Here’s a review of the Shivering Isles expansion pack by one of Unscripted 360’s listeners and readers.  I thought I’d share it with all of you Oblivion fans out there since I couldn’t review it myself.  The guidelines are roughly the same as I use when reviewing so I included my Rating Guide as well. 

Developer: Bethesda Softworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Screenshots: Available Here
Rating Guide: How I Review Games

Review:

Part of what makes Oblivion so great is the power of personal choice given to the players to control their own game experience. These choices impact almost every aspect of the experience. It first starts with the creation of your character and choice of its birth sign. These options impact the skillset your character will possess from that point on. Additionally, you are also offered the option of selecting your class of character, which also impacts how it will develop. For the purposes of clarification, my main Oblivion character is a Norde, birth sign Warrior, class Knight. Essentially, what this means is my character is set up as a good (as in non-evil) brute force, melee combat person that attacks fast, loud, hard and manually.  There is little ability to use magic, stealth or engage in criminal activity. Based on that, my experience may differ considerably from what you may discover. It is important to note that as I review this I am speaking mainly from my own experience and you could likely find your gameplay different.

Gameplay, Graphics and Sound

After downloading the slightly under 1GB expansion I had the feeling things were really going to be different and that became evident quite quickly. I had spent the few days prior to release going back developing and preparing my character for his new adventures. That really paid off in terms of getting items arranged and skills tweaked. It also helped to re-learn the controls. The first thing you’ll notice is that after you launch Oblivion, after Shivering Isles is downloaded, is the new Bethesda logo followed by a rather significant delay in “loading additional content” at the start screen. Once in, I loaded my last game save as usual and I was back in Skingard where I was before. I walked outside and immediately wondered where the Shivering Isles were and how to get to them. They did not show up on the map. After about 5 minutes suddenly and without cue, a new quest popped up and location was discovered. I proceeded to the nearest waypoint and traveled the remaining distance to the portal.

After completing what seemed like a Matrix-type entry process, I was on my way. Lots of new things to see hits you right off the bat. New textures, items, plants, people and monsters greet you. After the first significant test in the new land I noticed how much more difficult the monsters would be here. I was taking damage that rarely happened to me before but I welcomed it as new and different. You then are presented your first task in the main questline. I suggest proceeding directly to it as I spent time clearing dungeons only to find out I would have to do them again as part of the quests. The people all seem a little expectedly crazy and the main character comes off as something of a faux-Scottish (think of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers) type. You have been given access to a helper that you can summon anytime for information.  He is quite useful at times. New weapons and armor are to be found (or created) and depending on what you use now, they may or may not be an improvement.

Generally I found my tried and true weapon (Umbra sword) continued to work best even better than the advertised new swords found in Shivering Isles. That was a disappointment. I was pleased that the new way of creating items (remember this is the spoiler-free version) produced a suit of armor that was superior to the Imperial Dragon items I was using since completing the main questline of the original. New ingredients were nice to see but not terribly useful for me. There are many new spells of which you are given for free while progressing in the questline.

Overall you will find that much is different yet there is a comfort and familiarity and bond with your character that is reassuring as you play.  The quests are new and quite different. I do have to say though they seem like they lack substance. Several seemed more like idle busy-work than real adventuring.  Lots of walking around (no horses to be found) and getting to places rather than actually doing things. The story line is good but the theme of insanity doesn’t really play much part in the activities. One thing of significant frustration though is the arrangement of the achievements. Basically they expect you to play it twice to get all of the additional achievements due to a choice you must make making one of them impossible the first time through.  More on this in my advice section.

My Advice for playing:

1. Before entering the Isles, store as much unneeded items as possible. There are very few options to store things once you’re there and even those options come later.

2. Search every hollow log you see. There are great items in them.

3. When presented an option between two choices at the end of a quest, SAVE YOUR GAME RIGHT THEN AND KEEP THAT SAVE SEPERATE! You will not regret this and will understand why you did it later.

4. Prepare to take some damage. That means carry potions and repair hammers to avoid trips to town.

Xbox Live Extras

None exist for the expansion pack.

Conclusion

The emotional answer is yes it is worth the $30 and significant HDD space consumption. After all you are playing new content on what I believe is the best game to date for the Xbox 360. Hopefully you like buying with emotion because that’s the only way you’ll be able to justify the cost.  The logical answer is the opposite. $30 for an expansion that I played out in just over 14 hours is in no way worth the money. Let’s view it in these terms: The original content sold for $60 and offered most people about 80 hours of game play. Broken down thats about $0.75 per hour of play for the original. Shivering Isles on the other hand sells for half the cost of the original and by Bethesda’s quotes is 25% the physical size of Cryodiil.  Bethesda also quoted about 30 hours of gameplay; I found about half of that.

Were they counting on the fact that you need to play it twice to get all the achievements? Hmmmmmm.  At any rate the breakdown of Shivering Isles per hour comes to about $2.11 per hour of game play. Anybody see a disparity here yet? Sorry Bethesda, you really messed up in pricing this. You relied on the emotion of your users to buy this when the product in no way logically justifies the price. You would have been better serving your fan base by adding Shivering isles to an Oblivion 2 and putting it out later in the year. Maybe we now have a sense of how the Marketplace will be used to ratchet up profits and nickel and dime users.

I love Oblivion.  I like the expansion even though the much-touted weapons were a letdown. The value is questionable at best.  You really will be basing your decision on emotion rather than substance. If you can live with that by all means get Shivering Isles. If not, use the same money to buy a Platinum Hit title that will likely offer more time in game play.

Written by: Sirharper