Oblivion offers a delightful amount of distractions during gameplay. Playing with the mortar and pestle not only increases alchemy skills, but it can be fun too. Exploring caves and ruins with weird booby traps and hidden treasure (although minimal) is interesting too. Players can buy real estate and horses, fight in arenas, explore to their heart’s content, and run from bears. (As an aside, I had loads of fun finding bears and then locking myself behind gates. I then shot them with my bow and arrows to increase my marksman skills and collected bear claws for a particular quest I was attempting to complete.)
The voicework and soundtracks in Oblivion are great. Some actors have multiple characters, but many players won’t care. It seems like each character has a distinct voice. Subtitles are offered, but they can be turned off easily. Actors speak slowly and with diction so in many cases the subtitles are not required. Also, rats grunt, corpses gargle, horses neigh, bears growl, wood makes a great clanking noise when struck with a sword, and people scream when attacked. Sound effects are essential to a fun game. The soundtrack for Oblivion is passionate in all the right places. An orchestra was used when creating the soundtrack, and it sounds as if the players are sitting in my living room. Crank up the volume and enjoy!
The physics of Oblivion work extremely well. When you kill a wolf on the hill, he rolls down it. Vases and plates can be flung across the room, smash into the wall, and fall in heaps on the floor. Enemies hit with arrows flinch as the arrow pierces their body or armor. The physics help make the game all the more believable.
Oblivion is a lot of fun, but it is by no means flawless. Some aspects of the game are extremely irritating. Here are a few examples:
Getting on and off horses is arduous. The rider has to dismount from the horse to collect items, and then climb back on. This process is stupidly slow. So is attacking from them and riding them in general. It may be a faster way to travel, but I felt better off on foot.
Stealing seems like an integral part of the game. How else do you acquire repair hammers and bread? If you get caught with stolen goods town guards will take you to jail. This makes absolutely no damn sense to me.
The biggest annoyance to me in the game is that each area of the game levels up as you do. “Challenge scaling” is the term used to describe this crap. If I went back to the sewer where I started the game, the rats would not be easier to kill, but the same difficulty. The game tries to match your character’s skill, but each baddie gets exponentially smarter and more skilled as you do!
