At long last the wait is over. A new adventure through the lands of Tamriel has arrived. How has Bethesda’s latest venture fared? Let’s find out.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Maybe you’ve heard of it? There’s certainly no denying that Bethesda’s newest open-world roleplaying game has received loads of attention leading up to it’s hotly anticipated release. The only question remaining is whether or not it deserves all of this attention.

Let’s just get it out of the way up front:  Skyrim is without a doubt one of the biggest, most well-realized worlds to ever reach gamer’s hands. We’ll be taking a critical look at a bunch of the things the game does right and a few of the quirks that break the immersion here and there. Read with the confidence that there will be no spoilers outside of the first 15 minutes of the game in this review. I’ll only be touching on the basic premise of the game’s main conflict. Without further ado, let’s begin.

You begin as a prisoner on the way to his or her execution. The player character is sharing a wagon to the executioner’s block with two rebels, one of them being the leader of a group of rebels called the Stormcloaks. The Stormcloaks are at war with the Legion — soldiers for the empire — and hope to win their independence after the recent murder of the land’s king. Before the player character can be executed however, a dragon descends upon the town. This is the first dragon that has been seen in hundreds of years, and thus the town’s surprise is only outmatched by their terror. Your player escapes amidst the chaos and soon is free out in the open land of Skyrim. The world is now your oyster. Without going further into the plot, suffice it to say that your character (which you can make any of the nine races that populate the Elder Scrolls’ lore) is more than he or she initially seems. You must carry out your destiny.

If open world games have taught us anything though, it’s that even if you have some big, important destiny that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a blast putting it off and doing anything and everything else under the sun beforehand. As is Elder Scrolls’ tradition, Skyrim is no exception to this. The number of sidequests with full plotlines outside of the main quest is borderline overwhelming. There are numerous factions and guilds you can align yourself with, plenty of people you can lend a helping hand to, plenty of bandit hideouts to raid, dwarven ruins to plunder, gods to pay tribute to, pockets to be picked, and so forth. Why, you could sign up at the Bard’s college to put your wily charms to good use. Perhaps you’re the more sneaky, stabby sort? No problem, the Dark Brotherhood is ready to take you in and send you off to assassinate some hapless fools. If you’d like to get in on the political strife going on in the world, both the Imperial Legion and Stormcloaks wouldn’t mind having an extra hand against one another… And this is only scratching the surface of the plethora of questlines available in the game.

Skyrim also has a visually impressive presentation. The draw distance is very good with some breathtaking scenery to show off with it. There are some ugly spots though. Textures can look ugly if you get too close to things and shadows also look bad from a close distance. I played (far too much) on the 360 so I can’t say if these remain a problem on the high end for the PC version. Animations can also sometimes be particularly jerky and mouth movements awkward. Though I have to mention that the third-person camera is actually not horrendous in Skyrim — a first for the Elder Scrolls games. You could actually play the entire game that way if you wanted, though the first-person view is certainly still the optimal way to play. Thankfully, these minor graphical complaints aren’t something you’ll notice too often, but when you go looking you can certainly find some rough edges.

The music in the game is simply gorgeous. It’s extremely moody, setting the tone for exploration equally well as it does for the hard-hitting combat situations. 40 hours in and I still haven’t grown tired of a single theme — that speaks for both the quality and quantity of the score. Of course, anyone who’s played Oblivion will be hoping and praying that they have more voice actors this game. Perhaps Tamriel’s own divine Akatosh heard their pleas, because there are exponentially more voice actors than in the previous Elder Scrolls game. Every line in the game is voiced and most of it is done well. Sprinkle in some solid, appropriate sound effects ranging from water splashes to daggers raking across a bandit’s throat and you’ve got one great sounding game.

Of course, all the visual and sound praise in the world won’t matter one lick if the game doesn’t play well, but I’m happy to report that there is nothing to worry about. As with previous titles in the series you can wield a variety of weapons from a sword, axe, mace, greatsword, battleaxe, bows, and so forth. However, the ability to dual-wield is a first for the series. You can dual wield any one-handed weapons in tandem with one another, such as a dagger with a one-handed axe, or a sword with a mace. You can even wield a sword in one hand and a spell in the other, allowing you to attack and heal quickly, or start off combat with a fireball before dashing in with a power attack from your mace. Of course, any two-handed weapons can’t utilize these properties since both hands are occupied with the single weapon. This system allows for substantially more freedom in how you approach combat in a more immediate fashion. Any items or spells that you’re partial to can also be mapped to a ‘favorites’ function that you can pull up by pressing the directional pad up. This pulls up a small text menu in-game that lists your favorites while pausing combat. This allows for swift recovery should the situation change and you find yourself in need of new tactics.

Health, magicka, and stamina remain as they have been in previous games for the most part. Health is just that — the amount of damage you can sustain before being killed. Magicka is the amount of energy you have available for casting any and all spells available to you. Stamina is the least self-explanatory and is used to limit your use of physically demanding acts such as overusing power attacks with your weapons (which you activate by holding down the attack button) or sprinting for overly long distances. Sprinting is actually a new addition and a handy one given that the old skill to govern movement speed, athletics, has been removed. It is worth noting that increasing stamina when you level up also increases your carrying capacity. That’s right, encumbrance is back. Learning to adapt to how much you can carry before making a trip to sell your junk and store what you want to keep is one of those Elder Scrolls staples by now.

The old leveling system with major and minor skills has also been replaced with a far more intuitive system wherein every skill of the 18 available increase the count towards your next level. Once you’ve increased 10 ranks in any skill or combination of skills, you’ll level up. Every time you level up you select to increase your health, magicka, or stamina by 10 points and are awarded a perk. Perks increase the effectiveness of any of the 18 skills in a unique way as determined by the perk tree housed within each skill. For example, in the destruction magic tree you have to start by decreasing the amount of magicka your novice spells cost. After this prerequisite, the tree branches out and you may be able to increase the power of casting a single spell with both hands. Many perks have prerequisites of both knowing other perks in the line as well as the skill itself being at a certain level so planning ahead to get perks you really want can be extremely rewarding. It’s these perks that define what your character really excels at.

The variety available is this game is simply amazing, but what’s more impressive is just how refined most of it seems despite the breadth of what’s available. Aside from the hundreds of quests and locations littered with thousands of NPCs, there are numerous different playstyles available to you, all of which are completely viable. My first character is a stealth-based, dual-wielding rogue with a penchant for destruction magic specializing in ice attacks. So long as I play to his strengths, he’s a beast. Sculpting this warrior as you play feels like a reward in itself. On that note, unlike Oblivion, enemies don’t continually scale up to your level in Skyrim. A location’s level is set the first time you visit it, which allows you to actually feel how much power you’re gaining as you continue with the game. A pack of wolves will be dangerous when you first step into the land of Skyrim, but 10 hours later you’ll snicker at the thought that such whelps were ever a threat to you.

This likely goes without saying for those that have played any similar games, but there are some oddities in AI behavior and pathing. You can hire sword arms or recruit some NPCs that respect you to fight alongside you. At times they will behave very well and fight intelligently, but other times they simply sit there, dumbly being pounded on or letting you get pounded on. There are also those strange open-world instances where you’re receiving a mission to steal from or blackmail someone while that person is walking right by. These quirks take you out of the world a bit, but overall are rare enough that they serve little to dull the experience.

Summing up a game as big and rich Skyrim is honestly a bit of a fool’s errand. While I’ve done my best to take a look at the game mechanically, this modest review hardly gives a birdseye view of the soul of the adventure waiting for you. Thus, the only justice I can do now for the proud land of Skyrim is to recommend that you play this game. If you play one game in 2011, this should be it.