The only way for this game to be more awesome is to have a dragon playing an electric guitar.
The game is beautiful, as is common for Bethesda's new releases, and has great atmosphere that will suck you in the world of Skyrim, which has snowy mountains, swamps, forests, plains and frozen valleys. The cities are more diverse this time and they don't necessary have walls around them which allows wild creatures to attack you. The characters are much better characterized than in the previous game, they have different voiceovers and the world doesn't stop while you speak to them. The story is certainly above average by quality and it's based about the return of the dragons which is better than the one in which Russia conquers Europe because they hate everyone. Anyway the story is good, but the ending isn't that satisfying.
The gameplay is as great as the rest of the game. You can choose your path, decide to be a mage, warrior, thief or a mixture of them all, you choose. The skills you gain are reinforced with a perk system which further improves your skills and gives you new abilities. The game gives you possibility to join a faction or more of them and all of them have their perks, not to be confused with skill perks. There are a lot of enemies but the main ones are dragons which upon death give you their souls with which you can unlock shouts that you can find on the word-walls, simple. The unlocked words give ability to perform a shout which can froze, burn, push, disarm, etc. enemies, later you can even summon a storm or a dragon but since you get these after the campaign you won't use them much before starting a new game, and you will start a new game. The game offers a lot of content but with a lot of content comes a lot of bugs but I haven't faced a serious bug so I don't take this issue seriously. The other problem is that you will have a bunch of money (yes that can become frustrating) but nowhere to spend it. Everything in Skyrim is much more expensive than it was in Oblivion, everything except the houses that is, so having 20.000 gold is still a lot when the only real thing your gonna spend it on is really cheap.
Skyrim offers a lot more than the rest of the games on the market and its size alone is a good enough reason to buy it. The game may suffer some bugs but it doesn't really hurt the experience so in the end this is still one of the best… the best game of the year.
Pros: BIG game, immersive world, RPG elements, story, dragons, graphics
Cons: Bugs, steals free time