me to actually pick the locks. And when it comes time to level up (As in a REAL level up, not a skill up, or whatever the hell they call it) the fun begins. It seems you can't gain any more experience until you level up, but of course you can't just level up wherever you are, because that'd be convenient. Rather, you need to actually find a bed and sleep in it to level up, and get a few extra points into three skills of your choice. Let me just explain this a litter better: Say I'm in the middle of a dungeon, and it tells me I'm ready to level up. I either need to hike back to the beginning of the dungeon and go find a bed to level up in, or you need to waste the experience you'll get for going through the rest of the dungeon. A horrible design choice. Well, all I really want to finish up with is the open world aspect. It's very cool that there's an open world to do anything you wish in, but unlike Fallout 3, there's nothing really special about most locations, and normally they just have some enemies, a quest, or some treasure inside, and it almost discourages exploration because it's tedious and time consuming. Well, at lest things get a bit better in the next section...

Lastability

As much as I have bagged on the gameplay, there's certainly enough in Oblivion to keep you busy for quite a while. Lots of those bloody Oblivion gates need to be closed, lots of caves and forts need to be explored, and add in the replay value (For those of you who actually liked the game enough to play it again...) and the different classes to play as and the DLC, and you end up holding a game worth over a hundred hours of gameplay. So, at the very least they put a lot of content in the game to keep you playing for a long time to compensate for the other things that fell short, but this doesn't really save this game in my eyes.

Overall

So, there you have it. Loony actually didn't like a Bethesda game? Nah, I enjoyed it, it's an okay game, I just expected so much more, and the game actually delivered so little, that I can't even consider that this game is in any way better than Fallout 3. The combat was really boring and repetitive, the story was a load of crud, the environments were dull and repeated, the voice acting was terrible, the leveling system was poorly executed, and I found very little to get excited about in this game. If you enjoyed it, then great, because this game has tons of content, but if you're like me, return this and get Fallout 3, because if Fallout 3 truly is Oblivion with guns (Which it isn't), then I could really go for an AK-47 right now.

Final Score: 72%