The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard is a difficult game for me to review. It's cons, from its janky movement and atrocious combat, to the constant crashes and issues with files, take a lot away from the experience, However, at times I felt like some of these cons were part of the fun, part of the challenge of the game. Ultimately, that feeling, alongside the pros of a really good story, unique puzzles, decent parkour (despite the movement issues), the voice acting, and the amount of lore this game brings to the wider Elder Scrolls universe, led me to review this positively.
I feel specifically, that combat and movement got better and funner as I played through the game and got used to the controls, but I don't think you should play this game if you don't have the patience to get used to the jankiness. I found myself specifically enticed with the sheer amount of lore and interesting stuff that was thrown into such a small game, this is my first time learning anything about Hammerfell and I feel like I already know more about it than most other regions of Tamriel. I believe a very surprising positive to this game is the voice acting, despite being from 1998, the voice acting feels perfect, every character sounds not only unique, but they also sound like what you may expect them to sound like, given the tidbits you learn of them.
The big scourge upon rating this positively, on the other hand, is mostly the non-gameplay issues. I found myself enjoying the experience less and less as the issues piled on. By the end, I still enjoyed it enough to want to continue playing (even though I couldn't), but the amount of crashes and random issues drastically wore down the fun, by the time I reached the final parts of the story I no longer even took my time to get through them, instead getting more and more aggravated at each consecutive failure, whether it be due to said crashes, not being able to enter areas without messing with the save files, or even occasionally having to get rid of the file that makes the ambient sound and voices work. At one point, I even had to use the console to noclip through parts of the map, as I needed to pass through to continue the story, but the game was not allowing me to.
All in all, I think if you are patient, have a lot of time on your hands, and are interested in The Elder Scrolls, this is a game worth playing, ESPECIALLY, with The Elder Scrolls 6 supposedly taking place in Hammerfell. It provides a very unique experience, especially if you haven't played many games from its era, and for all its flaws, I feel its strengths outweigh them, ever so slightly.
