Oblivion is the quintessential role-playing game of its time. After the mysterious and untimely death of the Emperor, the throne of Tamriel lies empty. With the Empire ready to crumble, the gates of Oblivion open and demons march upon the land-laying waste to everything in their path. To turn the tide of darkness, you must find the lost heir to the throne and unravel the sinister plot that threatens to destroy all of Tamriel.
GenreRole-Playing
Platforms xbox360
DEVELOPER Bathesda | PUBLISHER Codemasters | RELEASE DATE
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Reviews xbox360
eurogamer.net review
The overwhelming thing about Oblivion isn’t knowing where to start, but when to stop. It’s an adventure game in the purest sense of the word in its effortless capacity to give the player a seemingly infinite wealth of possibilities – full of intrigue, excitement, risk, reward and this continual sense of the unknown.
Read Full Review
thunderboltgames.com review
There are niggly bugs and exploits uncovered during the course of gameplay, but handy downloads from Live seem to have fixed these up, as well as introducing horse armour into the game for your trusty stead on those long voyages, but otherwise you’re looking at the prime example to own the Xbox 360. We love GRAW and we’re mastering PGR3, but Oblivion beats them both to the coveted top spot of must-have 360 games.
Read Full Review
gamesradar.com review
When this game came out it musta been a freakin revolution. for anybody who thinks games need multiplayer to have value, I’ve put in 130 hours into this game and have yet to finish the main quest (ok, so I’ve been ignoring the main quest). That’s more than Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, Uncharted 2, and all of the Battlefield games I’ve ever played combined. It’s absolutely amazing (and a steal used at Gamestop, $26 GOTY edition)
Read Full Review
gamechronicles.com review
Character design is beyond words. Each NPC is expertly modeled and animated with wonderful detail. Sure, a few of the guardsmen will start to look like they came off the same cookie cutter, but anybody who matters (and there are thousands of them) all look amazing, and they all aren’t human. Some of your best friends might just be an Orc or a creepy (but cool) lizard guy.
Read Full Review
extremegamer.ca review
Oblivion also features upgrades besides the new combat system. Your character is more customizable then before featuring full face molding controls and an updated character skills and abilities. There are total of ten races that each have their own unique statistics and abilities (4 human, 3 elf, 3 creature classes). The NPC AI has also been retooled into the new Radiant AI which gives each character their own agenda, and lets them have more interactions with other NPCs. You can now eves drop conversations and gain clues, as well as talk to every in game character that isn’t an evil beast. The Radiant AI isn’t totally perfect and you will hear some of the same dialog lines often, but giving its only a game, they have stepped up the NPCs considerable from Morrowind.
Read Full Review
computerandvideogames.com review
That was a single moment described there, redolent with connections to other tales and immensely complicated in itself. Simply put, Oblivion is a game where the story never ends. The story of your exploits in any other game would have natural gaps, but here you can just keep telling it, with every yarn feeding logically into the next.
Read Full Review
g4tv.com review
Oblivion has been getting plenty of press thanks to its cutting-edge graphics, and screen shots just don’t do the game justice. The visuals are nothing short of stunning. The landscapes are beautiful, the cities are incredible, and the detail of the diverse characters you’ll meet it astounding. The audio is just as good, with a dramatic score, top-notch voice acting, and an immersive Dolby Digital 5.1 mix.
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk review
The latest incarnation of The Elder Scrolls is an epic, not only because the immaculate world you inhabit is so immense, but also because the gameplay is fantastically intense. In this instalment, the emperor has died and the land of Temriel is in chaos, infested with demons. Temriel can be saved only if the lost heir to the throne is tracked down and the monarchy restored. Here, the gameplay is not rigidly linear and players have complete, exhilarating freedom to explore this universe any way they choose.
Read Full Review
avclub.com review
The latest in a role-playing series known for its depth, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion isn’t so much a game as it is a lifestyle choice, like getting married or having children. Just designing a character—a crucial process of selecting attributes based on race, custom class, astrological considerations, and detailed facial molding—could take longer than finishing, say, the Curious George video game.
Read Full Review
justadventure.com review
The overall presentation of Oblivion is top-notch. There’s great attention to detail, not only in the visuals, but in the writing. I’ve talked about the imaginative quest storylines, but there’s an added bonus for gamers who like in-game reading: There are over 400 books in the game, which provide a rich background to the lore and history of The Elder Scrolls setting of Tamriel. Reading some of these books will even provide you with skillups!
Read Full Review
gamerstemple.com review
Oblivion also departs from the traditional RPG model in that enemies and monsters are not assigned levels. As you improve, so do your enemies, ensuring a consistent level of challenge throughout the game. This system has a few consequences, the first of which is that you won’t be able to seek out weaker monsters in an attempt to beef up stats or get easy treasure. Of more import though is the slight chance that if you mismanage your character you may reach a point in the game where your enemies become too much for you to handle.
Read Full Review
cheatcc.com review
The game is narrated by Patrick Stewart. His voice is so authoritative that he could read aloud an Archie comic and make it sound like a Shakespearean tragedy. The other voiceovers fall into the "good" category with a few more natural sounding than others.
Read Full Review
worthplaying.com review
Overshadowing both of those, however, is the excellent audio that Oblivion brings to the table, which easily raises the bar for the role-playing game genre and the industry as a whole. Big names like Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean steal the marquee of the voiceover department, but the talent is far from limited to those two actors, as the voiceovers are mostly excellent across the board. It is really quite immersive when you hear a townsperson introduce himself by name, or when you hear the conversations that people can have. The sounds weaponry makes, such as the shriek of a flying arrow or the meaty clang of sword meeting shield, is a pleasure to your eardrums, while not having to read every line of dialog as you would in, well, any other game is a pleasure to your eyes.
Read Full Review
mygamer.com review
All of the above mentioned properties allows me come to this conclusion – Oblivion is a game that does so much to draw the player into its world, that it’s far more addictive than the vast majority of MMORPGs out there. Many MMORPGs promise to create a world that once you enter, you may want to leave the real world behind; Oblivion brilliantly succeeds in such a promise, and it’s not even an online game. This is proof positive that an RPG doesn’t need monthly fees to be good. However, for being such a great game, Oblivion lends itself to addiction, so only play it if you truly have the time to spare. Be sure not to forget about your real life once you get your hands on this game – you have been warned.
Read Full Review
gamingexcellence.com review
As great as Morrowind was (and it was difficult to imagine better), Oblivion is a game that does everything ten times better. It also makes playing any other game out there seem trivial. Oblivion is not just a game, it’s an experience. And where most games feature a good first level or a cool end-boss, Oblivion’s strength lies in its scope and its consistency. There has never been a game created that was so detailed or so realistic and it gives me such hope in the videogame industry when I play a title made with such integrity and care. Oblivion is without question the greatest video game I have ever played or reviewed and it’s also an experience unlike any I have ever had. The best part however, is knowing that Bethesda will eventually, much like Morrowind, make it even better.
Read Full Review
xbox360.gamezone.com review
Continuing on theme of customization, this game will let you create your own spells, potions, and even enchanting your weapons. All you have to do is find the ingredients, which you can find anywhere or even pick them yourself, and create your own concoctions. I have created some mighty powerful spells that will do multiple things. I have this one spell that with each successful strike casts fire, ice, and lighting on one enemy. Then I have nice alchemy stats that allow me to create some pretty powerful potions that will help me out when any of my health or magic levels are low.
Read Full Review
gamingtarget.com review
The map has also benefited a great deal in Oblivion over its predecessor, mainly because of the (thankfully) included “fast travel†system. Of course, much of the adventuring will still be accomplished by running around the enormous Cyrodiil landscape conventionally (or on horseback), but the ability to use a traveling system is most welcome for this edition of Elder Scrolls.
Read Full Review
gamespot.com review
Ultimately, which version you choose should depend on whether you have a high-powered PC and whether you have an Xbox 360 hooked up to a home theater. If you don’t have the former, the Xbox 360 version is a relatively safer bet, and it gains a perk over its PC counterpart by offering some unlockable achievements, enticing you both to finish the main quest and to earn your keep in all the different guilds in the game. It packs a higher retail price, though.
Read Full Review
gameshark.com review
Oblivion has what seems to be hundreds of side quests to accept and be rewarded for. They range from simple fetch quests to boldly going into goblin dens to rescue people. You’ll become everything from horticulturist to detective as you talk to people and accept their quests for the rewards it will bring you.
Read Full Review
videogamer.com review
I’ll give you an example. Say you level up your character to 12 before entering the first Oblivion gate at Kvatch. You decide to give that quest a shot, but as soon as you enter the gate you’re greeted by a group of the horribly annoying Clannfear (they seem to knock you back whether you have 100 points of Agility or not), followed by Flame Atronachs galore. If you haven’t evenly levelled up your character, especially if you’ve chosen a race or class with a natural affinity to magic, you could be in for a serious walloping. In fact, whether you want to be strictly a fighter or deal specifically in magic, it becomes apparent early on that no matter what class you are, your character stats need to be somewhat evenly distributed otherwise the game can become painstakingly hard. Thankfully Bethesda was kind enough to include a difficulty slider, so if you find yourself in a jam, you can adjust the slider accordingly. Or, if you’re still stuck, you could always move on to the hundreds of other quests.
Read Full Review
1up.com review
Much like that infamous Japanese MMORPG, Oblivion promises total freedom of character generation but fails to deliver that perfectly. In particular, some combinations of race and class abilities just aren’t as good as others — and if you try to play a straight thief, archer, fighter, or mage, you’re going to have a hard game. Be prepared to be a jack-of-all-trades, or be very frustrated.
Read Full Review
gamepro.com review
The character creation in Oblivion goes into absurd detail, so much so that it’s outside the scope of this review. Needless to say, you’re free to tweak almost every physical detail of your character, from hair color and style to facial structure and skin tone (though, oddly, there’s no way to adjust body sizes or types — maybe next time).
Read Full Review
gamecritics.com review
Aurally, Oblivion is very reminiscent of Morrowind. Composer Jeremy Soule once again handles the scoring duties and he’s recycled a lot of pieces from the previous game. This isn’t a major issue, though, because the last game’s score was excellent. There are newer pieces here as well, and they’re very classical in structure and almost understated in their execution. The music never overwhelms the action—instead, it’s content to serve as a complement to what’s happening onscreen.
Read Full Review
darkstation.com review
The days of “kill-ten-rats†and kitschy collection quests are numbered. Virtual world, hunter-gatherer existence has evolved and agriculture has once again come to the forefront of [online] civilization with the introduction of FARMING to the popular free-to-play, family-friendly virtual world game, Free Realms!
Read Full Review
gamespy.com review
No Synopsis Available
Read Full Review