"Sounds good... but horrible content."

When talking about this game, one might often hear the remarks "totally free!" and "You can do anything you want!" That is far from the truth. The game is quite average at BEST.

Graphics: This is the best feature of the game. The landscape and texturing is absolutely beautiful, and the sky looks amazing. The water effects are especially good. (though you can hardly see anything underwater without some light spells) The armor and weapons also look extremely detailed, and you'll be able to see nearly every piece of equipment you wear (except belts, amulets, rings and etc). However, the character faces are absolutely dreadful, as people as simply uglier than a dead grandparent. 8/10

Sound: The music is pretty good. It often fits the atmosphere, and traveling with the main title theme is a delight. Jeremy Soule is a great composer. The sound effects themselves are ok, but it got on my nerves several times. The magic sound effects are especially repeatitive. 7/10

Story: The storyline by itself is interesting, but cliche. Basically you are some prophesized guy who needs to kill a big baddie. Not very original, but with TONS of backstory. One of the good things in the game is it's huge history. There are literally hundreds of books in the game talking about the world and its people. Though they are usually pretty boring. (and the little novels spread throught the game aren't especially good either.. but may provide some interest) The problem is, the presentation of the story is ABSOLUTELY awful. There isn't much in the game to make you actually CARE about the story. There isn't a SINGLE interesting character in the game, except for a few comic reliefs here or there, who have very few lines anyways. The dialogue is also dreadful. It's without emotion, without interest, and read like a bloody drone. The lack of good character responses (like BG2, Fallout and the group) doesn't help either. The lack of voice acting also serve to make the game world seem inanimate. 7.5/10

Gameplay: Now this is awful. This section is touted as Morrowind's best, but it's purely dreadful if you look at it carefully. It is claimed to be extremely "non-linear" and "Free". That is false. For one thing, there are very FEW, if AT ALL, decisions that can actually affect the game world. In fact, most of the quests you recieve are "do it this way and only this way, or not do the quest at all!" There isn't much freedom in selecting method or alignment when it comes to it. Although you can go virtually anywhere any time (with the right equipment), it doesn't help when you can't do much that you actually want. In fact, to be evil is to just randomly kill peole. That isn't fun! The good thing about being evil is to be able to do diabolical schemes and etc, not just a mass murderer. But they don't let you do it. The closest thing you get to do it is "to kill this person or let them go", or "give back the money or take it for yourself". Not much at all. There isn't even a good blackmailing session that I'm aware of! And then, there is the combat. NOBODY can claim it is good. It's UTTERLY devoid of strategy. It's just hack slash, drink potion, repeat. And it's not diablo, trust me. The combat system is totally devoid of action, just hit hit and hit. No adrenaline rush of thousands of creatures marching toward you, and you run run and shoot and etc like in Diablo. Just boredom.
Character customization is also lacking. Although there are a lot of "classes", skills and races, there is absolutely no restriction on them. This means ANYBODY can max out in ANY skill. This absolutely takes away the uniqueness in the characters. To make matters worse, the dungeons and quests are ABSOLUTELY painful. The dungeons, unlike Daggerfall and Arena, who were so long, so maze-like and so frustrating, this time will be the shortest you've ever seen, with absolutely NOTHING of interest. The dungeons are more bland than something my kid brother made, as it's just a bunch of corridors with enemies in it. NOTHING else. No special features, no interesting puzzles, nothing. And the quests... how many "kill that" or "fetch that" quests can YOU suffer? Because this game has more of these quests than you can imagine. And these quests don't even TRY to be interesting. Not like PS:T, BG2 and whatever. They're just fetch and/or kill. And this game has one of the worst kind of quests in history: "follow" quests. You see, many times in the game, people will ask to tag along with you. The problem? They are slow as hell, EXTREMELY easy to lose when running, and get stuck behind objects more times than you can say "*$^%" . And they usually go around with you for a LONG distance. And some of them are REQUIRED.

In conclusion, this game is just awful. Bad presentation of story, no intereting characters, and just abysmal gameplay. If you insist on buying it, be sure to get the various mods online. Some of them can make the experience MUCH more tolerable.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/05