Elder Scrolls meets Alice in Wonderland. Inventive, colorful, dark, joyous. Worth playing Oblivion just to this one, honestly.

I'm pretty sure I played this for 100 hours as a kid and am only just now learning you're supposed to do racing in it

Easily strongest AC title. Most to form, best to play, lean enough not to overstay its welcome. Only downhill from there.

It feels like they made 1/3rd of a really good game and then ran out of money and pushed it out. I was led to believe it was some kind of fun critique of hypercaptialism, but it really isn't. There's no meaningful "labor" side vs "company" side (the company is so comically evil it makes no sense to side with them or take them seriously as an antagonist.) Likewise, I was led to believe it was a Fallout: New Vegas successor, wheras it's more of a baby of Mass Effect 1 and Borderlands. Worse, the game introduces a much more interesting conflict in the last five minutes as some kind of cliffhanger that makes you wonder what the point of doing the main plot even was.

Gameplay wise, RPG elements are purposeless as there are precious few non-combat options, forcing the player to spec into a high-dps machine gun build to get anything done. Environments are gorgeously designed but entirely sparce, leaving no real reason to explore or look around.

In short: You are asked once why you are doing the main quest, and one of the answers you can give is "I don't know."

safe to say the defining game of the 2010s. the lack of meaningful competitors or successors against its constant success speaks to its strength and innovative quality