Beautiful, immersive, suspenseful, addictive -- everything a great role playing game should be..
User Rating: 10 | The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion X360
The game is extraordinary. I spent close to half an hour screwing around with the character creation and wound up with exactly the character I wanted to play. After another half an hour or so of crawling around the Imperial Prison and some sewers, surfacing to see the sheer size and detail of the world Bethesda has created is like traveling from the New York subways to the Swiss Alps in a matter of seconds. The music and sounds are kicked way up from Morrowind, and the physics engine is the best I've seen to date, with only a couple minute hangups. The controls are vastly improved from the Elder Scrolls' previous inception, because now you can actually push a button to block an attack and because different items and spells can be assigned to the eight directions on the D-pad, making for fast equipping and unequipping. The developers have changed the skill system around a bit to make may of the skills much, much more useful (namely all of the magic disciplines, marksman, armorer, speechcraft, and mercantile).
My only gripes so far would be welcome to most RPG fans -- I'm not much of a dungeon crawler. The dungeons need to be a little bit lighter inside. They're certainly more foreboding this time around, but you can't see anything beyond your torch light. At any rate, this should be correctable later in the game with some sort of Night Eye amulet. My second gripe is that I wish the zombies and other sorts of undead had fewer festering wounds -- this is not a game you can play with the kids (or your mother, in all likelihood) around. The last gripe is that the lighting and shadows, although very realistic, can make gameplay a little cumbersome.
Buy it soon. It's the best in the series, and probably the most immersive game around, even including the new wave of MMORPGs (which it isn't). 
