Rating of
2.5/5
Lipstick Meet Pig
Chris Kavan - wrote on 11/04/26
I will preface this as I am not reviewing this based on the story or gameplay aspects but focusing mainly on the "remaster" part of the title. Oblivion is still a top-tier, open-world RPG experience with plenty to explore, lots of side-quests and things to collect. If you like wandering around killing things, making potions, leveling stats and doing the bidding of dark gods - well, you'll have a blast. I even (finally) got to play the Shivering Isles DLC and loved it! That aside, let's get into the meat of the review.
Looks and Stuff: Remasters are nothing new, from family-friendly platformers like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot to the dozen or so Last of Us releases, they are all over the place. But Remasters ARE NOT remakes - it's essentially the same game with a fresh coat of paint and probably some QOL features to make it better for modern audiences. Oblivion was groundbreaking back in 2011 but, like pretty much every Bethesda game, was full of bugs - many game-breaking in nature. I'm happy to say that at least this version got rid of those but it still doesn't fell like a modern game. For one, while I didn't encounter major bugs, the game still crashed on my more times than any other PS5 game I've played. Luckily the game has a great auto-save feature so that, at most, I lost maybe 10 minutes of gameplay, but still, I would say I had a good dozen or so, if not more, crashes during gameplay.
What's more, while the game certainly improves upon the looks, it's still not a pretty game. And the characters still all sound the same (male Nords, female kajits, etc) share the same voices and will spout the same repeated phrases. Sure, plenty of secondary quest-givers and characters have unique lines, but when a queen sounds the same as a rando shopkeeper in another town, it does break the immersion a bit. I still also hate the fact it's too easy to accidentally hit a companion during battle and then they attack you - friendly fire should not exist in a single-player game. The music is still the same as well - something I actually don't mind as some of the cues certainly bring back memories, though, once again, many are far too overused.
In the end, I was happy to return to the world of Oblivion and easily sunk 60 or so hours into it (I accidentally left the game running without shutting it down once, so an accurate tally is impossible to tell) and for first-time players this is, of course, recommended far above the original but for those looking for a remake to blow them away, it's not exactly the be-all, end-all of remasters.
