Deep breath - starting your adventure...

The emperor with his bodyguards, on a little jaunt through the prison

Right at the beginning you find yourself trapped in a tiny cell, taunted by a fellow convict from a cell across the hallway. Soon after looking around, the emperor, trying to flee with his loyal bodyguards, approaches your fetid hole and asks you to step aside, in order to get out through the secret passage that happens to have its entrance in your cell. After a brief discussion you are told that the Emperor had foreseen your future in his dreams. After this very promising prequel, the player enters a "training" dungeon, consisting of a series of levels based around a secret sewage system. This is used both as an introduction to the game, and also as an interactive character creation. You must face a number of challenges, which can all be solved by different means. The actions of the player help decide the class and the starting skills of the starting character. Appearances, racial qualities and gender can all be fine tuned. The process of altering your appearance in Oblivion may not be the most intuitive, but it allows the player to really customise the character.

Solve everything with a sword and a shield in the training dungeon and what do you become?

These oversized vermin are what you will be up against most of the time in the training dungeon

Although it is possible to change and shape the character to be something different than what you start out with, you essentially decide about how you are going to play the game from here on. This is also one of the things at which Oblivion truly shines. Whichever way you play the game, be it as a sneaky assassin or a bloodthirsty melee combatant, virtually every aspect is near perfect. The combat mechanics are surprisingly responsive, with blocking moves and special attacks, all refined beyond what we could have hoped for after the rather weak combat system in Morrowind, whilst playing as an assassin makes games such as Thief and Splinter Cell somewhat envious.

The number of skills may overwhelm the player at first but luckily every skill remains useful, so it's hard to hit a dead end with your character. Basically, whatever you do in the game will enhance some skills of your character; for example, jumping around a lot will boost your acrobatics, whilst blocking incoming blows from your enemies increases your block skill (even the less successful players get rewarded, since getting hit increases your respective armour score, depending on what kind of armour you are wearing – at the cost of some hit points and the armour's degradation of course).

A beautiful vista awaits you in Oblivion

Whilst the interiors of the training dungeon are visually quite impressive, it is only after we exit it when we realise just how stunning this game can look: lush vegetation, vast landscapes, distant ruins and the sun's reflection blinding us. From here on the player is free to explore the overwhelmingly huge game world, complete missions for various guilds after joining them, go treasure hunting, follow the main quest, become a gladiator, or just live a peaceful life somewhere hunting deer - whatever you decide to do, there is literally hundreds of hours of fun to be had.