You’ll spend an awful lot of time thwacking enemies with swords, roasting them alive with spells or stoving their skulls in with maces. It’s easy to forget, but this is one combat heavy game. That’s all pretty cool, but Wildcat is worth getting if only because it changes so much of how you play Skyrim. There are no major changes but the increased stakes mean pinging someone off from afar, watching them crumple as an arrow skewers their chest, offers up a rare satisfaction.
Increased lethality means blocking - knowing when to do it and how - becomes almost vital, so much so that dual-sword runs become almost untenable and magic users, since they can keep kiting you off, become as powerful as they should be. Enemies tend to smother you so that, if you don’t play smart, you’ll never get the space you need to recuperate. The status effects and stamina management means losing a fight to the death is as desperate and as scrappy and claustrophobic as it should be. The damage increases mean, if you’re stupid enough, even bandits can give you a run for your money. They’re difficult, savage, often delightfully scrappy affairs that prioritise, timing, crowd control and movement. In a first for Skyrim, fights actually feel like fights. The changes themselves sound pretty boring on paper - combat will inflict injuries when you get an opponent down past thirty percent health, every attack costs stamina, attacks do more damage and enemies are generally more aggressive - but they have a huge effect in play. It’s a combat mod, and it wants to make Skyrim’s many battles feel less like particularly savage pillow fights. So if you, like me, can’t wait to get your hands on Bethesda’s next big fantasy RPG but can’t return to their last one without something to take the edge off, here are five Skyrim mods to tide you over until The Elder Scrolls VI comes out. Because, moments after Bethesda announced said Elder Scrolls game, I flipped on my Xbox, downloaded some mods, threw on some Guy Ritchie and my sexiest silk dressing gown and fell in love all over again. But, like with any good love affair, the drive to return is always there - especially when Bethesda have just announced another Elder Scrolls - it’s just that, when you do, it’s almost hard to recapture that same sense of computer-gaming bliss. Their facade, glorious as it is whilst it lasts, eventually falls away. Maybe it’s because the game was bad all along, maybe it’s overexposure but, at some point in your experience with them, Bethesda games lose something.
The combat feels floaty, the NPCs plastic, and the quests linear.
They’re great for a month, maybe year-long binge, the kind of temporary love-affair that soaks up everything else and keeps you locked away in the video game dark for longer than you want to admit, but not much else.Įventually, the infatuated haze fades and the cracks start to show.
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