The Elder Scrolls IV: Fighter's Stronghold (Xbox 360) Review

The Elder Scrolls IV: Fighter's Stronghold is a very short and simple piece of downloadable content available for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion via the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and is the last piece of DLC that Bethesda Softworks released for this game.

Does it offer enough to be worth your 150 Microsoft Points (about $2.18) if you happened to miss its two week initial promotional price of Free? In my opinion, no, it doesn't.

While I love The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and consider it to be one of the best games available for the Xbox 360, there really isn't anything overly new or special about The Elder Scrolls IV: Fighter's Stronghold to warrant a purchase.

The DLC features a nice castle located near Chorrol that's under siege by marauders, and by a siege of marauders I mean just over half a dozen push-overs, and once you kill them the castle is yours. To complete the quest, you'll simply need to head to a specific NPC in the Imperial City and purchase all the furniture to outfit Battlehorn Castle itself; basically, this is a simple and grandious house purchase.

What is new, aside from the odd book, are some of the servants you can hire, such as a taxidermist who will create stuffed trophies of creatures for you, a maid for your bedroom, guards who you can take with you throughout the game world, and an Orc trainer who you can actually spar with. Overall though, it's really nothing exciting or game-defining, and when I played through it last night (it's short), I couldn't help but shake the been-there-done-that feel.

There is also a hidden Quest in which you can explore an underground grotto, but it takes all of 5 minutes to do and again is nothing you haven't done before.

The main appeal to this DLC is the castle itself, and simply being able to own this really cool location, but the truth is there's so many other housing options available, that I couldn't recommend paying for this content.

My advice, spring for The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine instead. You pay a little more, but you get almost everything featured in The Elder Scrolls IV: Fighter's Stronghold and then some (read my full review of The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine here).

You get what you pay for, I suppose.