I have two reviews to write. The 1st is of Skyrim. The second is of Starwars: The Old Republic. Both are hard to write for reasons that are quite opposite each other.
The Skyrim review is a little difficult, as a sandbox game is always difficult. The level of experiences quite out weigh the time I have to spend on it. The Starwars MMO review is difficult because my critique of it is rather harsh. Overall it seems to be getting good marks, but for me it lost it's grandeur.
I'm giving myself a little bit of time to write these out, but I wanted to poke my head on here to say this:
I was quite disappointed with Starwars: The Old Republic. From my experience with the beta to release, my concerns were left unaddressed, which is a shame. The story-lines were great. The voice acting superb. The writing, brilliant. Though that's nothing new from bioware. The problems I had were things beyond that. The gameplay was..well...grinding. The quests were still what you find in any MMO. Beyond the story-lines and dialog, your not left with much. Really, if you re-textured all the meshes, it could be any generic upstart MMO. I felt disenfranchised about the whole thing. Like they had an opportunity to do something really unique and special, and, well, didn't.
Take for instance, the race choices. Hard core Starwars fans argued with me about this, but they can't see beyond the names and titles to see meshes and textures, skins and rigs. But what it boiled down too, was that everybody playes the same mesh. The texture may have different colors, like blue skin, or red skin. It might have some additional mesh components, like tiny horns or sunglasses or a couple of tentacles, but in the end of the day EVERYBODY IS HUMAN. Which is funny that they give around 8 or more names for the same human mesh. Blue human, Red human, Spikey nub headed human, tattoo and piercings human, Sunglasses man (The sunglasses show that he's a robot! Apparently Starwars has never herd of "Oakley"), blindfold man, tentacle head man, and that's pretty much your options.
One of the saddest "race" options I found was cyborg. When you think "Cyborg" you think some melting face terminator crap. Asymmetrical menagerie of flesh and metal. Pieces of skin missing, shiny areas poking through the holes, pipes, tubing, and a kitchen sink tap all hanging out in various unseemly places. In Starwars: The Old Republic, "Cyborg" means wearing sunglasses and a double microphone blue-tooth headset (You know, cause 2 microphones are better than one with the cell reception the empire gets theses days).
I felt a little betrayed by it all. Half the fun of Starwars is all the interesting aliens running about. Here, they chose the most boring ones, the easy "Same mesh, just throw on a bunch of re-textures and call it good" route, and it shows...badly. Even worse, they give some classes different racial companions that are far superior in detail and have unique and interesting meshes as if to say "Ha! look what you get to run around with, and never customize or "be". Hell, at least galaxies tried to make bothans a playable race. (As a side note: If Starwars: The Old Republic makes that trandoshan model a playable race, I will eat my words, and buy at least a month of subscription).
As for Skyrim: Fluttershy says "FUS RO DAH!"
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