Oblivion = housebound until your 90

Let me start by saying Oblivion has set the standard for future RPG's (Role-Playing Games). No doubt by the rating I have given for this game, you can see that I think it's awesome. It's more than that... In a game where Pro's exceedingly weigh out the Con's, this game is absolutely wicked! Let me go into detail...

Storyline

Set in medieval times, the Emperor has been assassinated & he has entrusted his sacred item, "The Amulet of Kings" with you; A prisoner in the dungeons of the Imperial City who by chance, was shown the way out via the Emperor's effort to retreat into the dungeons. The legend goes like this: If no emperor is crowned, the dragonfire is not lit and Daedra (scary looking demon guys) led by the Lord of Destruction are exposed to earth via oblivion gates.
Think of it similiar to a Lord of the Rings type setup & picture the big boss guy, that's the Lord of Destruction right there.

Basically, in order to light the dragonfire & close the oblivion gates, you need the Emperor's son to wear The Amulet of Kings and light the dragonfire. But without giving too much away, something happens with the amulet very early in the game. This is not a complete orginial storyline. The medieval setting is something a lot of RPG's have been doing or are doing.

Begin by choosing your race, attributes & skills. You can select different textures on any part of the body nearly with more names of colours than what is listed in the dictionary. You can shape features and add pieces like facial hair or spikes plus many more. I'm telling you the editing & changing has more combinations than the rubix cube. It has to be seen to be believed. Now onto the world of Oblivion...

Gameplay

I have always been a firm believer that game play is the most important thing in a video game. Yeah the grahpics are important and the music sharpens the edges, but without good game play, you have Pac Man. The game play in Oblivion is extremely riveting in a world that is so big with many things to do.

In Oblivion, almost immediately you can choose to pursue the main quest (to complete the game) or ANY side quest you know about. (i.e. find out from word of mouth or by discovering something).There is no strict path you have to follow & there is no time limit on you. Feel like hunting deer? How about becoming a gladitor in the arena? Or perhaps you want to go on a killing spree and fulfil one of your murder quests. Oh yeah thats right, be a hero or a BAD DUDE!

As you may have heard, the map in this game is absolutely gigantic with many towns each ruled by interesting leaders/counts. Not to mention the countless number of caves & forts you can explore. I assure you, there would be no one on this earth who would have completed all quests and been to every cave/fort in this game without going on the internet to read a walk-through/500 page novel. This game is massive. Did i say that already?

I mentioned 100 plus hours of game time in my listing of Pros. complete every quest and you will be looking at 1000 hours plus! Good Luck!! There is really nothing I can say in the negative for the game play. Although if I wanted to be super critcal, you could argue that no xbox live play is a disappointment.

Because of how good this game is, it simply crys out for online play. However I could imagine the developers would be working on the game until the year 2056 just to make sure no bugs pop up.

The final thing worth mentioning is your Health, Magicka & Fatigue bars at the bottom of the screen. Magicka & Fatigue regenerate by themselves. Health is regained a number of ways. By drinking a health potion for example is one way.

The first two are pretty self explanatory. The Health bar monitors when you die, the Magicka bar monitors how much you can cast spells. When they are empty you are either dead or have no magic. The Fatigue bar is completely useless. Your fatigue goes down by performing actions such as jumping, running, swimming or swinging a sword; then it regenerates. So even when it is completely empty, it always has just enough regeneration for you to perform another action. You can never not perform an action because you have to wait for it to regenerate is my point!

But these are very minor things. I look at the world of Oblivion and see the game play as a showcase for the rest of the world to marvel at. 9/10.

Factions

Expanding a little on the game play & without giving too much away of course :D, let me give you an idea of the many 1 zillion things you can do in Oblivion. You can join factions or groups.

They are: The Mages Guild, The Fighters Guild, Thieves Guild, The Dark Brotherhood (Murderers) or even become a Gladitor in the arena. (Possibly more that I don't know about).They are each set with it's own rules & quests that reward you handsomely the higher you advance. 9/10.

Graphics

~WOW~ what can you say? Graphics are suburb! This game is setting the benchmark for next generation graphics. Characters & walls don't look blocky when your up close.

The world of Oblivion itself is full of gorgeous textures in grass, trees & beautiful backgrounds. Life-like animations like ripples in the water & deers eloping throughout the world give you a real world feel. Combined with sound effects like hearing a wolf's footsteps bolt towards you add more realism into your adventure.
Everything again takes shape once nightfall arrives & features such as the moon & stars make you feel like your looking up at the universe from your bedroom window. (Yes that's right, you have day & night).

Towns are also beautifully crafted with perfect sculptured buildings and shops. Once again nothing is blocky. You can literally walk up to a single brick built into a side of the wall and see the cement they used in between the gaps. (well not quite... but you get my point, hehe).

Animations, pictures & sounds throughout the world make for a spectular combination. The one thing everybody would agree with in Oblivion is that the graphics are absolutely first class. 10/10!

Combat

First person/third person view, you choose. The fighting operates as most action first person games/rpg's. The normal 4 - You have the choice of attacking, casting spells using an item or a defensive stance which is blocking or any combination of the other 3 really.

Surprise attacks are achieved by attacking your opponent which he/she/it is not looking; resulting in a high damage blow. The interesting thing is, you can flee as far as you can then sneak up on them again as if they forgot about it(You will know when you can do this when the battle music disappears and the normal music comes back).

The wonderful thing about the fighting is who you fight. Everything from mudcrabs, mountain lions, necromancers & even vampires exist; just to name a handful. However this is a rare saving grace in the combat system. I do have a few things i see as flaws. Onto the not so wonderful things...

Firstly, i hate the idea of having a block skill in your stats screen. If your level on block skill is low (which it will be early in the game), this means basically anything you block with your shield or weapon, is going to inflict as much damage as it would have if you didn't block. (or at least very close to).

Secondly, it seems your character has very slow responses to blocking & casting spells. Especially when it seems your opponent can cast Restore Health in about 4 times as quick.

The last thing that gets really annoying is if your enemy knocks you down. They can lay into you and wipe half of your HP off before you get up and have a chance of defending yourself. Having said all that, maybe i am just ordinary at the game! Hehe. 6.5/10.

Items/Weapons/Armour/Spells

An abundance of items, weapons, armour & spells exist throughout Oblivion. You have items that can cast a multiple of spells. Certain potions affect you or the target differently. There is enchanted items too. For example, a special armour might shield you from frost or fire attacks; or both whilst increasing your willpower & personality.

There are many types of spells including destructive, illusion or restoration just to name a few categories. The weapon range is awesome tpp. They will effect how fast you move depending on the weight of these but your atheltics skill with help with this also.

So is it really is a combination of both? No. It is a combination of a lot of things like armour & strength for example. But i could be here forever explaining it. That is the beauty of Oblivion, so many things are taken in account with game, nothing is dull!

Some weapons are one-handed, some two-handed (cannot block with a shield with a two-handed weapon equipped), the massive weapon database includes things like maces, clubs, staffs, swords & bows. You have about 2 million types in each category and you can get just about any if not all of them enchanted. ~Wow~ And you can name them yourself!

Along with this, you can also create your own enchanted items & spells at the university of magic. Want to poison a dagger or shoot a flame arrow from your bow? Yup those items exist too. Any item can literally be mixed & matched with different effects on yourself or a target. You can also retrieve your own arrows you fire in the world or at enemies when you loot the corpse after the defeat; adding more realism into Oblivion.

As you get further into your game and build your fortress of items, you will find how irritating it is to scroll through your weapons to find that certain ingredient or that Health scroll. It can be very difficult & time consuming scrolling through 150 items to find 1 in particular. I'm not too sure how you would get around this even if you were the developer of the game. You can't blame them for making such a HUGE game! 8/10.

Music

Not a lot to say on the music side of things. I would have to say the music is just average. No music in the game completely stands out like it did in Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VII. Battle scene music is slightly upbeat, wandering around town & in & out of shops really is just generic bubbly music. Nothing special.

Characters voices are slightly disappointing. There wouldn't be more than say 40 different voice tones & that counts for all males, females & creatures. When characters communicate to you, I found the music is slightly too loud is hear what they are saying. All you have to do is adjust the volume level in the options screen by pushing start. Easy fix!

The sound effects are at least good & you can see they put in a lot of work in this area. All the small things stand out like picking up a potion & hearing a glass knock against something. In the overall scheme of things, the sound effects play a small part on how good a game is.
The music however is more of a bigger picture. I am a little disappointed with the music.
5/10.

Controls

You can switch between first person & third person perspective. You control you character with the left & right toggles & every other button does something (casting spells, inventory screens, drawing weapons, the normal stuff). You also have a button that switches between standing & sneak mode.

I also love the idea of setting your own hot keys with items & spells rather than pausing the game and going into your inventory screen. You can have it as a hot key and simply push 1 button to use it. The controls are really quite versatile. 8/10

Difficulty

Everybody is different but i hate games that are easy!
Oblivion I would say is medium. There are challenging aspects of this game. Like older rpg's espically the turned based ones, you cannot just hang around in one section of the world slaying monsters until your level reaches 999. It takes a fews hours just to get up to level 5 in Oblivion.

The Level up in Oblivion works on 3 skill increases of a major skill. (you have major & minor skills). So the more you get your level up, the longer it takes to increase your skills again next time around. So forget the idea of previous games where really hard monsters give you massive amounts of experience points and therefore it's to easy level up by just hanging around & killing them for 45 minutes. Each skill has it's own set of experience points; not experience points as a total of everything, which reminds me think of another point.

Fighting monsters in the world & in caves is generally medium diffculty, considering the game only generates monsters based on how strong you are at the time. In other words, the tougher you are, the tougher the monsters are that start to appear. Though let me just say, there are a few rare exceptions to this. You will find some enenmies in the game that have set skills no matter how advanced you are.

I also found the gold you obtain throughout the game wasn't easy. Especially when you first start off. For starters, you get no money from creatures that aren't human. Other games you could find 50 gold on a wild dog. I didn't know he had pockets and what does he use the money for? (yeah right). Money is hard to get & you generally only get it from stealing, fulfilling quests or by looting human bodies. (Treasure chests hardly give you more than 20 or 30 coins at any one time which is not much).

Besides this, there is nothing that is really easy in the game. Here is a word of advice: if you want to beat up & rob people, do it discreetly & not all the time. Otherwise you will have town guards chasing you WHEREVER you go. You can either go to jail, fight them or pay them cash. This becomes a nightmare early in the game when gold is scarce & you are a level 3 weakling! My rating for difficulty is what i feel is fair. 8/10.

Now is the time you should be going to your local store and buying this game. I would pay a $100 for this game (although i would find it cheaper). It is worth every cent & i hope video game studios make more games like this.

Stats Screen

I briefly touched on the levelling up system in Oblivion. Let me go into more detail and explain the other menus on the stats screen. Your character has Major skills & Minor Skills. Skills such as acrobats, hand to hand or Illusion Magic. You advance these skills by using them. The more you raise your skills on this, the more effective they are performed. It's that simple. Acrobats are improved by things like jumping and swimming. Hand to hand would be fighting bare hands and no weapon. Every skill can be increased a number of ways.

In order to raise your level, you need to raise 3 major skills. Your minor skills are inportant in development but are not necessary for level raises. You choose at the start of the game which skills you want as Major & Minor. It also depends on what race you pick and what that race is suited to. (E.G. Argonians by may good thieves so sneaking is one of your major skills).

This really is a clever system. You will soon realise that skills don't have to be practiced but can be learnt at a price. You will also discover that some skills will unlock special features once you raise them high enough like zooming in with your bow & arrow if you get your marksmanship skill up high enough.

Your inventory display is also on the stats screen that includes the time consuming task of finding an item amongst many. Scrolling through the stats screen is achieved by use of far top left and right buffers.

Spells are also listed here. They are seperated into a few categories like destructive, restoration & active. The only difference between active and the other types would be that active is happening all the time by use of clothing, accessories, etc, or something your race is born with or has learned. The other spells are performed by physically casting them in the game by use of a button.

Finally evident on your statistics sheet is a well constructed detailed map of where you are in the world & journals specifiying notes of your quests: Completed(, current (quests you know about) & active (quest you wish to currently pursue).

Heaps of information on the stats screen. You will be back and forth on these menus like a yo-yo but don't worry, real-time freezes when you are viewing this screen. So monsters can't hurt you! 8/10