Rating: 
Summary: Make the Jump from FPS to RPG
Review: This review is written from the point of view of the many first person shooter (FPS) fans who haven't gotten into RPGs due to a dislike of the traditional isometric graphics and party-driven gameplay used by most RPGs.I decided to give Morrowind a try after having enjoyed the RPG-ish FPS games System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, but having disliked the isometric and party-driven Baldur's Gate 2. In Morrowind, the first-person perspective provides a familiar control scheme to the FPS gamer yet the freedom of movement and depth of interactivity of an RPG is available as well. The combination is a powerful gaming experience in Morrowind, much more so than even Deus Ex or System Shock 2. While there are no guns to fire, your character's ability to throw flame balls and wield a mighty sword provide a satisfying offensive capability. The typical FPS gameplay of unlock door, kill, find key, unlock door, repeat is broadened significantly in this game. You can 'leave the rails' and explore the world, stop to admire the view of the twin moons in the night time sky (complete with changing moon phases), go for a swim or arrange your latest treasures for display in your own house. Your character begins the game pathetically weak, unable to kill the simplest crab or fish without a struggle. In time, though, this shortcoming becomes a strength of the game as you grow to appreciate the progress you've made as a combatant. Some of the enemies you encounter are more advanced as the game unfolds, but the number of spells your character learns and your ability to use them increases as well, keeping the game fresh and challenging. The graphics are superb, employing programmable pixel shading for the excellent water effects for example, but even on my Athlon XP 1700+ / GF4Ti4200 system the framerate can bog down at times. The sound effects are adequate, but the beautiful score could easily pass as a late 19-th century Romantic symphony. There is no party to control, so you can concentrate on your character as an individual in combat. Combined with the rather flat NPCs, however, this can make Morrowind feel a bit lonely at times. Still, for the FPS gamer who longs for more in-depth gameplay without sacrificing graphical quality, Morrowind is an excellent choice.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Morrowind certainly makes a good first impression. The first few hours with this game were great fun as I set about exploring the world and discovering my options. But as time went on, I found at that Morrowind has a few fatal flaws that really detracted from the game's enjoyment. One of the problems is that controlling your character is very awkward. I got really tired of having to hold down two separate keys just to be able to walk and sneak at the same time. There is no auto-walk or auto-run key, so you have to keep pressing a key the entire time you're moving. As you move between points A and B, there usually isn't much to do other than look at the scenery, so an auto-run option would have made things much less tedious. Inventory control is a nightmare. The game simply drops things into a small window and you're given no choice as to how it is organized. Sooner or later, you end up scrolling through hundreds of tiny icons, looking for one particular thing. The combat system in Morrowind is one of the weakest I've ever seen. You're given no feedback as to how you're doing. You just keep whacking at creatures and hope that they eventually fall down dead. This isn't a huge problem though, because everything in Morrowind is easily defeated by the time you reach level 12-15. That's on your first character. Once you've figured out the game, a rerolled level 3 or 4 character can be god-like. Morrowind's biggest failure though is that there is absolutely no game balance and it quickly becomes too easy. When you create a character, you're given choices as to major, minor, and misc. skills. It became obvious that it makes no difference what skills you choose because the options to use every skill are there in the game and well within the rules. It is possible, even easy, to raise ALL of your skills to the maximum. You can level endlessly and effortlessly simply by paying for training, which is inexpensive. Money in the game is easy enough to come by because you can take or steal practically anything in the game and sell it. Selling items can be time consuming and boring because the merchants don't have much available cash, but it's still easy to make a huge amount of money with almost no effort. Incredibly powerful and expensive items are strewn throughout the game and are often totally unguarded. If one of your skills is weak you can still make use of it by purchasing potions or scrolls, which give you the same effects as almost every skill and spell in the game. The overpowered "enchantment" (in which you need have no skill because it can be purchased) lets you craft powerful items that are way beyond your spellcasting abilities. As long as you've purchased the spell you want to use to enchant an item, it doesn't matter whether you can actually cast it or not. If this were a multiplayer game, mages might be throwing up their hands and wailing at the unfairness of it all, except that in Morrowind, even a mage can wear the heaviest armor and use the most powerful weapons with no problem. There are lots of quests in Morrowind, but almost all of them are a variation of "Ask NPC for a quest, go to a particular area, get the item or kill the person, and return to the NPC". In most cases, I ended up feeling like an overdressed errand-boy or a thug.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent RPG.
Review: I didn't experience any problems at all while running this game. Many people have reported crashing and bad frame rates but I haven't seen any crashes (except one, but that was because Norton Antivirus started running in the background) and little slowdown, even with visibility on high. It has to pause every so often to load but that is understandable with a game this size. I am running a P4 2.0 Ghz, 256MB RAM, GeForce 3. I expected it to have horrible framerates, but I was wrong. I definitely recommend this game if you have a strong enough system.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the money
Review: Reviewed on 1Ghz P3 256Meg ATI Rage 128 video - all at or above recommended hardware. This is an open ended RPG game meaning there is no well defined plot. It is large, but sparsely populated with anything interesting. You spend most of your time walking around either at either a slow or very slow pace. Graphics are very much like Heretic II except they run VERY slowly (around 5-6 fps). Collisions and crashes are very common. Fortunately quicksave is fast. Sound is good and some of the weather special effects are good too. The user interface is abysmal - two examples.
1. There are 9 seperate steps required to open a locked door with a lockpick. You know the door is locked, you know I have a lockpick, why can't you assume I'm going to use it when I click on the door?????
2. The same button (space) is used to talk to a person and to take an object. At one point instead of talking to someone I accidently took the vase in front of them and got attacked by everyone in the room as a thief! Stupid design! You'll run into a large number of NPCs in this game who are uniformly and identically rude event when you're doing them a favor. It's boring and annoying. In summary, this game is like writing your Phd thesis during a thunderstorm. Rather tedious and you'll want to save your work frequently. Buy Serious Sam II instead. It's half the price and twice the fun!
Rating: 
Summary: ... robbed a govenor!!
Review: simply put this is the most free roaming game ive ever played. ive only invested a couple of hours and ime hooked!!! you can do anything you want!!! however a few things made me detract a star. the map is pretty bad and could have used more time. also some of the orders given by guilds and the like are sketchy. and finally its hard to murder someone without them finding out
Rating: 
Summary: Personal Dissapointment
Review: The graphics are impressive, however, when interacting with other characters a window pops up and you basically have to read and click as a means for interaction. There is a main window with text that represents the response of the character you are interacting with, and on the right there are headings that read rumors, where are you from, etc... I find this interaction to be totally archaic so I was totally unimpressed by this gameplay. Also, after you have clicked on all of the options on how to communicate with the character and you click on goodbye, as you are leaving the character will say, "Can I help you", or something to that affect. Didn't I just exhaust every question with this guy? What else do I need to speak about? Also, the fighting in this game is really dissapointing. You hit then he hits, you hit then he hits...get the point? Yawn.... I believe this game would have been the greatest game ever made if it came out ten years ago. Definately try before you buy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Game
Review: I wasn't expecting much from this game at first and then I started playing it. I was utterly amazed at the graphics in the game and the gameplay itself is addictive, making you lose track of time quickly. I'd recommend this game to anybody who likes roleplaying. It isn't Dungeons & Dragons, but I believe the system they used is much more realistic for computer gaming.
Rating:
Summary: Good Concept, Bad Execution
Review: This game starts out making a good first impression, then rapidly begins to pale. It has 3 strong points.
1)Excellent character creation system. 100% flexible and personalizeable. You can make a character that can do ANYTHING. With variables like 8 races, 30+ skills, and 12 birth signs (really effect game), you can tailor your character to your preferences.
2)Impressively varied graphics. They will blow you away.
3)HUGE game world. Hundreds of NPC's, over two hundred quests available, maybe fifty dungeons.
These draw you into the game very quickly, making it fun to play... for a while. However, you quickly become aware of it's flaws.
1)It's Buggy and requires a high end system. The PC version is pretty buggy, causing crashes with some regularity. It's been out for a month and no patch has addressed this. I have a system thats a little old (900 mhz, 320 megs ram, 32 meg video card) and I had to drop the video settings to the second lowest level to get a manageable framerate.
2)The world is fraught with cheats. There are no less than a half dozen easy ways to increase your character's power, fully within the games rules. Two of the easiest: to increase defensive skills, find a mudcrab (very weak), and let it attack you for a while. Skills increase when they are used. After doing this four or five times, your AC and shield skill will have increased quite a bit. #2, use the mages guild teleporters to jump you to a few different cities. Shop around a little. You will quickly find powerful, cheaply priced magic items. There are also two skills that will give you limitless gold (which you can use to improve your character). And many other ways you can increase your character.
3)This is what really turned me off to the game. There are many quests you can pursue. Here's the problem. Almost all of them involve you trying to find something/one and kill/get it. As I mentioned, the gameworld is huge, and the directions are usually something like "NE of town Y" or "In the worker's quarter". After spending hours on one quest trying to find my target and then hours on another quest, I grew tired of easter egg hunting.
If your tolerance for hunting is higher than mine, you may enjoy this game.
I got bored with trying to find my objectives very quickly.
Rating:
Summary: An epic RPG in depth and design.
Review: This game is truly a tribute to the spirit of the RPG genera.
This has to be one of the greatest video game experiences ever created. It honestly feels like your entering an online persistent world. The level of detail, and depth this game delivers is amazing. Every time I sit down to play this game it actually feels like and adventure. If you enjoy open ended challenging game play this would be a perfect fit.
I would say this is not for the instant gratification crowd. The story and game play offered by this title is incredibly rich and immersive. This is a tribute to the spirit of the RPG genera.
Rating:
Summary: Ok game... until you realize how easy it is...
Review: There are a lot of things about this game that are good... the character generation, the graphics, the scope, and the freedom to explore how you want to. After playing for about 20 hours, I would rate it fairly well except for one thing. I have realized that I will eventually become invincible and the game will become pointless.
This is due to the ability to enchant items. At first, this seemed like a great concept. You can enchant just about anything with any spell you want. Unfortunately, I can see a time not too far off where these enchantments will make my character into more of a God than a man. The only obstacle is getting enough money to pay enchanters to make the items. For those who have not played, it is pointless to go into the specific details.
Therefore, this is a game of only two parts. First, you run around getting enough money to enchant items. Then, once you are invincible, you finish the game.
That being said, it is still a revolutionary game. I give three stars for that.
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