The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review (Cassie Clicks Heads)
Bad game. Strips away everything that made the series fun, interesting, and unique in favor of appealing to the lowest common denominator. Magic is a barren wasteland. Every build eventually ends up the same. The world is built around fast travel and isn't fun to explore at all as a result. Every dungeon has the same dumb puzzle that is so simple a glue-guzzling toddler with crayons stuck up their nose could solve it. Not to mention they're filled with the same enemy - Draugr. No variety, no spice of life.
The real damning bad stuff, however, comes with the faction questlines. I have never experienced more underwhelming, poorly written faction quests. You fast track to the top of all of them regardless of if you're even good at what the guild is about. You don't have to be good at thieving and skulduggery to go through the thievs guild, you don't have to be good at assassinations or stealth for the brotherhood, you don't need magic to become the archmage. It all funnels into the developers cowardly desire to make everything playable by one character because they don't want any player to miss any content. Long gone are the days of interesting branching quests and replayability. This game wants you to play the same character forever. It wants you to do every questline regardless of whether or not it makes sense. And none of the guilds can overlap in any interesting ways because of it. It makes the game world feel like an amusement park where you hop ride to ride rather than being an actual consistent character within a consistent world.
The people who made the game defend this as the players making their own stories, however, this is a lie. They don't want us making our own stories. They refuse to let us. Exhibit A: Ulfric Stormcloak being marked as essential and unkillable as he is essential to the quest "Assassinate Ulfric Stormcloak". The game is filled with this railroading garbage because the people behind this game haven't the same skills as the minds behind Morrowind or New Vegas. Your choices are meaningless because they have already decided what your story is. Even choices like Stormcloak or Imperial make no difference on the game. It simply changes the uniform the enemy is wearing. Instead of having an actual interesting storyline for both factions with different missions and objectives they are effectively identical. Because god forbid a player doesn't experience every ounce of content the game has to offer in one playthrough.
In short, the game betrays it's legacy, treats it's world as an amusement park, the faction questlines are not only horrifically written but also don't require you to even be good at what the faction is about, the dungeons are filled with the same tedious enemy a thousand times over and filled with the same baby puzzle in each and every one, and magic has been completely gutted from the game to the point it might as well not be there at all. The developers try to push this as player freedom and choice, yet they seem dead set on streamlining everything so that any character can do any quest, any faction, and no matter which side they choose get the same quests. This completely flies in the face of player freedom and choice since it's ultimately the same no matter what build you choose, what character you make, what sides you choose, etc.