The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review
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The problem with Skyrim is that while everything works pretty well, you never see anything just once. You see stuff dozens and dozens of times, well beyond the limit of when they might be considered interesting. For example, early in the game you'll discover a puzzle door lock, and you'll receive a clue for how to open it. Getting past that door is fun, but then you'll see 10 more doors just like it, and they'll open in exactly the same way. That sort of "cut and paste" mentality is just annoying. I didn't like it in Dragon Age II (where all of the locations looked the same), and I don't like it here (where all of the contents of the locations look the same). Or consider dragon battles. The first time I encountered a dragon, it was exciting, and I had some soldiers helping me out to make sure I survived. After that, I had to fight a few dragons on my own, and so the battles remained exciting -- at least for a while. But by the end of the game, I must have defeated over 50 dragons, and after awhile it just ventured into tedium, especially since dragons tend to fly around and ignore you, and it takes a while to kill them. In my view, Bethesda didn't create nearly enough content for their world to support a 100+ hour campaign, and the repetition is deadly.
Finally, I played Skyrim on the default difficulty setting, which is what I always do when I write a review. The game started out challenging, and I had to use a lot of potions and poisons to survive. Then somewhere around level 20, the tide started turning, and by the end of the game everything was trivially easy. I don't think the final boss even damaged me. Possibly switching to a higher difficulty setting would have helped, but I'm guessing Bethesda like every other developer out there intended their game to be easily finishable, and for a real challenge we'll have to wait for some balancing mods to come out.
Graphics
As a whole, Skyrim looks pretty good, even if your computer, like mine, isn't powerful enough to display the ultra-high settings. The animations are fluid, the enemies are detailed (especially the dragons), and the spell effects are colorful without being overly garish. You're even given the option of painstakingly creating your character's face, even though you probably won't ever see it again once you start playing the game.
Where Skyrim really shines is in the world design and in some of the ambient animations. There are so many forts and hideouts and lairs in the world that they all start to look alike after a while, and I don't think there's much Bethesda could have done about this (short of spending way more time on them than they probably deserve), but the major towns all have a unique look and feel to them, and some of the ruins are impressive. For example, one dwemer (dwarven) ruin has an "under the sea" theme. It's hued in blues and greens, and it appears to have giant jellyfish floating around. I'm not sure how any of that is possible, but the site is eerily beautiful to explore.
But the most impressive part of the graphics is the world animations, particularly the snow and water effects. To put it bluntly, Skyrim has the best water effects I've ever seen in a game, and it's not even close -- and Bethesda must agree, because they put streams and waterfalls everywhere (I'm pretty sure "Skyrim" means "land of running water" in the Nord language). Meanwhile, with the events of the game taking place in the northern part of the world, you have to trek through many a snowstorm, and the animations for these are effective enough that you might feel like you're actually there -- and need to grab a coat or some snowshoes.
Sound
Unlike the graphics, the sound in Skyrim is much more workmanlike. There is a ton of dialogue in the game, and while it's all performed by voice actors, they tend to read their lines without much in the way of emotion (or acting, really), and nobody stands out. Skyrim is actually a pretty good argument for the people who think role-playing games would be better if not all of the lines were acted. I'd rather hear quality acting in a few places rather than ho-hum acting all throughout, and I bet the game would have reacted better to my actions if not all of the dialogue had required an actor.
Meanwhile, I barely noticed the background music at all. At one point I turned off the music when I was working on a quest to find nirnroot (which produces a low tone when you get close to it), and I went about half the game before I remembered to turn the music back on. The part of the game I played without music wasn't particularly better or worse or different than the part I played with music.
Probably the most notable thing about the sound in Skyrim is that somehow Bethesda screwed up the volume control. The dialogue is all at about half volume, meaning you have to crank up your speakers (or turn on the subtitles) to understand what's going on. Then for some reason daedra voices are at full volume, and so it seems like they're all shouting at you. This is just a weird bug in the game, and I'm surprised that Bethesda hasn't fixed it already.
