A true work of art that transcends the RPG genre. Perhaps the most engrossing and realized fun you'll ever have.
For the uninitiated, Oblivion is perhaps the deepest game you'll ever play. It's also the closest you'll come to actually living out a fully fleshed-out and fictional lifestyle. It is NOT turn-based. In a lot of ways, it plays much like a first-person shooter. Like many of the reviews I've been reading, the number of quests you can do is staggering. I'm only about roughly 30 playing hours in and I can tell that I'm just barely scratching the surface.
Graphically, it's a beauty, even if it's a couple of years old. When you add in the mods created by the fan community (see Gamespot's feature on "Make it Pretty" for Oblivion), you have what could amount to a work of art in gaming. While Bioshock got marks for artistic design, Oblivion gets kudos from me for sheer grandeur. Provided you have a beefy PC, you can marvel at the swaying grass and rocking trees as an oncoming storm signals its presence. I find myself staring up at the night sky and admiring the view. It's that gorgeous. The lone knock might come in the form of character animations. If viewing your character from the 3rd-person perspective, you might find his/her jump to be a little lame. So what if the animation isn't as fluid as it could be? Capturing real human emotions and subtle movements is the holy grail in computer animation, after all, and that doesn't (and shouldn't) command a big chunk of a game's budget. The physics surprised me, to be honest. I recall swinging my fine steel claymore mightily against a Daedra (enemies native to Oblivion, their version of Hell) and he actually got knocked sideways in convincing manner and slid down a ramp. I was equally taken aback when I realized I had to raise my bow a bit if I wanted my arrow to hit its target via arcing, just like the real world.
The sound and music is fine to my ears, but be forewarned, I'm hard-of-hearing. If there are any glitches or bothersome audio, I'm not likely to catch it. I can tell you, however, that when the sweeping score first started playing at the main screen, I instantly felt like I was at the threshold of a grand adventure, a la Lord of the Rings. Voice acting was great, thank goodness. There are too many a game that get ruined by half-witted voice actors who plod through just to get their paycheck. Thankfully that's not the case here. Even the venerable Capt. Picard makes an appearance (OK, not the Captain himself, but the guy who plays him, Patrick Stewart). Also, I couldn't be happier for in-game subtitles, they go a long way to playing the game effectively. Subtitles even appear when conversations take place close to you, as though you're eavesdropping (and in some parts, you ARE eavesdropping on purpose).
The control scheme is intuitive and simple, much like an FPS set-up, actually. There's a few extra keys for magic and hotkeys for you to assign whatever you want to them, be it weapons or magic. It took me a little while to realize I had to hit the "C" key to actually cast a magic spell, but that was the only roadblock I ran into. From what I hear, the PC's control scheme is more natural than that of the Xbox 360 version, so take from that what you will, I don't own an Xbox.
The gameplay takes some getting used to, but once you're dialed in, leave a bowl of food out for your pets. Enough for a few days, to be on the safe side. You'll become obsessed with balancing your inventory items, keeping the ones that aid you the most and selling the valuable items you can do without. I was delightfully surprised to discover the Ring of Strength, thus enabling me to carry more items with it. You'll no doubt become someone like me whose cry of "one more quest!" is all too familiar to RPG gamers. There are a plethora of ways to vanquish your enemies in the land of Cyrodiil, ranging from your standard swords to magically turning them into walking candles. How you do it is entirely up to you. Keep in mind, however, that if you stray away from your major skills, you won't get to level up as often. As the game goes on, you get a better idea of how to balance your character and how best to maximize his/her strengths and guard appropriately against your own weaknesses. All this is pretty much predetermined when you generate your character in the beginning. If you want to jump into combat swinging a battleaxe, you'd want to choose the race, set of attributes and skills that are best suited to that manner of fighting. You can be as bad as you want to be or be golden. You can also carry out the quests in any order you want to. You can forsake them, even the main quest if you'd like, but that'd be a little hard to avoid as it tends to have some very handsome rewards waiting for you. You'll find yourself saving up as many gold coins as you can to afford some of the more pricier spells and weapons. Again, with time, you'll learn what you'll need and what you can do without.
Finally, there were little things that made this game so incredibly engrossing. The non-playable characters (NPCs) actually have work to do and sit down and eat and even go to sleep when it's getting late. Granted, it's a time accelerated game, but then if it was played during real-time, it would take forever to level up. The environments...oh, the environments! To say the vistas and fields and mountains are jaw-dropping is an understatement. Keep in mind, I have a pretty high-end computer and am able to crank up the quality with an acceptable framerate, along with the mods I mentioned earlier. There are little side quests that are neat diversions to lend the game a little levity. This is the first game in a very long time that I really cared about what was going on in Cyrodiil and felt like a very active and important participant. If you're looking for a game where you can be someone else of great importance and have a ball doing it, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this game. Just be sure to get the Game of the Year edition as it includes the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansions and naturally has all the updates installed.
A final note, my hat goes off to the team at Bethesda who put together this ambitious masterpiece. It was only after playing for about a week that I came to appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that these people must have put into this game, not to mention endless all-nighters, I'm sure. Consider me an admiring fan of their work, and because of this game, I'm keeping an eye on Fallout 3, and you all should too. If Oblivion is any indication of what Bethesda is capable of, we're in for one hell of a game with Fallout 3.