TLDR: Light recommendation with caveats

Oblivion was a pretty core part of my pre-teen/teenage years despite never fully playing through parts of the game like the well-regarded Shivering Isles expansion. I was pretty excited to return to an adolescent staple with the release of the remaster and after 150 hours I come away feeling that this game has not aged all too gracefully regardless of the fresh coat of paint.

Oblivion's graphics never really bothered me. The lumpy, potato character models of 2006 added to the charm. The new character models look great though I have seen some unsatisfied with the new beast race models, overall I think the new texture work is great. Interior lighting is greatly improved as well breathing new life into torches and mage-light spells. What I'm less of a fan of is that everything just generally looks washed out. Oblivion was a really colorful game despite its generic fantasy setting. There is just too much brown in the remake for my taste. Luckily this can be fixed with mods.

There are some other changes like reworked skill perks and stat calculations. I do like the change from gender determining stats to it being between to places of origin per race. This feels like it lends itself better to your own character's background. Not a fan of the HUD being changed to resemble the one in Skyrim, though the new menu system is a welcome improvement.

And that's about all the stuff I noticed. Underneath the fancy new graphics is the 2006 game, warts and all. I'm usually pretty forgiving towards older games and many decades old titles have aged perfectly fine. Oblivion is one that I think just doesn't hold up all that well after nearly 20 years.

The main issue is that the dungeons and open world are just Bethesda at their weakest (excluding Starfield lol). It is pretty well known that they had like 2 guys making the dozens of dungeons in this game and I'm sure those devs did their best, but it shows. The layouts may differ slightly, but 95% of the game's dungeons are Ayleid ruins, forts, or caves. The combat is not very good either though the ability to make your own spells remains an awesome feature that I hope they re-use in ES6.

The Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood storylines are generally regarded as some of the best in the series and whilst I'm in agreement with this, the mage's and fighter's storylines felt drawn out and tiresome. The main story quest is fine, if not unique for having the player character serve as a deuteragonist to the real hero of the story, Martin Septim. The Shivering Isles storyline was the real highlight of my playthrough and would rate that experience in general above the base game. Unfortunately by the time I set foot into the realm of madness, I had put in so much time that the game had become a tiresome slog.

I reached a point where combat was so mind numbing that I was electing to cast an invisibility spell on my self and run past monsters to get to my objective which kind of just signals that I should have set the game down at that point, but I wanted to see all the major quest lines to the end.

Oblivion is a game that could have benefited greatly from enhancements beyond the graphical and minor system tweaks we got from the remaster, specifically some more attention given to the dull world/dungeons. With none of those improvements, Oblivion remains the same janky, if not charming, game from the mid 00s. A game that wears on your the longer you spend in it, which is unfortunate because it wants you to stay in its world extensively if you wish to, bare minimum, see the main storylines.

This review might sound harsh, and maybe it is, so I want to make clear that I think there is fun to be had with this game and I will lightly recommend it to RPG fans who are willing to go into tempering their expectations. I would advise not going into dungeons unless quests direct you to them, lest you set yourself on the path to burn out REAL fast. Also make sure to play the Shivering Isles expansion, because it really is on another level from the rest of the game. Let's hope ES6 can find a good balance between what each entry in the series has done best.