The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Xbox 360)

Once you escape the dungeon you’re thrust into the world of Tamriel, and it might seem like a daunting task set before you. Your journal and compass come in extremely handy, combined with your world map and local map, these four elements make playing Oblivion extremely easy and intuitive especially for a Console RPG.

The compass tracks your current objective and quest with a marker, red if you’re far away from it and green if you’re close. The marker will also appear on your world map and any local map that you look at, it will show you the door you need to go through or the place where you need to look, so this means you’re not going to get lost on any quest if you follow your journal, compass and map.

A quick word about the Journal, Oblivion has one of the best RPG journal systems I’ve seen in any game, it quickly and easily tracks quests, it shows your current quest and entries, your list of quests and a completed quest list. The updates to the journal are also excellent, they are extremely well written and some of them are fairly humorous in nature, while keeping in character and full of important clues and information.

Oblivion is a daunting game to some and it’s full of things to do, you should never be bored and there’s always exploring the wilderness to contend with, since the map allows for fast travel (click on a previously explored location or a major town/city and you’re taken there as time passes) to speed up trekking back and forth, or just cut out a lot of the travel (which in my opinion is worth doing because of the game’s myriad of secrets).

So now we’ve covered a little about the Journal and moving around, Oblivion isn’t just about exploration and quests – you’re going to end up in a brawl or battle sooner than you think, the game handles this by meshing the physics system in with the combat system and it does it fairly flawlessly (with emphasis on fun). Right trigger swings your sword, fires your bow and uses whatever equipped weapon you have in your hand. Accessing the inventory is painless and once you learn the buttons, it’s quick and fairly simple to do. You can sort items by name, weight and even attack power or worth.

Left trigger is your block and depending on your skill, it reduces the amount of damage you can take. Oblivion borrows from some aspects of Console games by allowing for power attacks and special effects, depending on your skill level in the various weapon types and/or armour/shields.

For example a Master of Blade can deliver several power attacks that can cause opponents to become paralysed, disarm them and so on. A Master of Block can cause knock-back and employ shield bashes.

The right bumper casts your chosen spell and you can hotkey items and spells via the D-pad in 8 directions, for the most important switching as you play the game.

Combat is better in first person and I get the feeling that to be honest the only reason there’s a third person camera is to show off your character, especially when they get better armour and items. I have a preference in the game for first person fighting and the way the character can be staggered in combat, reacting to blow after blow really brings the visceral nature of this fighting system alive.

You have a health, magicka and fatigue bar. Health drops via a number of ways, getting hit being only one of them. Magicka falls when you cast spells, but regenerates and fatigue drops when you’re engaged in combat or jumping compared to dropping in Morrowind when you ran.

You can pick up objects in the game world and interact with them by pressing the left bumper, throwing the skulls of disembodied skeletons around for instance or hurling a defeated enemies’ weapon over the edge of a cliff in disgust because it’s not as good as the one you’re using. You have a limited amount of inventory space based on your strength and character’s encumbrance value, once you go over it you’ll be stuck to the spot and if you’re in combat it’ll be an embarrassing moment as the enemy smacks you one in the face with a mace.

Stealth also plays a greater role in Oblivion and if you’re walking the path of the Thief or a Dark Brotherhood assassin, you’ll want to get to grips with how the system works – there are a few things to know. A quick click of the left thumb-stick will drop your character into sneak mode and a golden eye will illuminate around your central crosshair, if this eye is dark you can’t be seen, if the eye is solid gold then someone/thing can see you.

That’s not the only thing however, the better your stealth skill is, the more chance you have of remaining undetected, the armoured boots you wear also affects this chance and it’s wise to keep a pair of soft shoes for sneaking around in or just get better at sneak (eventually you can move in any kind of boots with no penalty) – the last factor that determines your chances of being caught is the level of the NPCs own sneak skill, if it’s higher than yours then you’ll probably end up being spotted.