Xbox 360 Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review

The story starts you out in the imperial dungeon as the Emperor flees a group of assassins and must escape through a hidden tunnel in your cell.  The time spent in the catacombs in the sewer serves as the tutorial and tracks they way you play that game in order to provide a recommendation to you based on the skills you used.  As you prepare to exit the sewer system you have a final chance to customize your character through selection of your race, skills and birthsign each of which impart your character with abilities.  There are 10 races to chose from, 21 skills of which 7 will be major, and 13 birthsigns, which provides a near infinite realm of possibilities in addition to the ability to customize the facial features of your character.

After exiting the sewer you are free to explore the realm as you wish.  You can choose to progress through the main quest line or go from town to town talking with people and discovering other side quests that can be completed.  Additionally you can chose to join different guilds, which have their own quest lines governing your advancement within the guild.  The great aspect of this game play is that it allows you to choose your own adventure, if you want to progress through the mage's guild the main quest is on hold until you decide to pick it up.  At anytime you can break from the main quest again and explore the land of Tamriel.

Unlike other RPGs leveling up is not based on experience points, but on the skills used by your character, which makes the skill selection important.  For example if you selected Marksman as a main skill, but use a blade more in combat it will affect you ability to increase in level.  As one would expect the higher in level you get the more health, magic and fatigue you can bear, and the enemies become more difficult with better armor and weapons.

The game controls are relatively easy to master and you should have a good feel for how to use the system by the time you exit the sewers.  The biggest key will be the inventory manager, which allows you to change weapons, create potions based on items collect, select a spell or repair your armor.  This however has been one of the larger drawbacks of the game as the further you get the sheer volume of items you may have on you makes it tedious to find the right item.  A better way to do this would be to collapse specific items like keys, deeds or potions into logical categories that can be expanded as needed.

Due to the near 200 separate quests in the game there is a significant amount of replay ability outside the main storyline.  In addition several modules of downloadable content are also available on Xbox Live Marketplace to include the Shivering Isles expansion pack that adds 30 hours of new game play and 250 gamerscore points.  For those that are against the microtransaction system that Microsoft has conjured up can pick-up the Game of the Year edition includes both the Shivering Isles expansion and Knights of the Nine story lines.