I haven't completed it yet, so this is an in progress review/early thoughts.

I've played twenty hours on Enderal: Forgotten Stories so far. That's the same time it took me to complete (without all collectables) the recently released Metro: Exodus, which I dropped £50 on. This has already provided me the same amount of playtime without seeming even close to completion for free. That's not a comment on Exodus, which I enjoyed very much, just an example of how much gaming entertainment you can get out of Enderal for absolutely nothing. The only catch with Enderal is that you must own Skyrim, the original that is, which I reckon a lot of Steam RPG players do. Those that only own the Special Edition would actually do well to purchase the original just to play Enderal. It's that worth it.

While many gameplay features will be familiar to Skyrim players, Enderal's biggest change is a progression system using a traditional experience points system. I can't say if it's an inherently better or worse way of levelling up than Skyrim's skill tied system, but I know I prefer the skill improvement system of Elder Scrolls where they level up through use. Here, the only one to improve is with skill books. You can find them in the world, but I've found that to improve them usefully that you have to buy a lot of them. Takes a lot of gold. Fortunately Enderal's version of perks aren't tied to skill levels, which balances out the gameplay.

The world design is pretty great from what I've seen of it. Enderal feels more dangerous in certain areas than Elder Scrolls games themselves are. In fact the area I'm currently in feels a lot like I shouldn't be here yet and I'm in the middle of carefully sneaking my way back to safety. The landscapes are beautiful and the dungeon designs aren't carbon copied from Skyrim. Obviously the graphics are recognisable, but it's easy to forget you're playing something built off another game.

The mod itself is not without some problems, mainly related to FPS issues and a few crashes. Bethesda games are not known for their stability, so this isn't a dig at the work of SureAI, which from my experience so far have created a game to rival the one it was built upon, though they could perhaps do with optimising certain areas of the game if they can. Considering it is built upon 2011 Skyrim, I would like to see more stable performance from my rig which has a GTX 1070, i7-6700k (factory clocks) & 16GB RAM. I've turned the presents down two steps so far from Ultra to just high and still don't get a sold 60FPS in every location, which some drops still hitting the 30s. However it doesn't actually stutter, which makes the areas with drops playable.

I previously played SureAI's Oblivion conversion Nehrim, which is said to come to Steam as well in 2020. So far Enderal is every bit as good as Nehrim if not even better. I look forward to being able to play Nehrim again on Steam as well.