Oblivion Review

I put off writing a review for Oblivion for a while, simply because it is such a huge game. It literally has hundreds of hours in one playthrough, and is sprinkled with little Easter eggs for dedicate players. It is one of the greatest games ever made and is quite possibly the best current Xbox 360 game.
The game starts with you designing a face for your character. You can literally change everything about your face. You rarely see your face in-game, but players can spend hours simply creating the perfect appearance. However, all the options made it difficult to quickly make a attractive character (Thus most of my characters look hideously ugly.) Also, some of the options were indecipherable. (Chin to eye to mouth ratio? There were at least 70 options that looked like that.)
Once your character is perfect, you take him/her through a lengthy tutorial that teaches you the basics of Oblivions gameplay. This a improvement over Morrowind's (Prequel to Oblivion, 2002 Xbox game of the year) tutorial, which just handed you a knife and shoved you out the door into the big scary world. Oblivion gives the player a chance to amass a few weapons and a little know-how before booting them out into the slightly less scary, still really big (around 35 square miles) world. The character then chooses or makes a class. This involves choosing from a list of basic skills and is standard RPG fare.
One of the most challenging parts of Oblivion for beginners is what comes next. Anything. You can follow the plot, or ignore it. You can get a job, or explore. Or just kill random people. However, every action has a consequence, and the guards will haul you off to jail (where you lose levels) if you break the law. The game is completely open. There are hundreds of side quests, ranging from assassinating targets to simple deliveries. It would take hours to describe everything in Oblivion, but the bottom line is you will never get bored.
One of the best new systems was the new stealth system. It used the light, your movement, even the weight of your boots to judge enemies awareness of you. It worked great in practice, and the assassins guild missions are the best in the game. Sneaking is not an essential skill, but is great. In fact, Oblivion's missions can all be completed mostly with swords, magic, or stealth, allowing a variety of characters to fully experience the game.
The combat in Oblivion is solid (a definite improvement over Morrowind's literal hit and miss combat), but is still RPG combat. You block to lessen damage and expose the enemy, then swing. This worked well one on one and versus groups, but add allies into the picture and the combat does not have nearly enough precision (so many times I was killed by an ally that I had hit one too many times.) I found that at the higher levels the fights were too drawn out, as you would pound the other guy fifty times with your sword to kill him. This really hurts the combat experience, both in realism and intensity. A increase in attack damage or a decrease in health (or both)would of been appreciated.
Speaking of high levels, Oblivion has another high level annoyance. A new system increases the level of your enemies to match yours. While this prevents the brutal difficulty Morrowind had at the start, it's a real drag at the high levels. You work so hard to get your character a level up, only to find that the entire game is harder. You have to put all your level points towards strength and endurance to keep the game's difficulty at a manageable amount, but once these skills maximize at 100, every level up is a negative, not a positive. There is no feeling of accomplishment in your level, only dread of the enemy stat boost.
Oblivion was an Xbox 360 launch title, but it still has terrific graphics. The environments are crystal-clear, and the characters look perfect. There is even a speechcraft minigame centered on facial expressions. The frame rate holds up well ,even with the massive environments and bunches of people. However, ground features like trees and rocks will only appear as you near an area, hurting the long range environments. Also, the cites and environments lack that magic touch that Morrowind had. Oblivion was all grasslands with a little snow at the top of the map, while Morrowind had swamps and deserts in addition to the basic areas. The cities were all square and stone, lacking the sweeping grandeur of Morrowind's variety of cities (I miss my elephant bone cities.) However, when not compared to its stunning prequel, Oblivions environments are top notch.
Oblivions score also is great, but not as great as Morrowind's superb score. Tears come to my eyes every time I hear Morrowind's opening theme. However, very few games are originally scored as well as Oblivion. The rest of the sound really enhances the game experience.
Oblivion is an almost perfect adventure that's flaws are made up for with a massive amount of content.
10/10 Buy it, no matter what games you like. It is as close to perfect as games come.