Opportunity LOL's Video Game Review: "The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim"

I played Oblivion, the predecessor to Skyrim and really liked it, but felt it was slow. After a night of holding down my controller in the crouch position with a rubberband to gain stealth, it really took the excitement out of playing and raised existentialist questions - what's the point of all this? Will I care what my level is in a few weeks? Fortunately I had time to burn and found the game to be fun and addictive, despite the time theft that destroyed a month. That said, Skyrim has been a debate in my head for awhile. The hype has been super high and the main positive attribute being talked about is the massive amount of time one could put into playing and as a busy guy, the prospect I could be sucked into a game that would proceed to take all of my productive hours is scary. I've held it in my hands in stores a few times in the last couple weeks and rationality takes over, telling myself. "This could be a full month of work weeks," and then I put it down. However, checking the Redbox Friday at 5pm at a local 7-11 for a movie to watch at night finally broke me. I decided to rent it, putting a potentially costly time limit on my behavior - I would either love it, return the game, and buy Skyrim the next day or return it within 29 hours to not play again.

I played from 5pm that night until 3am straight and crashed. My dreams were not invaded by battling dragons to my relief, as The Indoor Kids recently said happened to them. I woke up on Saturday morning and began to grab an energy drink and sit in front of my television and continue playing but my mind kicked in and told me I was done. The game was to be returned as there weren't enough good reasons to blast through my weekend playing Skyrim, despite what the rest of the internet seems to be advocating.

I understand World of Warcraft. Tons of hours, talking to friends and forming parties to gather loot and accomplish tasks. You can build a character that lives in a world with others and it stays there. In Skyrim, all of those hours go into a character that lives on my PS3 hard drive and I have been alone the whole time. I can't decide to quit after months of effort and sell my character online (which is against the WoW Terms of Service, but it does happen). If my girlfriend wants to play, she can either play my character (lame) or start her own - and I can't gift her a ton of stuff to make it easy. These things don't matter for conventional console games, but when a selling point of a game is that I could pour a ton of hours into it I wonder - why should I? Certainly the possibility of playing DLC with a fully pimped out character can make it more enticing, but I think I need more than that.

Regardless, here's my assessment based on the ten hours I played Skyrim: It's pretty good. I loved conjuring. Running around with a magical sword that binds souls and a Flame Atronach at my side, I was ready to take on the many dragons throughout the various lands. Dragon shouts were fun but seemed more gimmicky than helpful - however checking The Elder Scrolls wiki, here are two shouts which I feel that I missed out on: Fire Breath and Odahviing (Spoilers). Skill development is certainly leagues better than how it worked in Oblivion, but you could definitely still game the system to quickly level your preferred method of attack.

Furthermore, Skyrim is a beautiful and massive world. That can be quite the selling point with time to kill and if you're in search of an escape from work or school. However, it reminded me that the actual real world is quite nice too and my lack of physical movement made me fidgety. Perhaps if this were a Kinect or Wii game I would have felt more engaged, though I am curious whether gameplay would suffer.

The negatives? It was quite unrealistic that I couldn't kill specific NPCs and if I attempted to pick off someone alone in a room the local guards knew immediately. Traveling took forever until I bought a horse and even then it could have been faster. Given my previous issue with the time cost, I also didn't appreciate that some quests were infuriating to the point I searched Google to move forward. For a true escape, I felt that Bioshock, WoW, and even many Facebook games were vastly superior. Perhaps that sounds like I prefer Beef Jerky over Steak. Regardless, Skyrim was just a bit too boring and time consuming to deserve my month. I am happy I rented it for sure - but I think it's a 7/10.

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Disclaimer: This is simply my opinion and I do not encourage you to buy or use the above product(s). I rented this game with my own money and have no relationship with the people or companies behind this product.