At this point, this review feels a little unnecessary. A month after launch, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has blown past everyone’s expectations, shattered sales records (even beating out Modern Warfare 3 in the UK) and done a pretty bang-up job of scooping up award after award. Five long years after the middling-to-pretty-good Oblivion, Todd Howard and his army of world-building wunderkinds have managed to deliver a sequel that improves vastly on everything its predecessor got wrong. It’s immersive, incredibly in-depth, and one of the finest games to come out this year.
If that minor paragraph didn’t seal the deal for the four people who haven’t played Skyrim yet, let’s dig into this with a more in-depth review.