painterkilla

Skyrim has made significant improvements over the past games, those being replacing the class system with a perk system, allowing for greater specialization: now improving a one-handed skill doesn't mean practicing with a sword makes with better at swinging a mace. Customization options are really good and the characters don't look like potatoes. The game world is really beautiful, varied, with some degree of verticality due to the mountains and filled with little stories here and there in the form of notes and journals. However, the game feels largely unfinished and empty. The guild questlines are incredibly short and still allow for a character with no skill to become guild leader, especially the College of Winterhold and the Companions, though the Dark Brotherhood one is well done. The Civil War could have been much more, but it limits itself to changing the guard outfits, the dragons all have the same behavior: land at ~35% health and the player can head-on charge, spamming attacks left and right. The combat feels largely like Oblivion: hit the enemy sponges until they die. Blocking has no benefits, you still get damage and stamina is useless outside of sprinting: enchant your weapon with stamina drain and get power attacks all day long. Despite being very nicely handcrafted, the towns are incredibly small, even Solitude, which is supposed to be capital of Skyrim, only feels different in size due to its tall buildings you (most of the time) won't be able to enter. Almost all dungeons are corridors with the back entrance either being inaccessible due a combo of high terrain and invisible walls or are just stupid 'key required' locks. The loot is very poor, even a master locked chest has no more than one or two mildly priced items, forcing the player to use a lockpick perk to suddenly find daedric items everywhere, much like the speech perk tree is required for you to sell all the items you want. Lastly, this is the first game since Daggerfall where the player character can utter complete sentences all the time, unlike Morrowind and Oblivion, but the dialogue is very simplistic: Speech checks are rare and useless: a step back from Bethesda's own Fallout 3, where you could completely bypass a quest with a simple check. They also force the character to be a dumb warrior/wizard/thief/whatever simply due to the lack of skill checks like in New Vegas: Your character, the Dragonborn, blessed by Akatosh with a soul of a dragon, is nothing more than a dumb chap who needs everyone to tell him what happened for the last years because apparently he/she was living under a cave or something. Bottom line: the game is enjoyable, but not exactly GOTY material, not with these issues, not with the bugs and definitely not with the interface on PC.

Broken Steel is a must-have. Besides the story continuation, you can keep playing after finishing it, which is great. You face new mutants and ghouls and get new weapons. The level cap is now 30, motivating you to finish every quest you didn't do. Basically, get it to keep playing after finishing the story and reach lvl 30

Now that the game is totally free, you can go to level 50 without paying a cent, which is great, because you unlock cars, decals, map territory as you progress. Too bad sometimes evade and busted meters are unfairly frustrating, A.I. cars are either pros or noobs (i feel that there is a catch-up) and there are some lags. You can't customise controls or fully experience the game with a controller. As a free game. It is great. Ignore Alan250's review.