Metacritic review

[evilhippo]

For what it is worth, here is my Metacritic review of Skyrim:

 

This is a good game and in some ways, a great game: sweeping vistas, epic music and sound-scape, coherent storyline and the scope of the game, the sheer immersion and *size* of it all, is truly staggering. Items that are eye candy clutter in other games... cooking pots, whetstones, mills, smelters, furnaces, are actually functional in Skyrim! This represents a significant advance over other Bethesda games like the earlier Eldar Scrolls series or ever the sprawling Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas. Kudos for that.

 

The gameplay is very good. Not great, but I can live with very good. Combat in The Witcher 2, for example, is far more sophisticated and visceral whereas Skyrim's combat mechanics are a bit ordinary. Not bad, just ordinary.

 

However there is one aspect which is a major step back: companions in Skyrim are characterless cyphers, little more that cannon fodder for carrying your stuff around, whose names you will have difficulty remembering. Unlike Fallout 3 or New Vegas, there are no real character quests, nothing more than generic personality and, most inexplicable, more clunky controls than the character wheel used by Bethesda in Fallout New Vegas.

 

Oh and the Companion AI is *horrible*... they run in front of you when you take a bow shot, they are hard to push out of the way when they trap you in a corner or block a doorway and the accursed dog 'companion' pushes against you constantly and nudged me off a cliff once. I am sure mod makes will make *vastly* better companions than the vanilla ones (such as the staggeringly awesome 'Willow' mod for Fallout: New Vegas) but in such a detailed, immersion intensive game, this trivialisation of NPC companions is a strange design decision.

 

So I like this game and, yes, it *is* buggy, but with anything this big that is inevitable. Bethesda will fix it eventually and compared to Fallout 3/NV, it seems a bit less bug riddled. That said, I suddenly CTD with no error message at least once an hour. Oh well.

 

7/10... would be 8/10 if companions were not so completely uninteresting

[Almeida]

Your dog companion nudged you off a cliff? That's it, I knew it! All the companions are sociopaths.

[siviz4]

While I agree the companions suck, they're not something that's forced upon you (and personally I'd prefer playing without them even if they were well made) but rather a side feature. I think you're giving that feature way too much attention. About the character control... It wasn't Bethesda who made New Vegas, they merely distributed it. Obsidian developed it.

[Uzibeatle]

While I agree the companions suck, they're not something that's forced upon you (and personally I'd prefer playing without them even if they were well made) but rather a side feature. I think you're giving that feature way too much attention. About the character control... It wasn't Bethesda who made New Vegas, they merely distributed it. Obsidian developed it.

 

 

you know I"m glad you reminded me. I had forgot about Obsidian. Damn.

 

Now I guess we know why companions in this game have taken 3 steps back from what we saw in Fallout New Vegas.

 

I stand corrected.

Well, here is to hoping the tools in this game exist so that modders can give us companions that we enjoyed in FNV, which

is what I was hoping for here. I too was and am a Willow and Wendy fan and am finding the companions in this

game so dull and morose. I am having withdrawal symptoms.

 

I can always go back to FNV and I may well do that and shelve Skyrim for six months until mods are available to make

the game what it should be!

 

Course I knew that when I bought it so this is not a complaint so much as a observation.