Too busy to devote 12+ hours a day to your gaming habit? Here's a review that's sensitive to your needs: Short and focused on just the things that a busy gamer like you really needs to know.
Busy Gamer Review-
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Reviewed On: Xbox 360. Version for PC includes a free construction set for creating your own levels and enhancements, and support for third-party downloadable mods. A version for PlayStation 3 is in development and promises enhanced content over the Xbox 360 (although this content may be available for purchase as downloadable content from Xbox Live Marketplace). There's also a version in development for the PSP, The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion, which will offer significantly different gameplay.
In a Nutshell: Explore a vast world in this incredibly deep single-player adventure game. The main quests require 20+ hours to beat, but the game can easily be played for more than 200 hours if you take on countless side quests and downloadable add-on missions (see related Rant about how purchased downloadable content that affects your game saves may be problematic on the 360).Thanks to occasional online patching via Xbox Live (you do have broadband, right?), Oblivion is much more stable than its Xbox predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which crashed at the drop of a hat unless you took great pains to manage in-world items. This game looks even better and does away with many of its forebear's limitations. For instance, joining one guild does not block you from joining any of the others. Join 'em all, if you enjoy side quests, Xbox 360 achievements and/or access to helpful rewards and free stuff!
The game is incredibly well-written for a video game with great storytelling mostly through in-depth discussions with non-player characters and in-game "books" that you can actually read, engaging quests and mini-games and thousands of paths to explore - figuratively and literally. You can be a fighter, an archer, a magic-wielding mage, a sneak thief, an assassin or any mix of these player types that you choose to pursue. Just creating a character (selecting your race, stats and various major and minor attributes) can take the better part of an hour as you work through the opening tutorial storyline.
Learning Curve: Moderate. The Xbox 360 controls feel like most first-person shooters, so getting around is pretty easy if you're at all skilled at Halo. Plumbing the hidden depths of the game, however, could take a lifetime - or at least the better part of a year even for a somewhat aggressive player.
The Save Game: You can save anywhere at anytime. You will need approximately 1MB per save, so you'd best have a hard drive or your memory card will fill up fast. Since the game has so many choices, and there's always the risk of a crash, you may want to keep old saves for awhile until you're certain that you made the right decisions - or at least the odd case where something gets horribly mucked up, ruining a quest or trapping you in a narrow alleyway. Fortunately, the game autosaves whenever you sleep or enter a location, so you're typically covered should your character - fashioned through days and days of careful leveling up - unexpectedly expire.
Family Factor: Older teens can handle the somewhat bloody medieval-style battles you'll engage in against humanoids and sometimes chilling monsters and beasties. Young kids should be kept far away pretty much all of the time; even simply traveling around town talking to civil servants or taking a rest in a rented bed can lead to sudden, unexpected battles. And walking or riding across the countryside spawns attacks from random creatures, many of which will take some work to escape or dispatch. If you want to play it safe, enjoy Oblivion only when the little ones are tucked away safely in their beds.
Buy, Rent or Skip? Your first instinct as a busy gamer - best expressed by Monty Python when faced with a killer rabbit - should be to "run away, run away!!!!" This game can and easily will consume every waking moment you can spare, and quite a few that you rightfully should not. Its depth rivals many massively multiplayer online worlds, and the urge to just play for "five more minutes" can easily take you into the wee hours of the morning, leaving you useless the next day at work or around the house. Oblivion, it might be argued, is quite well named since it can easily sap your real world stats! That said, if your personal willpower is sufficiently leveled and you feel you can take advantage of Oblivion's "save anywhere" capability, this game is immensely fun and rewarding. It's a must-buy if you can afford the personal cost - measured in hours sucked away and your ability to take on the day following a long-night's questing - that's required to play.
On a Personal Note: I took so long to review this game because: a) I had a life when it came out, so I used what little willpower I could muster to stay far away from it for long stretches, and b) I wanted to wait until I'd logged 40 or more hours before writing it up. I was also put off by my early attempts at thievery, which failed due to low sneak stats. It just seemed unreasonable that I would be caught by a street guard in the basement of an alchemy shop in the dead of night after successfully picking two locks without detection. However, since leveling up my thief skills, I can now pick most locks and steal from shops with impunity, sometimes right under the shopkeeper's nose!
Right now, I'm a Level 13 Khajiit (anthropomorphic cat) fighter/mage/thief/assassin who favors the blade, acrobatics, light armor, blocking, restoration magic, sneaking, athletics, alchemy (for poisons and stats-restoring potions), speechcraft (to sweet talk shopkeeps into offering their best prices) and mysticism (for detecting life when breaking into homes and shops or scouting a dungeon or cavern). My entry into the Dark Brotherhood came late, but it's a twist I wish I had chosen earlier due to its many benefits - enchanted armor and trinkets in particular. I waited until an odd little side quest gave me a reason to murder a character for both a hefty payout and a more satisfying story outcome.
Despite improved stability over Morrowind, I have encountered a few game lock ups personally. One happened the very first day I played upon activating a strange rune stone that I found near a quest city; that bug has reportedly been fixed. Another came just the other day when exiting a shop I had visited several times before without incident. Fortunately, my autosave was intact, so I lost no real progress and the game continued (albeit a bit sluggishly for a bit) after rebooting.
This is one of the few games for which I would recommend buying the official strategy guide. It's a convenient reference for creating a new character, and when you inevitably get lost on a mission or forget which Mage's Guild sells Destruction spells - which you WILL need in case you ever encounter a conventional weapon-dodging Will o' Wisp in, say, a tomb in the bowels of an abandoned fort (grrr!!). Another great resource is the free Unofficial Elder Scrolls Oblivion Wiki (though my last few visits have caused Internet Explorer 6 to crash; hopefully this is temporary issue).
Overall, Oblivion is the deepest, most fulfilling game I've ever played. I just wish there were more hours in the day.
