A Crowning Achievement
Here is a game in which breathtaking visuals and perhaps the largest free roaming environment in gaming history supplement, but do not by any means overshadow, an equally vast amount of gameplay content.
In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, you take on the role of a citizen of Tamriel. What your character looks like, the skills he or she is proficient in, and how he or she acts, is entirely up to the player.
The game has an interesting enough main quest, introduced to you when you first begin playing the game, and this alone should keep you busy running around serving the empire for quite some time. What you'll inevitably find, though, is that you'll early and often get sidetracked by the game's incredible amount of non main quest activities. I cringe to call these activities "side quests" because you'll almost certainly spend more time completing these tasks than you will involved in Oblivion's main tale, and that's not a bad thing.
You'll be given the chance to become a Gladiator-esque champion of the arena, a warrior type charged with keeping order in the kingdom, a questionably moraled thief working within an underground organization, a heartless and brutal killer serving a dark master in the same vein as Satan himself, among many other roles. This content is not only a welcome addition to the game, but it (perhaps more than any other element) makes the game as great as it is.
While excellent in nearly every regard, Oblivion does contain a few small faults. For starters, the physics engine in the game borders on nonsensical. Many times killing someone (or something) with a downward swipe of your weapon will send them flying backwards (...or forwards, or....sideways) through the air, defying any rhyme or reason. Also, the enemies in the game grow more powerful as your character does, so training yourself in the hopes of making your trip through that difficult cave or dungeon a bit easier really won't end up helping you at all.
Despite its minor flaws, Oblivion is a game you need to play. It is not only a masterpiece in action RPG gaming, but in gaming in general. Once you finish your playthrough for the first time, you may just want to do it all over again in a different way, and that's just fine.
