The biggest game in the world. The most comprehensive RPG ever made. The first true next-gen game. The best Xbox 360 game yet? Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is literally spoilt for choice when deciding what billing to jot down on its calling card. Sixteen virtual miles, a seemingly infinite number of character choices and the letters RPG might sound appealing to the chin-strokers, but it’s no way to sex up Oblivion’s appeal to the masses. In this day and age, simply stating “Hi there, I’m Oblivion and I can grant you +3 Fun!” isn’t nearly arousing enough to stir the attention of Xbox 360 owners.

As it turns out, Oblivion doesn’t even need to put on any makeup, let alone fumble around for sexy pickup lines to get your undivided attention. The longer you spend in its company, the stronger Oblivion’s call for attention becomes, as it simply beats you down with its monstrous size. This really is the biggest game, the most comprehensive RPG ever made and the first true next-gen game. Yet to begin with, it’s hard to fathom where Oblivion will stamp its mark on Microsoft’s white and green landscape. For an adventure so big, the beginning is suitably humble.

You start behind bars in a small, damp jail, being taunted by the lag in the opposite prison. Here, you have to start making decisions about your character that will influence the next forty-odd hours in Oblivion. Choosing your race, for example, will ultimately determine your playing style – those picking the cat-like Khajit race will use nightvision combined with high agility and speed to play as a thief, while Orcs will favour the direct approach thanks to their ability to wear and repair heavy armour and wield axes and warhammers. Slowly but surely, the sense of freedom blossoms.

Pick your character and Emperor Uriel Septim wanders into your jail, accompanied by guards. “In your face, I behold the sun’s companion,” he groans. Hey! It’s Patrick Stewart! And he’s talking a bit like Shakespeare! Then he pulls a lever and runs through a secret passageway while you’re still giggling at his ye olde English. Christ, better follow him. Chasing the Emperor through this passageway while choosing more statistics and jumping through the tutorial hoops placed in front of you eventually ends in an ambush. The Emperor hands you the Amulet Of Kings and tells you to take it to Brother Martin just before he’s slain. Continuing alone, armed with more statistics than a National Lottery optimist, you finally emerge.

Bright sunlight, open fields, a view that stretches as far as the eye can see. Several questions immediately pop into your head. What do you do? When do you do it? Where do you go? As Shakira would sing if she played Oblivion, whatever, whenever, wherever. The opening hour of Oblivion is linear and regimented to make sure you have your preferred choice of statistics but beyond that, you’re free to go anywhere and do whatever you please. The only suggestion that a main quest lies ahead is a small, red arrow that's attached to your compass. Other than that, you’re a completely free man. Look at your map and you'll realise just how big the world of Oblivion is. Running from one end of Oblivion to the other will easily take more than two hours, with nothing but the occasional loading hiccup to show for it.

One hour in and having had your first whiff of the potential ahead, you’re excited. You know there’s a good show you circled in the TV guide earlier but it can wait. You’ll just catch up on what happened with your friends later. Right now, you’re a free man and the choice is overwhelming. This choice forms the backbone of Oblivion and what this particular game does – that so few others have managed – is give you the tools to let you form your very own story to bore other people with (“Oh my god, I went to Cheydinal and there was this man and he wanted me to save his two sons and I went to the dungeon and I killed the monster and then this trap was sprung and I had to cut the rope and… hello?”). Fable is probably the closest comparison, but Peter Molyneux can only dream about being in the same league as Oblivion’s scope, let alone actually reaching out and touching it. If milestones were ever needed to mark the huge leap between this-gen and that-gen, then comparing Oblivion’s overwhelming freedom to Fable’s funnel-neck and linear design are the only comparisons that you’ll ever need. If you’re not convinced, then consider this – every decision you make is one that YOU make, not one that's determined by predetermined menus or what the developers want you to do.

For example, do you lead the corrupt guard to his death or find the evidence to ensure he gets thrown behind bars? Do you believe the flirty wife or imprisoned husband when trying to find the gold from their robbing sprees? Do you discourage Glathir’s sense of paranoia or carry out his ‘death list’ for him? Do you help the disabled fisherman catch the mud crabs or kill him to steal your eventual reward? These are just a handful of decisions we’ve plucked out of Oblivion’s giant bucket of choice, which is as bit as tasty and glamorous as it sounds. And just in case you were wondering, we led the corrupt guard to his death (he got eaten by rats!), we trusted the husband over the wife (we were right!), we gave Glathir’s death list to the guards (they killed him!) and we killed the fisherman (he didn’t have the reward!). To console ourselves over the deceitful fisherman, we looted Glathir’s corpse for his house key, let ourselves in, drank some of his wine, then slept in his bed. Thanks Glathir!

Anyone who has played Fable or Knights Of The Old Republic might scoff at a morality system that’s seemingly as black and white as this, but what’s important is Oblivion doesn’t even bill itself as a morally ambiguous game. It just lets you do whatever you want. To use the above examples again, there was nothing to stop us from killing the corrupt guard, the husband, the wife and Glathir if we wanted to. Even the devious manner in which you kill NPCs is entirely up to us – depending on how you’ve been forming our character over the last few hours, you could paralyse them and push them down a cliff, enchant some of the local wildlife to attack your target, even summon skeletons and ghosts to do your dirty work. You end up having to train yourself to think outside of the boxes that videogames have consistently placed you in over the years. After all, what’s to stop you killing the lag taunting you at the start of the game? Even better, the decisions you make aren’t just a means to an end of a token new item, as is the case with most RPGs. Instead, the residue from each decision you make collects over time until it triggers another side-quest, guild invitation and in some cases, retribution – one particularly angry guard, stripped bare from a quick spell in jail, actually tracked us down to a nearby village for his revenge. This was a full day after we sent witnesses of his corruption to the Imperial Guard and blew the whistle on him. That’s a full day, 24 hours of nothing. We’d saved our game, turned off the 360, watched Eastenders, had some dinner, gone to bed, woke up the next morning, had breakfast, continued playing and this damn guard was still chasing after us. When he suddenly charged us the next morning wearing nothing more than pants, we nearly threw up our Shreddies in fright.

Nine hours in, your eyes are really starting to hurt. You rub each of them for a brief release from the dry pain, you check your hands for blood. No blood. Eyes must be fine. Jesus, that rumbling was loud. Of course, food! You haven’t had any food all day. You’ll just finish one more quest though and then go and get something to eat. Sounds fair. Yeah. Just one more quest. After all, it’s not like that food is planning on going anywhere, is it? However, what you don’t realise yet is that there’s always “just one more quest". There’s always a carrot dangling just in front of your nose to keep you trekking through Oblivion’s towns, countryside and tombs. The reward is part of the incentive, but the real pull is that the quests are actually fun to play and complete. They vary in what they ask of you and finding out what you have to do next often throws up all sorts of different surprises, especially as quests rarely seem as straightforward as they first appear to be. What starts off as debt-solving on someone’s behalf quickly spirals out of control until you end up in a convoluted hunting game in a locked tomb on a mystery island. Not exactly the way that Baines & Ernst like to do business, but infinitely a lot more fun at the end of the day. Some quests even require a bit of detective work, such as investigating the vampire hunter who declares random civilians as vampires and murdering them – all with the approval of the City Guard.

Just to give you an idea of the scope, here’s how a few minutes of Oblivion can play out. You walk along the forest and find a statue in the clearing and overhear nearby hunters having a conversation – you see one of them sporting some nice armour and so decide to kill them. Think of it as the medieval equivalent of a chav spotting a 3G mobile phone. You combine some ingredients you found earlier, say rat meat and flour, to create a rubbish rat-meat-and-flour poison (or, as it’s known to some, a Pot Noodle). Smearing the bow with this budget poison, you fire a shot at the hunters but soon find yourself overwhelmed in seconds as they all team up and gang up on you. Not the best approach then. Second attempt – you sit stroking your chin waiting for a good idea to strike when you notice a huge grizzly bear in the woods to your right. You attack the bear, then run back to the clearing with the hunters, at which point you use your invisibility spell to hide. Now you’ve disappeared, the angry bear mauls the hunters instead and one huge brawl later, you crawl out from your hiding spot, kill the wounded survivor and nick the spoils. Brilliant! Not only does it show how brilliant Oblivion is for providing you with a system that can be bent to your will, but it also makes you feel like a tactical genius on par with Napoleon for exploiting the system. Granted, Napoleon isn’t famous for killing a few peasant country folk with the aid of an angry bear, but that’s only because he didn’t have an invisibility spell to enable him to do so. We couldn’t wait to brag about our tactical genius to others. In fact, we’ve taken away more stories in five days with Oblivion than we have in our total time with the rest of the Xbox 360 library.

Eighteen hours in, you hear a ringing sound. What IS that noise? You realise it's your mobile phone ringing but you ignore it. Friends? They’re not friends, they’re merely acquaintances. Real friends would understand anyway. You turn your phone off. Peace at last… at least until the ring of light on your pad starts flashing, indicating the batteries are losing their fight to support your Oblivion session. You know you’re living on borrowed time. What if they give out during a fight? What if you forget to save before the batteries die? You clench your teeth and press on. There’s not much time left. Best not waste it then.

It’s around this point that after having spent so long in Oblivion’s company, you’ll see that it’s not quite as perfect as you once thought. The illusion spell that Oblivion casts, with its immense freedom, begins to fade a little – just enough for you to peer through and spot the smallest of cracks appearing in the ugliest of places. Almost inevitably, given Oblivion has more naïve ambition than a primary school toddler along with a patchwork of different games this big, you’ll find holes if you poke around the seams for long enough. Loading times are kept to an absolute minimum and never tread on your toes, but when you race through the landscape you’ll notice the occasional hiccups and stutters as new areas are loaded in. That’s not the biggest problem you'll find though. You won’t be surprised at all to hear that those going down the stealth route will find the most holes to pick at, with plenty of AI flaws to amuse and irritate in equal measure. The apparent telepathy of the guards is always a problem. Hit them with an arrow and no matter how well hidden or far away you are, they’ll get an immediate lock on your location. Discouraging enough for those going down the archery route, tougher still when you realise that instant kills simply don’t happen on tougher enemies when armed with just a meagre bow and arrow. Similarly, alerted guards will be utterly confused when you use an invisibility spell to disappear, but when the effect wears off however, they’ll know where you are straight away, even if you’re three postcodes away. In a chapel. On the second floor. Hiding under a table. In total darkness. Whispering “I am well hidden.” Great.

However, even these flaws can’t derail Oblivion’s triumphant charge into Xbox 360’s gaming elite. Oblivion’s brilliance isn’t some happy accident of course; this is the result of marrying next-gen technology to sound gameplay to boundless ambition. Twenty hours in, the ring of light on your pad breathes its last breath and finally dies, with life in Oblivion coming to a complete halt as the ‘Please Reconnect Controller’ message dominates the screen. You lean back, exhausted. You’d look for more batteries but in the real world its night-time, too dark to look around. Still, it’s almost morning again and when the sun comes up, you can find the batteries. Then you can carry on playing. Addicted? Never. This is a game that backs up its next-gen talk with a next-gen walk. This is a game that grabs you by the balls from the first fight until the demands of the real world snatch you back away. Ladies and gentleman, this is Oblivion. And really, that’s all it ever needed for its calling card.

Ryan King