After over 5 years of silence I have decided to login to leave my own review of Skyrim. Due to the vast waves of disappointed gamers I feel compelled to leave my own opinion for those who are undecided on the game, have yet to recieve theirs and feel anticipated dread, and especially for those who are playing or will be playing Skyrm on the PC.

My rig
Windows 7 premium 64bit
3.0GHz dual processor
8192mb Ram
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT

Basic Gameplay, atmosphere, and the engine

The game works brilliantly, it's well optimized, I noticed nothing that was graphically poor and I'm playing on medium settings, and I've experienced no slow framerate whatsoever. The world is gorgeous and beautifully crafted, the dungeons are deep and plentiful, filled with eye-candy, traps and puzzles and very good loot! One thing that I hate about sandbox RPG's (and something I disliked about Oblivion) was the repeated tilesets, the same caves and grey walls with a few random skeletons and mushrooms with pathetic traps. This is totally gone in Skyrim, I found myself triggering spiked walls, healing myself, then stepping on the same trigger moments later!!

I saw someone on here yesterday asking about the loot in Skyrim, it's much more rewarding, you'll find tough creatures guarding special loot chests at the end of dungeons rather than an iron dagger. You won't feel the need to pick up everything just so you can make some money, there is more balance in the economy!! Especially now that you can work for gold with crafting.

Crafting

I love this feature, you can upgrade weapons and armour and craft new ones, turn skins into useful materials and then turn those materials into other materials! It's like my favourite RPG series (Gothic) has been melded into The Elder Scrolls and I love it

The UI and PC controls

This has recieved controversy among many pc players. It's true, the influence of the console shows slightly, it took me 2 hours to get used to the interface and find my way around, but afterwards, no problems, no mouse or keyboard problems, everything is where I feel it should be, no gamepad needed for me at all, the mouse and keyboard combo it absolutely fine, the interface is alot more streamlined than previous games and I have no problems not being able to see my character when I equip new items, I can just exit and view them in 3rd person anyway so I don't see what the problem is. The new feature where you can view the items is wonderful.

Combat

The Elderscrolls has never been one for amazing combat. Skyrim is the best it's ever been! Magic effects are awesome looking and devestating, I always wanted to be a mage in the previous games but I hated the look and feel of magic in previous ElderScrolls games, now it's AWESOME. The finishing moves are great and brutal, but it's still something that needs work on in the future in regards to melee and archery, but definitely a step in the right direction. One thing that does irk me in paticular however is not being able to block when you have magic equipped and a weapon equipped, not a big problem and one I can certainly live with but it's a bit unusual, perhaps blocking at a disadvantage would have been better. However, because Bethesda have finally gotten ridden of dead npcs that jump into the air and float down like wobbly feathers I'll let that one slide

NPCs, Quests

I've barely done any because I'm still getting my footing in the land of Skyirm but the ones I have done are awesome. The voice acting is mostly excellent and being a musician myself I love the bardic songs!! The variety of voices is fantastic and scores massive points from me but some of the voice acting does feel very scripted, you can tell some of them were just reading the script rather than getting into the characters and spirit of the game. There are plenty of NPC's scattered of Skyrim and the world feels more alive, hunters and bandits, merchants and farmers, guild members and creatures scatter the lands going about their lives.

The bad stuff

There is plenty I would love to see in Skyrim or the next Elder Scrolls game but that's all it is, a game, and I don't expect something amazing to tick everything on my list, no game will ever do that and no-one should set their expectations so high.
The one bad thing in paticular about Skyrim wasn't the UI, the graphics, the controls or even the combat. It was the start of the game that I really didn't like, there is no background lore presented to you and no date given. you only know you were in the wrong place at the wrong time crossing the border. Had I not been a fan since daggerfall and had I not read lots of lore I wouldn't have a clue where I was in the game or timeline. The tutorial is a bit poor aswell, the game is easy enough for me to figure out for myself, I'm used to that in games and it's fairly logical. But for someone new to the genre or series, it could be a nightmare.

All in all, Skyrim gets 9/10 from me!