Pootah

Certainly a step up from a Oblivion; Skyrim fixes a lot of the problems of its predecessor. Menus and other UI elements have been streamlined; stats have been removed and replaced with perks, allowing for greater control over your character's progression. Level scaling has been reduced to be more like Fallout 3's, so levelling up is actually useful, where in Oblivion it only made the game harder. Graphics are inevitably superior, although remain mediocre comparative to other games of recent years. As with every Bethesda game, Skyrim can be lot of fun so long as you don't think about it too hard; after a while you start wondering those **** little questions like "how are these torches still burning when this dungeon has apparently remained untouched for thousands of years?" Or "how can I make a 30-pound suit of armour out of 5 1-pound metal ingots?" or "How the hell did so many bugs slip past QA? Seriously, there's a pile of rubble just floating 2 feet off the floor there." Skyrim's map is also slightly larger than Oblivion's, but it suffers from exactly the same problems: while the scale of the game may be impressive, quality is more important than quantity. I don't care about having virtually infinite quests to complete spread across more dungeons than you can count when nearly all of them are boring fetch quests or similar and every dungeon is just copy+paste of one of four other dungeons. Having dozens of towns sounds impressive, up until you realise that the alleged capital of Skyrim literally only has 9 houses in it. The most disappointing failure of scale is the characters: there must be thousands of them, but there's not one personality between them (and only maybe 20 VAs as well). The main narrative is unimaginably bland; centreing around a civil war in the eponymous province. Predictably, the player can choose which faction to join, but joining either side results in identical quests with the names switched round. Combat is similarly broken: since increasing your magic skill only reduces the amount of mana used (and you can't make your own spells any more), fights consist of either one-shotting enemies with sneak attacks with a bow or mashing the attack button in melee until the red bar is empty (the block skill is even more worthless than it was in Oblivion). As previously mentioned, even after a slew of official patches, bugs are a constant feature, whether it's quests failing to activate or merely items falling through the shelves they've been placed on, leaving modders to actually complete the game.

Most survival-horror games try to increase the tension by having you play a character a bit less powerful than your average steroid-using, armed-to-the-teeth action hero, but with Penumbra, Frictional have gone too far and forced you to play as someone apparently suffering from serious mental and physical disabilities. The protagonist is, for example, only ever capable of doing one thing at a time. Say you want to pick up a chair or similar debris to barricade a door. Doing so reduces your movement speed to a crawl, and makes you unable to jump. The same applies to virtually ever object bigger than about 15 cube inches. I'm pretty sure that in real life, I could lift a rock the size of an ostrich egg without having to drag it behind me at snail's pace. None of this is helped by the awkward interface or the broken physics engine. To interact with something, you click on it and move the mouse, so, for instance, to open a desk draw, you'd click on it and pull the mouse back to pull it open. It's pretty cool when it works, but it doesn't always, because obviously the game is 3D and the mouse plane isn't, so having the same control for 'move down' and 'move back' can be frustrating at times. As well as thinking everything it 4 times heavier than it should be, the physics engine clearly uses a lot of shortcuts: take the example near the start where the game tells you to barricade a door: regardless of whether you haphazardly left a single chair in front of it or spent a couple of minutes stacking up barrels, the door and everything in front of it just explodes after a certain amount of time. The whole thing leaves you wondering why the game bothered to tell you to barricade the door when just running away has largely the same result. This brings me to the other option: combat. Say you have a pickaxe. To use it like a weapon, you have to interact with it in the same way as any other item; i.e. click, then move the mouse forward to raise it, pull it back to bring it down. I'm trying not to stray into hyperbole here, but this is seriously ****. I know the point of survival horror games is that you're not supposed to have an easy time in combat, but not being able to look around is beyond frustrating, especially when you're fighting zombie wolves (the first enemies of the game) which have a habit of jumping through you when they attack. Since you die in only three hits, if you miss then by the time you've turned around and readied for another swing of your weapon, you're already dead. Of course, you can usually avoid combat. What you can't avoid, however, are the asinine 'puzzles' the game throws at you. At one point, you need a 4-digit keycode to get to the next area. The code can be heard in morse code at a radio set. You'd think there might be a leaflet or a poster lying around somewhere in the game area explaining how to decipher morse code, but no. Frictional apparently expected players to just know morse code off the top of their heads. Since I didn't work on a boat in the 1920s, this just leads to an unsatisfying check of the nearest walkthrough. There's another part close to that where you need to get through a door which is barred with a plank of wood. The door is made from iron bars, so quite why exactly you can't just reach through the bars and lift the bar up, I don't know. Also, this is a point in the game where you have the aforementioned pickaxe, which you'd think could just smash this tiny plank. Nope. In fact, it's even immune to sticks of dynamite. So what you have to do is find the one rusty hacksaw in this enormous basement, which begs the question: why not just make so I had to find a key, rather than looking stupid with invincible planks of wood? Then, to get to the next part after that, you have to jump onto a ladder. Somehow, even this becomes a chore when this imbecile you're playing as won't grab on and is for some reason damaged by the 2-and-a-half foot drop when he misses. The next area is where I just gave up on the game: you're crawling around these cramped tunnels that are full of spider eggs, which can apparently sense when someone walks past 15 feet away and instantly hatch. Much like the wolves, they have a tendency to jump through you and kill you in three hits, but this time they're far too numerous, small and fast to try hitting them with a weapon, so you have to shine your torch on them. The problem is, they're a bit slow off the mark, so if one of them is too close when you do that, it'll jump through you, and then there is nothing you can do to avoid dying. You're supposed to block off sections of the tunnel using conveniently shaped rocks, but trying to move boulders around slows you down even more than usual when you're crouched in a tunnel, so you more often than not end up being eaten while dragging them around. Eventually I just gave up in exasperation at this dissappointing, broken game.