Skyrim: The Game You’ll Play for 1000 Hours

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I’ve played Skyrim over and over again. I really enjoy the majority of the game and will continue to play the game until the next Elder Scrolls game comes out. There are a lot of different major quest lines that I really enjoy and could play 100 times over. These quest lines are very interesting and offer great rewards to slightly overpower your character. Some of the best quest lines are: the Mages College, the Thief’s Guild, and my personal favorite, the Dawnguard quest. Just one of these quests could take a couple of hours, so this game can last a while without restarting and making a new character. 

The character creation mechanic is okay; you have some cool races to choose from, such as the Argonian lizard people. After you create your character, you can do anything you want and change your play style from one method to another whenever you want. You can be swinging a sword one minute, and the next be throwing fireballs at people. By using a sword or a fireball you can level up that particular skill and get better and better as well as choose a perk for that specific skill that makes you even more powerful. The perks aren’t that interesting, but it’s still cool to build your character exactly the way you want.

(Modded)

The amount of different items, armor, and weapons is pretty impressive too. Finding a piece of armor that you’ve been seeking forever feels pretty great. All of the armor sets and other items are made really well such that you can make your character look awesome and make you feel powerful... Until a giant stomps your face in. You can create armor and weapons and also enchant them; this is one of my favorite parts of the game because I often get stuck making my character as overpowered as possible and making sure everything I have works together.

You can choose a difficulty level, but I recommend not playing on the easier difficulties. You’ll get too overpowered too soon in the game and not have much incentive to keep playing. However, either way, you’ll still end up playing the game upwards of 200 hours. The main quests keep you interested for quite some time. Now that the DLC is out, your time will be occupied with even more main quests.

Now let's talk about one of the game's downfalls: some really dumb side-quests. “Go get my helmet out of a dangerous cave!” is a really lame side-quest. After you do it, you only get 50 gold and feel like you wasted your time. Some of the side-quests are like this. And, don't get me wrong, you’ll still have fun playing through them, but you'll end up thinking, “Why?”

That said, there are a lot of really good side-quests, such as the one where you steal ale out of an inn for a hobo. Not much of a challenge, just funny. It also only takes about five seconds. The good ones are the short ones. If I’m gonna run someone’s errands, it better not take too long, 'cause I’ve got dragons to slay. I don’t want to walk over a mountain for some old guy’s helmet--that’s lame.

Some of the best side-quests in this game are the Daedric quest lines. These quests are very interesting and usually offer the best rewards. Overall, the side-quests are pretty good, but some can be annoying.  Skyrim is a role-playing game, so I suggest you actually role-play a little bit. The first time I played, I didn’t and just slashed anything in my general direction. That’s fun too, but you should try giving your character a personality and do things the way you think they would do it on your first or second play through.

<<If I'm gonna run someone's errands, it better not
take too long, 'cause I've got dragons to slay. >>

The magic for combat in this game isn’t that great. Most people won’t end up using it because there’s other, better options. Although magic isn’t great, neither is any combat in this game, honestly. It’s kind of awkward to aim your attacks sometimes, and you mostly end up mashing the hit button until someone dies--not much else to it. It’s not great, but it works.

I highly recommend that you get this game with its DLC because it adds a lot to the game and requires a lot more hours to invest. This is an RPG, but you don’t really make any decisions. You just kind of follow the quest line and ask a lot of questions when you talk to characters. I think the choices you make simply boil down to whether or not to do a specific quest line.  I think that’s kind of lame when you compare it to other RPGs like Dragon Age Inquisition where every decision you make matters.

(Modded)

Skyrim is a very large open world game. To get around, you can "fast-travel" from place to place in an instant. However, you will have to wait for about 30 seconds or more, staring at a loading screen, which sucks because some quest lines involve you having to travel a lot back and forth. This results in some short missions being such that most of the quest entails staring at a loading screen. Fast travel speeds things up, but you’ll never really see all of Skyrim unless you hoof it from time to time. In fact, you’ll have to in the beginning because you haven't "discovered" any of the locations yet. And as soon as you can use fast-travel, it gets overused. The game might be better with less locations to fast-travel to, but it’s also kind of nice to not have to walk really far, so it’s better just to have the choice. Really, the only drawbacks are the long loading screens.

Now, for the final assessments on Skyrim:

The music in Skyrim is pretty good; it adds to the beautiful atmosphere of the game. The graphics are slightly outdated, but in my opinion, still look great. There’s a remastered version coming out soon, so it’ll look even better in the near future. The animations in this game can seem abrupt and forced sometimes, but there’s so much going on that you won’t really care. The quest stories are well-written and are never awkward. You can’t just play this game once though, as it is one of the most entertaining games ever made. So, you're going to want to play it a couple times more after you finish it. You can play this game on console and also on a PC. On the PC, you can mod the game, add quests weapons, characters, etc. Mods are cool, but you’ll still have a lot of fun on console version.

So why will you spend 1000 hours in this game? It’s fun, interesting, beautiful, unique, has great replayability, and is slightly addicting. I recommend this game to everybody because it’s a masterpiece and every kind of gamer will love it.

Overall 95/100  Music 80/100 Graphics  80/100  Animation 60/100 Story 100/100 Script 95/100

Andrew Cherrington 
(Pragmus Pi)
Video Game Reviewer