The best Elder Scrolls since Morrowind
Let's start with graphics. This game is georgeous. Gone are Oblivion's pea-soup backrounds and rolling fields. Not that that was a bad looking game, but it's garbage in comparison. From forested rivers, to snow-capped mountains, Skyrim looks amazing. It stems beyond the foliage and landscape however. It's the awesome little touches that really make this game shine. Stand by a river and watch long enough and you'll be treated to salmon swimming upstream. Watch the local wildlife forage through the woods, or just follow a townsman and watch him go to work and you'll truly feel immersed in the look of this beatiful game.
Of course a game isn't good because of how pretty it is. Gameplay is what counts. This game has it by the buttload. You'll be hard-pressed to not have something to do in this game. The overall content and side missions are staggering. Almost to the point where I felt intimidated by the sheer number of quests I had logged up at any given point and time. I am currently over 120 hours into my first playthrough and I still have one more faction to start (the civil war factions) and dozens of sidequests to do.
But how is the story? Honestly it is the best overall story in the series so far. While I liked the tale of the Nerevarine a little better, the story of the Dragonborn is definitely handled better as an overall gaming experience. Between scaling the highest mountain in the world, fighting dragons and oh so many more things I can't discuss for fear of spoilers this story delivers. By the end of the main story I felt I had played an average game's worth in and of itself.
Of course the bulk of any Elder Scrolls game lies not in the main story, but in the faction quests. Skyrim has some truly great faction quests to while away the hours. Although the number of these quests seemed far smaller than previous games, the quests themselves more than make up for it. I thought the Thieve's Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests in particular were extremely well done. I probably enjoyed these more than the main story quests.
Add to all this the ridiculous amount of sidequests, some of which are fairly long chains of quests, others simple diversions and all points in between and you have an insane amount of content. I often wandered around in my first few dozen hours of playing simply to explore. This has the benifit of enacting obsure or out of the way quests at time. It also brought about some of my favorite non-scripted moments. At one point I had to fight a random dragon encounter while at a fairly low level. I dispatched the dragon with the help of a wandering giant nearby. However in the course of this fight I managed to piss off the giant, who promptly killed me once the dragon was dead. I loved it. The versitility of this game and it's ability to throw random scenarios at you help keep what is already an extremely open experience even more fresh.
My only real complaint is the dragon battles themselves. When they first occur they are somewhat challenging, but eventually they are so insanely easy that it really takes away the fear and the idea that these are the world-ending creatures of legend. As the random encounter I descibed earlier alludes, giants are harder to defeat than dragons and giants will generally leave you alone as long as you keep your distance.
Now there's been all kinds of stories about glitches and bugs ruining this experience for people. I only had tore load my game due to a glitch once. It wasn't exactly a glitch either, but a design oversight. I fell in a crack between a building and a mountain and was stuck. When you have such a huge, detailed world, these small oversights are bound to happen. Otherwise there was veryrare cases of pop-up and clipping, but generally I felt this was the least glitchy Bethesda game I've played. Again when you craft such huge, detailed worlds, filled with items, characters and loot it's tough to fix every single glitch that comes along. I never felt my enjoyment of the game was hampered by these small glitches. And they never broke the illusion of being in a cohesive world.
All in all I cannot recommend this game enough. If you are an Elder Scrolls fan from way back like I am, you probably already have invested dozens of hours in this, to anyone else who's even a slight fan of fantasy games, buy this game! You won't regret it.