Assassin's Creed: Revelations [PS3]

Better than Brotherhood? 

.... maybe only just. 

It was only better for me because it came with the original Assassin's Creed. 

It could be the most epic and cleverly-woven piece of storytelling ever weaved into a game - and I wouldn't know because I was so alienated 
I just didn't care any more.

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?

The successor to Assassin's Creed 1, 2, and Brotherhood;  this is the conclusion to the stories of Altair - the 13th Century Holy-Lander who stars in the original AC - and Ezio Autitore di Firenze - the 16th Century Italian who has been the lead protagonist through AC2 and AC:B. 


Both Altair and Ezio appear in-game as old men - we see Altair in his 30s, 60s and 80s, and Ezio is now in his 60s. 


For a man of 60-odd, there is little sign of Ezio Auditore di Firenze slowing up while fighting and razzing about through the game's environments - mainly Constantinople in 1511 but we also revisit our old haunt of Masyaf, Syria. The sections with Altair aged around 80 show a true frailty to the him, but it hasn't been applied well enough to do it credit - I'll explain that later.


The story set-up is still the same and the "genetic memories" of these two legendary Assassins are being played by a modern-day ancestor, Desmond Miles. Thankfully, there isn't too much of him - until you get right to the end..... anyway, let me go through things in order.

+++ O.K. - The Good Stuff +++

Much more colour - YAAAAAAY!

I much prefer the new setting as well. Constantinople looks beautiful - with the ornate towers, decorated markets full of carpets and other wares, crowds of people wearing vibrantly coloured robes - it it a much more satisfying visual experience. Masyaf is much the same as it was in AC1, but now is much more decrepit and so isn't quite as nice.


There is certainly more emphasis on the colour, variety and spectacle that's been caked in to Revelations but for the most part it pays off. Being able to kit Ezio out in a deep purple cloak and shiny new armour was at least slightly satisfying.

Using bombs and mines is one of the more fun hobbies in this game

+++ BOMBS! +++
Yes - OK - these were great fun. As stupid as it actually sounds on paper that people in the 1500s had bomb-making stations posted on every other street corner that allowed you to cook up a multitude of different bombs... but it was still fun to get cooking.


The bombs are good to experiment with - as there are perhaps too many bomb-crafting ingredients thrown at you (luckily not in explosive form), you are therefore able to play around and see what works for you.


Varied enough to be interesting - probably the best implemented new feature for several games. There are several types of bomb - diversionary, tactical and offensive. Diversionary simply draws a guard's attention and is made up of noisecrackers and that sort of thing. A great example of a tactical bomb is the one that is full of lamb's blood - so when it explodes onto a guard they think they've been seriously injured - and then invariable are. Finally the offensive bombs have varying strengths, fuses and effects to take out the diverse range of guards you face in the game.

+++ PLENTY OF VARIETY +++

There's lots of different enemy weapons - loads available to scavenge from fallen enemies - and stuff to buy from the shops so if you want to search for the perfect sword and lance to go with your purple cloak and shiny armour then go for it.

There's also a nice mix of armour types - guards with heavy body armour can now be fairly tough and require some good footwork or use of a bomb to drop their guard.


The variety sort of makes it through to the missions too - you spend your time searching environments for hidden objects, scaling the highest towers to unlock more of the map, defeat senior bad guys in an area to take over more control of the city. 


Side note: On the "city control" point, you can beat the captains in each area by simply sneaking close to them and shooting them. When the captain dies, all the other guards run away. You then set the guard tower alight. WIN. Yawn.


Anyway, the city is varied and interesting enough to keep you searching around for a few hours - but I don't think there's much incentive to work towards 100% completion on this one.


For added value, those who bought the game new (or had it bought for them by awesome brothers) get a copy of the original Assassin's Creed game. I mention this now because it's about the last good thing I can say about Revelations.


Here goes the rant....

What a beautiful city. What a terrible game.

--- "GO GADGET GO" AND "GOT GADGET WOES" ---
Really I haven't gotten on board with the whole gadget thing in Assassin's Creed. I've felt that the stealthy killy concept is perfectly suited to minimal gadget interference, but the game insists on offering you absolutely loads of toys to choose from - if you so wish.


There's a gun, crossbow, hidden blades, bombs, mines, poisons, throwing knives, a hookblade, parachutes (I know, wtf?) - and the developers seem to think the series will fall apart if they don't cram 3 new things in each game to "improve" on the last. Oh well - they're there if you want to use them.


So then comes my big problem in Revelations - it's bad enough that they throw in dozens of crappy gadgets. 


Then I give up and accept that - fine, although it doesn't fit the setting at all, I'll get on board with the whole parachute thing. Flinging myself off buildings and swooping safely to the ground saves time at least (Not that you need it because Ezio is now near-invincible and anything actually fatal can be cured with a well-timed health potion). So I start to razz around the city by parachute - getting to a high location and then just leaping and gliding down to targets was great fun.


Then - WITHOUT MENTIONING IT - you have your parachute taken away. How did I find this out? By leaping off a building to my death only to find no cloth wings of safety there to back me up. Thanks, AC:R. You have managed to successfully:

1. Introduce gadgets that I loathe because they dilute the glorious Assassin concept
2. Make me accept defeat - and so start to make use of said gadgets
3. Take the gadgets away again without telling me - meaning that I died and had to restart a level from the beginning due to the lack of a parachute (for no good reason too - still don't know why they aren't present in the "Underworld" level)
4. Piss me off. Like, seriously.

Good old hidden blades - how you served me well.

--- TOWER DEFENCE THAT SUCKS??? ---
Yes, surprise surprise, putting a tower defence mini-game in to defend your base when the enemy tries to siege it into a stealth-action-adventure game didn't work. Who on Earth thought that a tower defence mini-game would work in Assassin's Creed anyway!?!

But why exactly didn't it work? Because it was totally half-arsed. Hear me out, and I'll explain how I think this could have been awesome.


They devised a set-up that could have worked as a great, near-endless mini-game - you line the rooftops with your troops and place barricades in the way of wave after wave of incoming enemies. You also have a cannon to blast away enemies - but this is on a timer and so takes a while to reload. You can even just shoot the enemies from the rooftops with the stealthy pistol you hide up your sleeve (accurately, every single time, in the 16th Century - sure).


So why is it no good? Because it's only used maybe 5 times in your whole story play through. I think you can choose to do more - but all of the fun, variety and enemies will be sapped once you've played about 5 rounds. Actually, more like 3.


The way it would have worked perfectly is if you got to do permanent upgrades - use experience points earned in tower defence to upgrade squads of assassin's to use on the rooftops again and again. Then upgrade the cannon, the strength of your defences, the resilience of your troops - give the player more flexibility in play and make it more worthwhile to play through many more levels. 


The way tower defence games work, you could easily have it stretched over 10, 25, 50, 100-or-so levels before a "boss" came and if you beat them then you got a custom cloth dye colour unlocked, weapon, or set of armour.


It would become a meaningful part of the game rather than an annoying and redundant tack-on.... just like most other newer features in this series.

I still really like Constantinople's architecture.

--- CITIZEN CANED ---

So there's still the massive bugs present in the non-player characters in both free roam and during missions. 

Some civilians get confused when you sit on benches, walk near them or jump, and have a habit of vibrating like a washing machine for as long as you are next to them.

You are often still required to be 2 feet away from your target instantly and at all times throughout escort missions, causing serious problems when I was playing an Altair mission - he is running away from an angry mob with his son - and then the computer-controlled son hit a wall accidentally and fell down a hill backwards. I failed the mission because I just couldn't keep up with him. Mission restart. Yippee. That cutscene had so much depth and intrigue - I just can't wait to watch it again. Not.

--- FRAILTY HANDICAP ---
In some missions with Altair, you are actually unable to kill people - you have to use assassin buddies and gadgetry to help. The missions throughout are sometimes very restrictive - this actual inability to fight leaves you wondering why this was used as an action sequence in the first place.


Although the variety and change of pace is interesting, these games are now just so, so different from the original set-up of "Anything is permitted", and I feel it has lost a little something with each subsequent game. 


While I applaud them for trying to do something more meaningful and artistic in a mainstream game, I still wouldn't feel that having a soppy moment where you call in other people to shoot for you in a Call of Duty game would work. Actually, I'm pretty sure you do at some point. Alright, arse. 


Basically I didn't enjoy the aged, story sections of the game - mainly because I now feel so detached from the characters and loathe the way the story is presented that a section I may otherwise had appreciated just made me even more annoyed that I wasn't being let off the leash to go stabby stabby. That may be something in that I need to get checked out.


--- STOOOOOOOPID DIALOGUE ---
In one level you play as Altair, who has been away from his home, Masyaf, in a self-imposed exile for 20 years. As you approach, the 2 guards you are meant to kill stealthily using your hidden blade start talking about Altair:


Did you hear about that old guy Altair, who looks a lot like that old bloke down the hill?

Yeah, I heard about him. They say he used to kill people silently, using a hidden blade.

Well I don't believe a word of it.... "hidden blade".... what a load of nonsense. Oh hi, old man!

*Stabby Stabby*

WIN. Yawn.

--- CUTSCENE HELL ---
The cutscenes don't do much to help my problems with the game's story - the character models are all pretty ugly, the way they speak and move is creepily unrealistic, and they are generally either Ezio or Auditore looking soppy and old. He grunts slowly and whines about age and love and his life - and yet when it comes to crunch time and it's time to save his order he gives it all up for a woman he's only just met! Urgh. Rubbish.


Sometimes they spend a while talking about some exciting conspiracy (that I'm not exactly sure the reason you are involved) and there is talk of answers, truths and Assassin secrets.


Most of the game, though, is spent doing random errands for people - meaning that even Ezio acts and grunts exactly the same while being told to assasinate royalty as when he is told to get a bunch of flowers. Seriously, that mission is in there. 


It's that bizarre juxtaposition that ruins the game - trying to keep a player engaged in an epic conspiracy spanning centuries needs some really intense and gripping action. Revelations only lasted me 10 hours and most of that was spent watching slow, tedious cutscenes and carrying out menial tasks. Oh what epic adventure.

Eagle sense is still used - if a little sparingly - to detect mission targets.

--- OH GOOD GRIEF! AM I GOING TO FALL!?!?! ---

Most story missions follow the standard format: 

• head through town, 
• talk to someone, 
• watch boring cutscene,
• tail a baddie... 
• *stabby stabby*, 
• head to an underground cave, 
• watch boring cutscene,
• find a handhold to climb up, 
• get halfway up and... 
• *cinematic tense action moment!*.....*yawn*,
• climb more, 
• watch boring cutscene, 
• *stabby stabby*, 
• *talky talky*, 
• WIN.

On the *cinematic tense action moment!* point, the developers of this are so shamelessly stealing things from Uncharted that they should put "(c) 2011 Naughty Dog" in the corner. I'm not talking about climby action stuff - that's been around for decades - I'm talking about the camera angles, animations and effects as the now-inevitable bit of scenery falls. 

It's not even slightly mixed up - the control is taken away from the player, the camera shifts to look downwards (at that scary drop that you may well fall down! Even though there's no chance because it's a cutscene). When control is returned you've already found that safe bit of ledge to start climbing up again so most of the action goes on when you're not playing. Whoopee.

--- L.A. NOIRE'S GUIDED ACTION TOUR ---
Those of you who read my review of L.A. Noire back in May 2011, would know that one of my major issues with that game was the fact that action sections comprised of you holding the "forward" button down AND THAT IS ALL. The character automatically ran in the right direction towards your target - requiring no skill and totally failing to engage the player in the action.


So why do I mention this now? Er... duh. Because Revelations does exactly the same thing. Tense, cinematic action sequences as detailed above - filled with explosions, fire and crumbling scenery - are all traversed by holding down the "run forwards" buttons. Wow. This doesn't feel like a cutscene at all.


So basically, they made the cutscenes feel like an archaic novel and the action sequences feel like a cutscene. 


Maybe the end credits will feel like a 3D first person puzzle platformer?

--- PARAGLIDING ACTION ---
Then there's a section where Ezio (no word of a lie) has to paraglide after the big baddie to catch him.


Is this really the best you can do, Revelations? You think that as a thrilling conclusion to the series should be an utterly stupid, Hollywood sequence.


When you catch the big bad, you then throw him off a cliff and battle as you fall. Well, when I say battle - you have to block ONE of his attacks and then punch him THREE TIMES. 


And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the final action in the Ezio/Auditore story. You are then left with half an hour's worth of talking and cutscenes before being treated with a baffling "Desmond" section.


--- STORIES END ---
And the conclusion to the tale? I HAVE NO IDEA. 


I can't tell if they were setting up the next game, if they trying to be all philosophical and poinant - or if it meant jack shit. 


I'm guessing at option c) Jack shit. It was awful. Just like the last 3 games, it made very little sense - had no sense of drama or conclusion - it just rambled on and then the end credits rolled. 


Now this may be one of the best story narratives ever - taking the player and 2 lead characters right to the end of the story - only for none of them to have an effing clue what was going on - but it didn't sell to me. 


Altair wasn't sure what he was doing. Ezio didn't understand a thing. I hadn't the slightest idea or care what was happening - it was a load of boring pap..... I really got bored here.


Then after the end credits there's a whole new section with Desmond in first person in a weird, Portal-esque puzzler environment. And was it gripping? Conclusive? Amazing? Game-changing?

I played through 2 out of the 5 Desmond levels and decided - No. I'm not wasting any more of my life listening to this crappy story. You know what, I don't care any more.


For the same reason, I didn't carry on with the multiplayer section of the game either - it was trying to keep you hooked by providing more details on the backstory and throwing in hundreds of useless gadgets - and I couldn't care less any more. 

Too much talky, not enough stabby. 

Disturbing but decisive. 

Revelations was no revelation at all.

CONCLUSIONS

It took me three whole games to get here but yes - I have finally given up with the Assassin's Creed series.

The new features add very little - and the fact that the new scenario is nice should make for good DLC - not a full priced game.

The conclusions to the stories of Ezio and Altair made no impact upon me - mainly because I lost touch with both characters a long time ago. I doubt I will be finding out what happened to Desmond in the end, either.

I do not mourn their passing - but out of respect for the original I will offer them this:

REQUIESCAT IN PACE

Feel free to post comments or contributions to improve the experience!


Any images in this review are subject to relevant copyrights and are kindly provided by: http://assassinscreed.ubi.com/revelations/en-GB/game-info/index.aspx

Saints Row: The Third [PS3]

Over the top and utterly bombastic in every aspect of the game. Sadly, the shiny transvestite gangster show can get a little stale later on.

Welcome to Steelport - here's your complementary dildo

From the very first mission, you are thrust into a frantic, explosive world where one-liners and innuendo are your bread and butter. Painting the gritty, violent Third Street Saints gang from previous games now as media sell-outs, this game begins on television commercial sets brushing shoulders with other in-game celebrities. 

"Oh no! (You might shout) My beloved Saints! What has happened to them!?!". 

Well worry not, pathetic losers, they are still the filthy turds you know and adore.

About five minutes later the building starts exploding and you end up being captured and taken on a jumbo jet. This jet is then, of course, blown out of the sky with the Saints leaping out the back in spectacular action movie-esque fashion.

After returning to Earth, the Saints then have to make their name in the new city of Steelport. This basically means that all the cars, guns and safe houses from previous games are lost and you'll have to go and earn some new ones. This is acheived by playing through the main missions to progress the story or by completing side-missions which are based on a theme of "Tank Mayhem", "Helicopter Assaults" etc. Each mission earns you some respect and cash, which is then used to purchase new customisation options, new player skills or other upgrades.

The respect you earn now also adds to an RPG-style player level. Certain guns and upgrades can only be accessed once you are at certain levels, e.g. at Level 21 you can get a "revive health 30% quicker" upgrade, but not before. This all works fine and gives extra incentive to play enough to unlock just one more level, but sadly the count stops at level 50. Once you reach level 50, all respect just vanishes in a puff of air with nothing bothering to keep count. Why, exactly? Surely just keeping track of all the additional respect earnt would offer online bragging rights, or some sort of validation for all your hard work chainsawing pedestrians in half? A missed opportunity, I feel.

Up for a challenge
You are free to find your own fun (although the developers have clearly done it all before you did, so no thinking you're clever).

Pretty much everything you can do has a statistic tracking your depravity, from the length of time you have spent running around naked to the number of people you have gassed with the "Fart-in-a-jar".

This crosses over very well into multiplayer, allowing you to make your own fun based on who can whack as many people with a dildo-on-a-baseball-bat in five minutes (current record being just under 300).

The downside, even if a very minor one, is that with all the counters keeping score of your behaviour, you can feel like you're not actually doing anything wrong. In fact, it feels as though you are being positively encouraged to be a dick. This takes away a little bit of the childish fun on offer here: in previous games you could run over police officers and gleefully laugh as they rolled down the road knowing that thousands more are heading over to try and stop you. In this game, you run them over and it's more like: "Cops run over score: 500. Well done. Good boy. There's some more down the road, and you are perfectly allowed to do the same to them". 

Get your friends round for a violent, cross-dressing party
(or just stay in playing Saints Row 3)

As mentioned above, the multiplayer in this offering is great fun to muck around in. You can get an online friend to join you for story missions, for side missions, or for the free-roam antics available throughout the city. This is both fun and functional, and adds a great deal to the game's lifespan.

Not only can you speed around the city totally independantly, taking jet planes off in opposite directions and then maybe bumping into each other later, but you can also get in the same vehicle to maximise the local destruction. While burning up everything in sight with rockets and laser guns, there was virtually no difference in frame rate or visual effects, which is quite an acheivement given the ridiculous amount of explosions occuring per second.

Given the amount of hilarity on offer in terms of the costumes you can dress players up in, a round of "See who has the funniest outfit" was called for. Seeing what other people had decided to wear to run around the city in was great fun. It was only a little later on I realised that without the boobs, guns and swearing we were playing 6-year-old girl's dolly dress-up. Bugger. Oh fuck it, time for a killing spree.

Just how ridiculous can I act/look/sound?

So, I'll explain a little more about how I found the outfit customisation. My first appearance was as a butch, moustached, Cockney gentleman wearing a floral dress. This is my standard look for the Saints Row games, basically because it means I can laugh my way through the cutscenes, rather than try to translate all the ghetto euphemisms for "murder people in a helicopter".

My second, and new favourite, look cranked it up a notch with a shocking pink policeman's uniform, complete with cowboy boots. I was scarily close to buying a real-life version of this baby.

Next, I decided to snip certain manly bits off and stick some womanly bits on and went out into town as a blue-skinned, boobsy, nudey lady. 

In each of my incarnations, the giant purple dildo is the perfect accessory: delicately complementing the colour tones of my outfits and wobbling around as if to show the world who's boss. 

My final outift, unlocked much later on in the game, was a toilet. Yes, they went there. After going about as far as I could go with the cross-dressing and the nude aliens, they offered the option to run around the town and beat up pedestrians looking exactly like a toilet. Kudos, Saints Row, kudos.

So, basically, in answer to the question posed in the heading: You can look stupider than the African-American Gay Men's choir at an Alabama barn dance.

Stalemate Steelport

Later side-missions and collectible-hunting can turn into a rather dreary completion quest. Once you have "No bullet/explosion/vehicle damage" and "Infinite ammunition/No reload times" then most tasks turn into "Hold the trigger button down and stay in the same place for half an hour".

Putting in these kind of cheats is as much a blessing as a curse. It is great to be able to start shoot-outs with the cops and the only thing you have to worry about being their smouldering corpses slowing you down, but it removes all the challenge from the later missions.

The harder "Professor Genki" missions are much more manageable with bullet damage switched off and so slightly less frustrating, but the survival missions (which go on for 10 - 20 minutes each) just stagnate when there is no threat whatsoever.

What I feel may have worked is for the final level of cheats - such as no bullet damage, no explosion damage, infinite ammo, no reload times - could only be used in free-roaming and were switched off during all missions. Then you could still use the penultimate level of upgrades -  75% reduction in damage and near-infinite ammunition - but there would still be the possibility that you could die, meaning the game might actually expect you to do something in order to complete the section.

Conclusions

Really, there's very little to be upset by in Saints Row: The Third (other than if you are offended by murder, swearing or nudity). If you are a fan of the Saints games then most of the good stuff is still here and most of the new stuff is welcome. 

The only downsides are when you have been playing a long, long time. The repetative nature of the tasks you carry out is only exacerbated by the infinite life cheats, meaning that a lot of the spark of the game is in the beginning. That is not to say that you won't have a looooooot of fun in Steelport - there's enough to keep even the shortest attention spans happy for 30 hours or more. 

Superlatives

REALLY VIRTUAL - Happily does away with reality to offer an enjoyable gaming experience.

With perhaps a little more thought as to how the long-term gameplay may have panned out, this could have been game of the year.

Batman: Arkham City [PS3]

A truly brilliant game with lots to do and see. Took Arkham Asylum, cranked it up to 11 and squirted it out over a city.


Sandbox full of toys
This is how I feel a sandbox should work. There is a huge area to explore with an absolutely massive array of goodies to find within it. Some areas are unavailable until you have gone further in the game and will take a particular gadget upgrade to get to. There is as many bad guys as you want as target practice - and there is a massive number of ways to take them down (stealth, combat, gadgets, batarang to the crotch).

A bit of a challenge
It's also not a walk in the park - the difficulty level is fairly well-balanced, offering challenge if you try to press ahead too quickly but not stagnating if you just want to mess around. This is the difficulty level that I like to play at. Some of my friends (Psykomotor in particular) like to feel invincible and breeze through a game for the cinematic value and for pure fun. I prefer the challenge - to perfect the mastery of the control system and feel that great sense of achievement while watching the end credits roll.

Infinite scope for custom fun
This is pretty much GTA Gotham and it WORKS. It's dark and moody in the streets, colourful and bright when villains hit the town and there is so much scope for hilarity. Get a friend round to try out some of these excellent Pass-And-Play games:

• Drinking Combat Challenges - no shots if you get a perfect round - one shot for each round not achieved.
• Drinking Predator Challenges - no shots for stealth round - one shot for each time detected.
• "Who can throw the funniest remote batarang?"
• "50 points for hitting a thug's crotch and making him fall down a flight of stairs".
• Take out groups of enemies with challenges - no gadgets, no punching/kicking 
• Really, the possibilities are limitless.

It's fun - more fun than most stuff around at the moment (by the way, I'm writing this a week before Saint's Row 3 is released so currently my comment is valid - and I hope things are changing for the better). What it really needs is some on-line multi-player involvement, even if just watching someone else take their turn while trying out some of the games listed above.


Baddies go bye-bye
The involvement of some of the baddies in the game is a bit pants - several villains are attacking Batman one minute viciously, then pausing and smiling and asking Batman oh-so-softly if he'll just go and do something for them - which Batman accepts and trots off happily to do (only to be stabbed in the spine the second he spins around) *Freeze in particular. Others show off some top-quality superpowers but when it actually comes to the showdown with Batman they are locked up within seconds *Deadshot, Bane. I suppose this is the "comic book effect" - when you have a dozen baddies coming at you from all angles, some of them will be taken down instantly just so you have time to reach the cliffhanger at the end of this week's issue.

Side missions everywhere
Although there is a massive variety of side missions, with each requiring a slightly different use of gadgets, detective work and acrobatic skill, some side missions are stupidly awkward to find. I suppose you could say traipsing round the whole city and its little alleyways looking for the next piece in the puzzle adds to the immersion. But only slightly. A bit. Annoyingly. Sometimes I wonder whether you are playing the role of an elite detective or just a guy who spends a little too long in alleyways and accidentally solves some murders along the way.

Time dilation and it's negative consequences for street brawls
My third criticism is that the new bad guys thrown into combat can upset the flow of battles somewhat. You take down guys in fights by either hitting them or countering their attacks. These counters need to be carried out during a particular interval (while the enemy has a symbol over their head). Guys with knives need to be countered thusly three times with an instant takedown available if you hold the counter button between attacks. Now my issue is that some of the upgrades and special attacks cause time to slow down suddendly (after 15 consecutive hits or something) and this distorts when you need to counter mid-flow! Then Mr. Knifey gives you a big, friendly hug. Several of those and the game lets you repeat the experience of meeting Mr. Knifey all over again. Yay! *Massive sarcasm*

Conclusion
Textbook gaming. A real masterclass in ingenuity and variety. The scope of the city and it's baddies lets the game down at points but this is made up for by having enough here to keep you going for many, many hours. With Arkham City's secrets slowly being revealed to you through story unlocks, side missions and gadget upgrades, you really get under the skin of this giant criminal playground - and it can really get under yours.

Skyrim [PS3]

It's huge, open and immersive - until you want to go wild and then you'll be glitched back into line.

You can always get what you want

Doing pretty much whatever you choose in this epic, sprawling fantasy environment is great.  

• "Today, I will mine some gold and make a nice shiny bracelet, then wear it to chat up butch guys". 
• "I'm going to buy a house, get married and wear fancy pantaloons".
• "Perhaps now I will run to the other side of the world to see what's there".
• "I think now I'll go and stab some dogs". 

These options are all available to you and many more - the game and story is just about non-linear enough to allow you to feel like you are finding your own adventures in this massive, massive world. 


And when I say "massive", I don't mean "fairly big", I mean "takes you half an hour to walk from city to city and bloody ages to get to the top of the highest mountains big" - as you would hope. The landscape is not only epic but also nicely varied: there are large mountainous regions, forests, valleys, barren vistas, towering cities and tiny villages. The environments feel very organic - it's not just a straight road between towns but at points it's a dirt path winding alongside a river, just as a real pathway would be.

The designers have clearly taken the time to make each environment feel natural and each settlement to have a "living" feel to them - with houses, shops and inhabitants all interacting in a noticably natural way. This doesn't quite work out when scrutinised closely - with some towns having more shops that residential buildings - but we'll just assume there's a regular and rich transient community who come to town a lot to do their shopping.




Live out your destiny, Dragonborn
If you actually play through the story quest and start building up your skills, the game can grab you for days at a time and not let you go. 


The story involves most of the major factions that you engage with throughout the game, and seeing each one rise up heroically, or die tragically actually carries some weight. Making your affiliations and fighting on one side of an epic conflict or another can be rewarding and remarkable fun. "Aha Ulrick von-Prick! I betrayed you at the last minute! And I'll also betray the guys we were fighting - being a double-triple-uber secret agent!".


Getting the higher-level skills to unleash mid-battle is also fun and rewarding. The spells you can cast are not only visually-spectacular but also satisfyingly tactical - using "runes" (basically magical mines), destructive spells, corruptive spells and healing spells at the right times for maximum effect takes a little while to get used to but later on is smooth and flows blissfully.


The final stages of the story are suitably epic and there are loads of challenging battles in the last couple of quests which serve to bring together everything you've done thus far. 

The only problem is that the conclusion of the main quest feels quite hollow, with very limited reference to your actions throughout the game. I have yet to play through the main story a second time, but I find it hard to see how the end would play out any other way - the only difference being the key characters are still alive and ready to follow you into battle. 


Perhaps if the relevant factions had some sort of bonus or perk that they had available that could be used to beat the big bad dragon (not that any help was really necessary for this one). If you had such perks then these could be unlocked by completing side quests for one faction or another - giving more reason to actually bother completing these.

False Freedoms

Now would someone be so kind as to tell me if I was stupid for expecting these qualities in the first place: 



I thought that in an epic sandbox game where there was an emphasis on FREEDOM and the wonderful STORYTELLING allows you to carve YOUR OWN PATH through the world.

Right. 

This world is explicitly set out in the first five minutes of play to be dominated by an evil empire in vaguely turn-of-the-BC/AD-era, Mediterranean imperialist empire uniforms. 


As such I decided to be chunky, fiery Boudica-esque character, cunningly named "Boadicea" (Sly, eh?). I kitted her out with all the axes and heavy armour I could find and decided to go on the rampage against my oppressors in my quest for Breton freedom... well... actually just pretty much every NPC (Non-Player Character) I could find in a Viking-style berserker rampage... anyway, the point is that most of the people in the game can't actually be killed. They just take damage and fight back, then crouch for a while before regenerating all of their health back! 


Now unless there is some sinister underplot to Skyrim that I've not quite appreciated yet whereby the majority of its inhabitants are in some kind of undead cult and so I'm pretty much just fucked if I want to go up against them, or otherwise I've missed something here. 


In a free choice game where you are loaded up with axes and an open world and told to go wild - are you actually restricted to not killing the people in it? Or just some people? Yes, the ones that are part of meaningless side-quests and hard-nut guards can be killed off. 

Booooooring. 

I wanna kill a King. Then take the throne and decree that all God declare unto me that all non-ginger people are genetically-defective night walkers *insert sinister laugh here*.

Talky Talk - Not Happy Talk
There are many glitchy issues present within Skyrim and so I'll spend a little while discussing them. 


The first that kept rearing it's ugly head every hour or so was dialogue overlap. By this, I mean that one NPC was telling me something important about what I was meant to be doing next on my quest and suddendly someone else walks in and starts blabbering on loudly about the town's crops. "Ah wonderful Mr. Bob Everyman, the barley is in season, you say? Right.... and so where exactly is the ring that will help me kill daemons? You didn't hear either? Great....." *stabs* *runs*.


In other cases the characters will just give up altogether and stop talking - though your quest menu will assume you've been given all the relevant details. It can then be difficult to try to work out what's happening in the plot from the very brief summary in the quest menu, e.g. Meet Witch. Do you have a chat with the witch? Free the witch from jail? Stabby stab stab the witch? You can most often find this out when you arrive at your destination but it does leave you feeling disconnected from the adventure when you run halfway across the world and through a labyrinthine dungeon to meet someone for reasons completely unknown to you.


Then there are the guys who will push you around and cut off conversations. Some leave the room as you are trying to start a conversation. Others spend conversations bouncing up and down eerily so that you don't know if they're talking to you or having a fit. All of these really detract from the grand overall immersive experience, hence the points knocked off this game's score.




Giant and Bugs. And Giant Bugs.
O.K. next on the list of issues that brought the fantasy back to reality was the major failings in the physics engine and difficulty balance. 


At one point fairly early on I decided to go monster-hunting big-stylee. I attracted the attention of a dragon and bludgeoned it to death within minutes. Why are they so fucking easy to beat? They look sensational, really. Absolutely gorgeous. But the fact of the matter is they're just not scary when I have killed 3 within the first 5 hours of play (and 20 in as many hours). But that's fine, I'll get the experience and powers anyway. 


Then a giant appeared behind me. "Oh bugger", I thought. "I don't know if I can take on a giant". 

Splat.

I was hammered into the floor and then hurled into the air in a crazed ragdoll fashion. Spinning past a dragon around 200m in the air, I thought to myself "Hmm, I wonder if I hit you with my corpse if you'll die with me, you weak pile of crap". 


So this is the world I live in, is it? A newb fighter can take dragons down like flies with a fly swatter if the fighter was swatting flies, and my first encounter with a creature I haven't met leads to me being catapulted into the sky. This also lost me the experience earned through the past 2 dragon swattings so I was back to square annoying - left to decide whether to waste 15 minutes killing a couple of dragons or simply go somewhere else to hope that no giants come sneaking my way. 


Anyway, my time as St. George then led to a rocky mountainous section with snow so thick I couldn't see more than ten feet in front of my face and was set upon out of nowhere by a troll. "Aha!", said I. "A troll, the miniature version of a giant - this may be more up my street!". 

Splat.

"Riiiiiight", says I with heavy annoyance in my tone, "so this is one of those games where the big bad buggers that have been hyped up to shit are popped off willy nilly but all the little creatures you'd have thought you could take on eat your face in insta-death moves". 


This saddened me slightly as I realised that balance was going to be an issue - maybe the developers thought that setting dragons too hard would have meant that no-one could gain the necessary dragon magic that you need to get through the game. However, you could have at least made them a mid-game challenge or, alternatively, bring the smaller baddies' damage down a bit to make the difficulty level smoother. 




Innocent Man
The next major issue I faced was when I killed a "person". That must of been what the reason behind it because the bounty on my head was HUUUUUGE. So, apparently I had murdered someone and also must have evaded capture because the moment I walked into Whiterun territory I was assaulted by every single NPC I faced. 

And I could do nothing about it. 

I put my weapons away, put my hands up and was cut into pieces. "Righty-ho!", I mused, "Looks like I'm going to have to find the right person to hand myself in to. I'll try the guard station, and I must be quick about it as a guy with a sledgehammer is running towards me". 


As I entered the door (loading animation begun) I heard a cry of pain. When the guard station  had loaded up, there was I - dead and floating in mid-air - near the door way. Glitched to shit. Not meant to happen. It kept auto-loading on the glitchy death animation until I woke up from the annoyed shock to manually load up an earlier save.


Didn't matter a blind bit because the guard station is just full of guards who are keen to kill you. There was no way I could pay a fee for my crimes, nor go to jail - the only option was to die. 

Great. So that's this save file ruined. 

And which save file shall I go to? Well that's a very good bloody question as I haven't been to Whiterun for ages so I'm not sure what exactly I'm meant to do about it. 

Start my whole game again? Fuck. (Or, more accurately, Fuck That)

This bind meant that I had to replay the past 3 hours worth of main quest missions because I had been speeding through the story as an oblivious criminal. As it turned out, I worked out, it was because much earlier on I had met someone on the road who gave me something to look after (dodgy stuff I guess) and then was going to run and hide when suddenly he fell off the 3 foot ledge he was standing on and landed on me. In the collision he obviously cracked his skull and damaged his brain slightly because he became concussed and therefore slightly confused. While getting up from the floor he pulled a dagger out and went for my throat, to which I replied, "Fire spell! Ha!", and he crumpled to the floor in a heap. I guess there was a guard around 250 meters away who witnessed me "stealing" some dodgy items off someone and then "defencelessly" burning his face off. 


I then walked off on my merry way unaware that I was in any trouble but that guard certainly got the message around - Boudicea had stolen, possessed illegal goods, murdered, poked him a bit once he was dead, and then evaded capture from a long-range guard. 

What a bitch. 

If this was the case then fine, yes, I deserve to be butchered non-stop. Otherwise I demand to be given a fair trial. What? That's not a thing here in Skyrim? Oh. Bugger. Then just above the shoulder please - I want to be left as a commemorative bust to my family.


Conclusions

The main problems in the game are it's glitches and it's limitations. If you were truly free then this game would have been 100 times more enjoyable.

With a few extra months of quality testing and a few tweaks to the story mechanics, this would certainly have lived up to the hype.

As it stands, this is a very good game - fantasy as it should be. The world, creatures and magics all look fantastic - plus the dialogue with characters is much improved since Oblivion.