Recent reviews by Zyxtomatic

It's good.

I was never quite into the main game, as I always felt lost and unsure of what to do. The Expeditions, however, changed all that, and they are fantastic. I can't stop playing!

Great story, great characters, great voice acting, great writing, great environments.

You get to be a student at Hogwarts and zap people with spells. What's not to like?

Amazing story, setting, and music. Very powerful.

Incredible visuals and sound, great soundtrack, amazing world setting, super fun sidescroller gameplay that's not too difficult but still challenging enough to be fun, and a very intriguing story told with no dialog.

My young kids (4 and 8) sat with me and watched while I played this on our big TV, and they loved it.

My young kids and I have been really enjoying the puzzles and challenges.

I played through this game once on the Xbox 360, and then played through twice on the PC while modding it to ridiculous levels. Between the console and PC versions, I don't even know how many hundreds of hours I have in it. It's one of the most immersive games I've played in my long gaming career, and I often find myself involuntarily comparing other games to Skyrim.

The size of the world is huge, and you can spend countless hours just adventuring and finding what's out there, regardless of any quests. Just point yourself in a direction and go!

The music is well done and worth listening to on its own. There have been a few times I've been streaming classical stations on Pandora or Spotify and suddenly heard a Skyrim track come on. Great stuff!

The graphics were amazing when it was released in 2011, but they have since aged as expected. However, the nearly limitless amount of available graphical improvement mods brings it right back to current standards and beyond. It can easily be made to make the fastest GPUs cry for mercy if you want to mod it that far.

It's not perfect, of course. Just like any game, it has its flaws. The voice acting is okay, but not great. There seems to have only been a small number of voice actors spread out among a huge number of NPCs in the game, so there is a lot of voice actor repetition. Additionally, while the main quest line is good, and the class-specific quests are good, many of the optional, small side-quests turn out to be mostly fetch quests. Those side quests aren't terrible, and they do provide an opportunity to see more of the world, but they aren't memorable.

Overall, if you enjoy big, open-world RPG/adventure games, Skyrim is absolutely one of the best, genre-defining examples.

If you also enjoy modding and tweaking your games, Skyrim will consume you. You've been warned!