Cyrodiil's weird faces will haunt me forever, and now they've been joined in my nightmares by a selection of almost-as-weird faces from Skyrim. Verdict: FIXED Animation There's a proviso here: Skyrim has some of the best horse animation I've seen in videogames, even when they're galloping vertically up a mountain. It might not be Game of Thrones, but it's gory enough to be satisfying and fun enough to trick you into thinking you might be playing an action game even when the dice-rolls behind it all haven't changed all that much. And shooting magic out of your hands makes playing a mage more satisfying than ever. Blows can still feel a bit noncommittal at times, but at least it all looks a whole lot better.

Hammers ricochet off shields, and you can carve bandits to pieces with dual-wielded scimitars. The addition of Fallout 3-style gory finishers works wonders for the combat, as do those skill-tree perks that let you rush, crush or decapitate opponents with heavy attacks. YES NO In Skyrim, though, those thrusts and jabs and bludgeons do proper damage. In Oblivion, you'd hit it, but it would do a roundly pathetic amount of damage вЂ“ and even at high levels, hand-to-hand combat was floaty and unsatisfying. 'AVE+IT! In Morrowind, you could swing a mace at a rat thirteen times and never hit it once if your one-handed weapons skill wasn't high enough. What follows is a rundown of what Skyrim does (and doesn't) fix about Elder Scrolls games past. And Skyrim does fix a lot of the things that were wrong with Oblivion вЂ“ but not all of them.

I came to Skyrim with all these things in mind, hoping that they'd all have been bred out of the Elder Scrolls DNA. I lost about 150 hours to Oblivion, but for all of that time I couldn't help but think about what could have been better: the animation, the dialogue, the writing (which took a noticeable downturn after Morrowind). It's unmistakeably a Bethesda game, though, with all the positives and negatives that implies. Charles loved it, and he's definitely not the only one. Been playing a bit of Skyrim lately, by any chance? Seems like a few of you have.

Oblivion game of thrones