The game starts out a bit hard For detractors the skills are low and do not always proc and map information are not known to the player; that gives a realistic experience in my opinion, but some may not like it. There is an issue with alchemy which is caused by running multiple cores that glitches that skill in the port. It usually will insist that you haven't named your potions. The graphics are dated, as is anything from twenty or more years ago. And the voice acting is a Bethesda commonplace for all of Elder Scrolls being voiced by like 5 people. Also there are text bricks where voice acting doesn't do justice to larger bits of dialogue. Talking to people or interfacing with them from the start tends to do a good bit to help alleviate map and other quest marker issues but if you have low charisma or speechcraft or barter skills it usually will only get you the bare minimum or they'll outright admit you're not worth their time to talk to. Aside those detractors, the lore is deep, the world is very explore-able and vast with random encounters. The storyline and racial quirks of each specie are well thought out even in the conflicts between specie. Exception there being cliff racers which definitely should be purged by your holy fire at some point. There are many tongue in cheek jokes and easter-eggs hidden about. The ability to craft spells and items makes it very user friendly to replay and long term game play. Unlike later Elder Scrolls titles you can levitate, jump beyond normal height, and do many things they hadn't capped or removed from the later editions... Like summoning more than one creature in a single summon spell. Many of the places will have some degree of feeling lived in as is common for the genre, and in some cases like Solstheim there is a beauty which kind of has a verisimilitude to the world we know. As for the sky graphics... kudos to the artist, they're always nice. Overall... great game. Worth trying if you've patience to get through it.
If you're a fan of turn based resource based hex crawl tactics games then you'll love this. The game is similar to Advance Wars in it's mechanics, though with far more complexity and solutions in unit load-outs to make an interesting twist on turn based RTS/Hex Crawls. The game starts off with a hypothetical series of conflicts of the eastern and western powers with cinematic cut scenes between conflict maps when you complete areas. Units can be catered to things like anti-air, anti-armor, or anti-infantry among other things(Even upgrading to stealthy units) and can really alter the ways to win through games. The general idea is taking cities and industry areas turn profits which then at the start of turns produce funds to build your armies and get you closer to winning. Usually the win condition is to capture all cities in the map and thus progress. The games modifier(easy/medium/hard) for ease of play makes it accessible to all avenues of player as well. There are also simulation battles where you can pit yourself against differing factions for some single battles rather than the campaign. All avenues are quite fun. Having played this when it first came out I highly suggest it to those who like Lords of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Orion series, Fantasy General, Close Combat, or Sid Meyer's Civ series games. Those more into Red Alert or Dark Reign, I'd definitely also suggest the slightly slower turn based strategy it offers. It's quite good at keeping pace and is easily re-playable for a hundred hours or more. I use this game as my high bar for turn based strategy games. Enjoy playing it, ...and thanks Gog for offering this to us all <3.