It seems that the boys of summer really have gone, along with the lush and verdant landscapes, leaving us with a stark, skeletal and harsh wilderness to explore.  What Obvlivion brought us was a living, thriving region of fictional world Tamriel and Skyrim takes us way north, into the frozen wastes and arctic tundra, a bleak land of snow and ice, mammoths and giants, aurora and blizzards.

Skyrim is the fifth main title in the Elder Scrolls franchise, following on from 2006 game-of-the-year-award-winning Oblivion, which saw huge advances in open-world gaming, itself following on from Morrowind and bringing the series to the current generation of consoles.  Oblivion brought us an amazing and immersive land for us to find our characters and develop them, from the glistening heights of the imperial city to the swampy marshes of Leyawiin; the game was immense and consumed you as a player and deserved its accolades.  

But that was 200 years ago.  The Oblivion crisis is long since over and the character you played back in Cyrodiil forms legends that are discussed over imperial campfires as the snow gently falls outside the tents.  Things have changed, events are unfolding here and now in the region of Skyrim, inhabited by the hardy Scandinavian-esque nords.  Dragons have begun to attack villages and someone needs to step up to challenge their plans and destroy the master dragon behind it all: Alduin.   



Anyone who knows their Dungeons and Dragson is aware that dragons are not simply feral flying lizards, but actually are highly intelligent, capable of speech in a complex language and more than able to hatch devious plans.  Their breath weapons are devastating and dragons make for formidable foes.  As it turns out, the character you play is 'dragonborn', which means they can learn to use the voice, an arcane form of magic derived from the language of the dova, or dragonkind.  Not only that (because even the crusty old Greybeards of High Hrothgar can do that, despite having little bits of cornflakes stuck in their beards from breakfasts long since past) but your character can absorb the soul of a freshly-killed dragon, which causes people to give you rather strange looks when it first happens.  Using these souls, you can learn various shouts that can call lightning from the sky, get a dragon to assist you in a particularly difficult battle, or even slow time for a limited period.

These abilities are developed as you continue along the main quest line, but as ever in a modern Elder Scrolls game, you don't have to follow the main quest.  You can leave it indefinitely if you wish, opting instead to explore the vast map, discover caves, mines and dungeons, clear them of their denizens, or just run errands for the people of Skyrim as you meet them.  What advantage this method has over getting the main quest over and done with at the earliest opportunity is that you will have developed your character, levelled up a lot and earned a great many perks, which lend advantages to the more challenging parts of the central quest.  

Levelling your character is achieved through the use of skills, be that striking an enemy with a weapon or spell, being struck on your armour by an enemy, sneaking around, pickpocketing or picking locks, whose revised system in this game is greatly welcomed as it's more hands-on than in Oblivion and enjoyable as a brief mini-game. As you are successful in these areas, your level in that particular skill increases, contributing to a small increase in your overall character level.  When you level up, you can increase one of your three main statistics by ten points: health, magicka or stamina.  Magicka is your pool for spellcasting and regenerates slowly over time and stamina is your pool for sprinting and performing powerful melee attacks and restores itself more quickly than magicka.  Health is health and if you need guidance on that, then you probably can't even read these words, so be off with you.

As you play the game, you tailor your character and every time you level up, you gain a perk point to spend on enhancing a skill.  These enhancements range from new ways of attacking, more effective defence or the ability to dual-cast spells, making them more powerful.  Perks can also reduce the amount of stamina or magicka that performing some attacks or casting some spells cost to your pool, giving you more to play with and causing you to become a more difficult adversary.

The new engine in this game looks and feels similar to that of Oblivion, but is different in some very interesting and fundamental ways. Incorporating some elements from Fallout 3, Bethesda has some snazzy new elements, including a selection of slow-motion coup-de-gras moves that trigger as and when they feel like it; each are tailored to your enemy and chosen weapon.  This looks good, but unfortunately, as with Fallout 3, the slowing down of the soundeffects to match the visuals has caused some unpleasant-sounding clunkiness and stretching of audio, leading to unattractive artefacts.  


Also new to Skyrim is dual wielding.  Your character can, if you so choose, wield a one-handed weapon in each hand; two swords or daggers, for example, or a sword and shield or any combination you care to conceive.  My particular favourite right now is Mehrunes Razor (a magical dagger) in my right hand and the spell chain lightning in my left.  It's a welcome addition to the game and brings a whole new level of character tailoring and freedom.  

In the same vein, crafting has taken a step up.  You can go around, chopping wood, mining ore and culling animals for their pelts to make leather armour using tanning racks, new weapons using blacksmithing forges, which you can then enchant using magic workstations.  Alchemy is the the only thing that remains largely the same; collection of the plentiful ingredients around the lands from both benign and malignant creatures and plants (damn those malignant plants!(yes, spriggans are back)) leads you to the alchemy labs dotted around places and then you mix and match your ingredients to discover their effects and create potions and poisons.

If all that doesn't keep you busy for about 300 hours, then perhaps the visuals will keep your attention.  On the PS3, the game displays at 720p, which is slightly disappointing, but there's so much going on, I don't suppose it's surprising.  On my PC, however, the game runs splendidly at 1900 x 1200 and looks spectacular.  While the overall feel of the game map is that of a frozen Scandinavian land, complete with Icelandic hot spring area, glaciers and an iceberg-littered northern coast, the crystalline beauty of Skyrim is staggering.  Though the textures don't bear close inspection, if you find the right spot at night and the snow has stopped and the moons are out, the aurora blaze silently across the sky, vivid greens and pinks, trailing behind massive mountain peaks while, in the distance, luminous yellow torchbugs flit around and a far off campfire illuminates patches of mist.  This is a jaw-droppingly spectacular game just to take a walking tour around, but more than that, it's living and breathing.  The inhabitants of Skyrim will welcome you, tell you off for walking around with your weapon drawn, be amazed by how cool your blade is, or regard you with suspicion for being an elf.  If you're an elf, that is.


As you make your way in the Companions, Dark Brotherhood, Theives Guild or the College of Winterhold, you get to know these NPCs.  When I was first shown to my room in the college, with an reindeer pelt-laden bed, a buck's head mounted on the wall and such, I just wanted to live there.  I wanted to climb through the screen and get all cosy under those pelts, go for a drink in the tavern in Winterhold, warm myself by the fire with a jug of mead and listen to the bard singing The Dragonborn Comes.   

It seems that everything Skyrim does, it does well.  Glitches notwithstanding (and I shan't go into them here, because we've covered them elsewhere on the site) it's pretty close to a perfect RPG experience with an open world that draws you in at every step.  While some NPCs can be inconsistent with the way they behave towards you, it's generally a seamless and enjoyable playing experience from exploration to quest and back again.  There are some fantastic items you can discover and use, some really well-written and funny, fun moments and some fantastic battles to take part in and even if you've done every quest for every person, cleared every dungeon and killed every beast, then it doesn't matter, because the game can create new quests on the fly, meaning the game never has to end.

Oblivion kept me busy for years.  Proper years.  Actual years.  And Skyrim looks set to do the same with DLC on the way and the out-of-the-box gaming experience being one from which I just cannot tear myself away. 

5/5