The Elder Scrolls told of their return.
Today's review will be on the popular game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or Skyrim for short (cue the Fus-ro-da chorus). Skyrim is, if it wasn't apparent, set in the land of (where else?) Skyrim in the Elder Scrolls universe. You assume the role of a dragonborn, a 'rare individual who has been born with the blood and soul of a Dragon, but the body of a mortal.Φ'
These dragonborn are so rare, that your appearance causes quite a stir once people realize what you are. So much so, in fact, that you are asked to run errands for many different people. As you progress through the game, you get to do a fair amount of dungeon crawling, as well as killing any dragons that you may come across.
Also in the game is a very extensive leveling system. There are 18 skills you can train your character in as you level up. All of this serves to make you more efficient at whatever it is you want to do. The reason I say that is because there is more to do than simply run around killing things (although that is quite fun in this game). There are skills pertaining to alchemy, forge operation (to make weapons and such), and even one to get you better prices from merchants. And to top it all off, there are no set 'classes' that you have to align yourself to. It is entirely up to you, the player, to determine how specialized your character is, if at all.
Overall, the game has a great story, as well as decent replayability value. It even has given rise to several memes across the internet (see picture to the right). The one thing that kills it, however, is the loading times. Every time you enter or exit a building and sometimes when you go into other rooms in the same building, there is a loading screen. Now this wouldn't be such a big deal if the loading times weren't so long. On average, it took 1-2 minutes to load to the next area. What made it even worse was if you left a building and then realized you needed to be in that building for your current objective.
Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, these long loading times served another purpose. You could go grab food or a drink in the time it took to load. You could even learn a bit. What I mean by that is that there were informative little tidbits that showed up on the loading screens. You could learn quite a bit about the universe in this way, at least until they started showing the same information again.
I'm sure you are all looking forward to my rating, so here it is:
After running all this through my proprietary rating system, Skyrim gets a decent 7.5 rating. This is mainly due to the ridiculous loading times. I understand that it is not always possible to have no loading screens, but even if they were able to kill some of the loading times, even by a small amount, it would raise the rating up a bit. All-in-all though, the game was pretty good. If you like games where you have to do a bunch of dungeon crawling or games with huge open worlds, I recommend you give Skyrim a try. Just be aware that there are long loading times. You can rent Skyrim from Gamefly if you have access to it, or just buy the game from Gamestop.
These dragonborn are so rare, that your appearance causes quite a stir once people realize what you are. So much so, in fact, that you are asked to run errands for many different people. As you progress through the game, you get to do a fair amount of dungeon crawling, as well as killing any dragons that you may come across.
Also in the game is a very extensive leveling system. There are 18 skills you can train your character in as you level up. All of this serves to make you more efficient at whatever it is you want to do. The reason I say that is because there is more to do than simply run around killing things (although that is quite fun in this game). There are skills pertaining to alchemy, forge operation (to make weapons and such), and even one to get you better prices from merchants. And to top it all off, there are no set 'classes' that you have to align yourself to. It is entirely up to you, the player, to determine how specialized your character is, if at all.
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| One of the most well know quotes from the game, in meme form. |
Overall, the game has a great story, as well as decent replayability value. It even has given rise to several memes across the internet (see picture to the right). The one thing that kills it, however, is the loading times. Every time you enter or exit a building and sometimes when you go into other rooms in the same building, there is a loading screen. Now this wouldn't be such a big deal if the loading times weren't so long. On average, it took 1-2 minutes to load to the next area. What made it even worse was if you left a building and then realized you needed to be in that building for your current objective.
Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, these long loading times served another purpose. You could go grab food or a drink in the time it took to load. You could even learn a bit. What I mean by that is that there were informative little tidbits that showed up on the loading screens. You could learn quite a bit about the universe in this way, at least until they started showing the same information again.
I'm sure you are all looking forward to my rating, so here it is:
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| Skyrim gets 7.5 stars |
After running all this through my proprietary rating system, Skyrim gets a decent 7.5 rating. This is mainly due to the ridiculous loading times. I understand that it is not always possible to have no loading screens, but even if they were able to kill some of the loading times, even by a small amount, it would raise the rating up a bit. All-in-all though, the game was pretty good. If you like games where you have to do a bunch of dungeon crawling or games with huge open worlds, I recommend you give Skyrim a try. Just be aware that there are long loading times. You can rent Skyrim from Gamefly if you have access to it, or just buy the game from Gamestop.
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