The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim is a game about an ancient evil, a civil war, and mighty Nord heroes. It’s also a game about stealing people’s pants while they’re wearing them, punching bears in the face, and performing unspeakable acts of necromancy on adorable bunny rabbits.

Really, Skyrim is whatever you want it to be, and it’s fantastic.

If you’ve played any of the previous Elder Scrolls games, you already know what you’re in for. You'll get an epic primary campaign and several other fully fleshed-out quest lines; a robust character creation system; and as always, there are more swords, sorcery, lore and freedom than you can shake a Wabbajack at.

Pretty much every aspect of the game has been tweaked or improved since the previous title in the series, 2006’s Oblivion. The eponymous province of Skyrim is a lot more varied and interesting than Oblivion’s Cyrodiil. Skyrim may not be the most technically impressive game out at the moment graphics-wise, but it is still a beautiful place to wander around - watching a dragon lazily circle a cloudy mountain top can be a breathtaking sight indeed. The character models have more polish than last time around: they look a lot more like actual people and a lot less like they went through a gene-splicer with a potato.

You play as the Dovahkiin, or Dragonborn, a mortal born with the soul of a dragon. Not only is this a sweet pickup line to use on members of the opposite sex in taverns, it also means you can slay a dragon and absorb its soul to gain access to powerful dragon shouts (which we’ll get to later). Plus, your destiny is directly tied to the return of the dragons, who have apparently all been on vacation for thousands of years. It’s an epic and fun adventure to play through, but if you’re not the ‘save the world’ type, there are plenty of other things to do instead.

You can join up with the Companions, for example. They're a rag-tag group of mercenaries whose hobbies include punching bad guys in the face, stabbing bad guys in the face and - let's face it - pretty much anything violent that involves enemy faces. If you're magically inclined, there’s the College of Winterhold, where you’ll study ancient magical devices and blow people up with finger-lightning. Light-fingered types may find the Thieves Guild handy if picking locks and pilfering gold is more your style, while the murderous Dark Brotherhood caters to Dexter fans. If none of these sound appealing, you’re also free to pick sides in the civil war between the Imperial and Stormcloak factions.

You'll be drowning in excellent content, and that's even before you include the various quests given to you by the demonic Daedric Lords, or the myriad of other unrelated quest lines in the game. Skyrim also randomly generates simple missions, so you’ll never run out of things to do. Of course, you can just ignore all of that if you like, and run around the forest picking flowers, catching butterflies and befriending deer - we’ve probably spent several hours doing just that, and enjoyed every second of it.

Combat in Skyrim is relatively simple. On the Xbox 360 version of the game, the left trigger corresponds to your left hand, the right trigger to your right hand, and the right bumper is used for additional powers and Dragon Shouts. You are free to place any spell or weapon in either hand - for instance, you could be wielding a pair of daggers, a sword in one hand and a firebolt spell in the other, or an axe and shield. Some weapons take two hands, such as great swords and bows, and there are perks you can unlock on level up which allow you to power up a spell if you using the same one in in each hand. Using a physical attack drains your stamina, and using a spell costs magicka. Each playable race also has it's own 'Power' - an ability that you can use once a day and has useful effects such as regenerating your health and scaring off enemies. You can unlock additional Powers by completing certain quests.

Dragon Shouts are powerful spells made up of three words each, which can also be mapped to the ‘powers’ button. To unlock each word of a Shout, you have to first find the word and then unlock it using the soul of a slain dragon. Words are inscribed on one of the large ornate word walls that are scattered around Skyrim in dungeons and on mountain tops. The more words you unlock for a particular Shout, the more powerful the Shout gets. The first shout you are likely to get, Unrelenting Force, starts off relatively weak and only allows you to knock an enemy off balance. With two words, it can knock back several enemies a short distance; and once it has reached full power you can quite easily send a giant cartwheeling brutally, and hilariously, off a cliff. Keep at it and in no time at all you’ll be shouting “FUS RO DAH” at slow-walkers in your local mall. This isn’t appropriate behaviour, but you’ll probably forget what's appropriate (and that the words won't work) when Skyrim sucks you in and turns you into a lonely-yet-content social recluse.

Despite the many great things about Skyrim , a few areas don’t shine so brightly - the most obvious being the glitches that plague the game. Most of them are forgivable, such as minor graphical mishaps and the odd backwards-flying dragon, and some are just straight up awesome - getting thumped by a giant will occasionally send you flying into the stratosphere at the speed of sound - but there are several game-breaking issues. I ran into several, the worst of which completely broke the main quest line and the civil war storyline. I had to talk to two characters - one for each quest. The first guy wouldn’t talk to me, and suggested I talk to the second guy, and vice versa. And I couldn’t just flip out and kill them both: they were invincible due to their importance to the quest line. Goodness knows I tried, though. Jerks.

At the end of the day, everything that’s great about Skyrim far outweighs the bad - it’s one of those rare gems that manages to live up to the hype. It may not have been the most polished game of 2011, but in my eyes it was certainly the best. If you haven’t already, get it - it’ll keep you busy for months to come, and besides, you pretty much need it to understand half of the internet right now. Don’t you want to find out if someone really stole your sweet-roll? Or the significance of knee injuries caused by arrows? Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go strip down to my loincloth, enlist a zombie-goat to join my cause, and then go beat a sabre-tooth cat to death with my bare hands. Because I can. And that alone is enough to earn Skyrim a perfect score.