Just finished Enderal - and I have to say, it was… AWESOME. Main story line especially, but also the side quests were really interesting. And of course the world itself is pure eye candy - it works surprisingly well to have all those totally different landscapes so close to each other - from icy mountains over mushroom infested forests and dark valleys to deserts, green fields and tropical vegetation.
Perhaps it’s just because Skyrim was mostly just white - but all those lush green forests with tons of overgrown ruins and bright flowers… I loved those.
In general all the detailing looks great - unfortunately the price for more those details is that you usually can’t interact with them. Not a big thing, but still unfortunate. You enter a library filled with tons of scrolls and books for example and all you can interact with are a couple books and a few stacks of books or scrolls that behave like containers.
There also is no Skyrim/Oblivion - fast travel system - which is great since thus you get to see more of the beautiful (have I mentioned that yet?) landscape. However, you can of course still fast travel - through teleportation spells and “Myrad towers” (if that’s their name in English - played the game in German - awesome synchronization, especially of the main characters, by the way). Those only allow you to travel to specific points in the world, though - but those points are spread well.
The leveling system based on experience worked surprisingly well - almost too well, actually, at level 50+ I still got like one level up every 45 minutes or so - provided I fought against the correct enemies.
It should maybe be mentioned that enemies don’t level with you - or at least usually don’t. Until you’ve reached a certain level and have levelled your attributes and skills some areas are pretty much suicide to enter. Quests always tell you how difficult you can expect them to be, though.
Which brings me to levelling your skills (one handed, heavy armor, etc.) - you don’t level them by using them, but by reading skill books. Also, you can only read a certain amount of books. It works, and since those books cost a lot of money you have something so spend said money on in contrast to Skyrim. However, they cost a lot of money, which could be problematic early on in the game since at that point you don’t have a lot of money.
The difficulty is further increased by a “disease” your character has (because of story reasons) - using healing magic or potions will make this disease worse and you can actually die of it. You can only get better by drinking other potions - which are rare/expensive to get, though, or by unlocking a certain skill on one of the perk trees.
The only other ways of regaining health are sleeping or food, which will only regenerate your health while you’re out of combat, though. Your health doesn’t regenerate automatically. Again, I found that to work surprisingly well - plus it also gives food a purpose.
The only problems I noticed in the game were:
a) Climbing mountains “freestyle” can lead to you getting stuck
b) Sometimes story relevant dialogue wouldn’t continue unless I walked away from the speaker and then walked towards him again
c) Once an NPC trapped me in a little room by blocking the door and I couldn’t get past him because him being there was story relevant.
Otherwise the only thing I could mention as being not quite satisfactory is the lack of towns/villages and people who give you quests/you can talk to aside from merchants. As far as I recall there are only three intact towns and only in two of them you can actually do relevant talking with NPCs. On the other hand the main town is so big that it took me like 4 hours to check out all its areas. Still I would have welcomed it to have some more NPCs out in the world to give you more side quests - especially since the quests that I found were all really nice.
Or in short - if you liked Skyrim and your computer is capable of handling Enderal - it’s definitely worth playing.