Bethesda's Elder Scrolls: Blades is a mobile-first experience that brings the Elder Scrolls franchise to your smartphone. Despite mixed reviews at launch, the game has picked up a few content patches and fixes over the year. The biggest new update changed chest and loot mechanics, for example, but there's plenty else on the roadmap for Bethesda's flagship mobile RPG.
But now that the game is starting to get in the flow of content patches and update, it's time to dig in and review what Bethesda's offering here to see if it's a worthwhile investment for Elder Scrolls fans.
Swinging swords and bashing shields
The Elder Scrolls: Blades is essentially a miniature Elder Scrolls title with many mechanics and complexities stripped back to make sense on a touchscreen. This is a big departure from the mobile titles of five years ago where developers tried to cram their full, console-sized experiences onto an iPhone 4 or Galaxy S3, but I really don't think that's a bad thing.
Bethesda has taken care to make sure this game feels like it belongs on mobile. It can be played in portrait or landscape mode, which is great for using just one hand, and you can seamlessly switch between controlling through taps and virtual joysticks.
The game opens up by showing you how easy it is to walk around, look at things, and open up caches of items in the world, and then it dumps you into combat.
And that combat feels immensely satisfying, for a mobile title. Tap and hold to ready your weapon, then swipe to swing it. If you time it right and swing right when the yellow circle is full, you'll do extra damage, and the phone vibrates to indicate that critical hit. As opposed to boring old taps and turn-based combat, it's really fun to just fight enemies, regardless of whatever else you might be doing. The updates have also added a few extra visual indicators to help you along, too, including listing enemy weaknesses underneath their health bars and showing popups for effects happening in battle. Fundamentally it's all the same, but the extra polish makes this feel like a much different game than it was six months ago.
Holding the block button (which you can customize to put on the left, right, or center of the screen) pulls up your shield, and timing that right will stagger the enemy that's trying to hit you. Magic and abilities will appear over your magicka or stamina bars, respectively, which also gives you a visual indicator of which colored bar they're going to drain when you tap on them. Potion icons will also contextually appear as you need them.
It still mostly feels like an Elder Scrolls title, but made for a phone. There's a level of simplicity here that the most hardcore fans might not appreciate, but for a pick-up-and-play dungeon crawler, I have nothing to complain about.
Grinding content
Okay, so it feels good to play, but what about the actual content? Elder Scrolls games are all about exploring caves and forests and other dungeons, digging out loot, and upgrading your character. Fundamentally, that's all here in Blades.
The gameplay loop in Blades revolves around main quests and jobs. The quests are more of a “go from point A to point B and kill everything on the way” until you get into some dialog and progress the story. Jobs are things you pick up, and you're then sent to whatever environment where you have to kill X number of enemies, collect X number of things, or just make it to the end of the dungeon. That's pretty much it.
Those jobs reward you with experience to level up, plus items ranging from treasure chests, materials for crafting and building your town, healing potions, equipment, gold, and more. You're going to do a lot of these jobs to level up enough to tackle the main quests and to have enough stuff to build up your town and make better equipment.
That town building is what makes this game unique next to Skyrim or Morrowind. You take your materials back to town then build houses or alchemists or flagpoles, all to increase your town's level and have access to more shops and enchanters and blacksmiths. Instead of finding new towns, you build up your own as you see fit. And honestly, that customization is really cool, especially with the different building types and decorations you can place around. The drawback is that this part feels really mobile gamey, with everything costing different amounts of lumber and limestone and bronze and whatever else. If you don't have enough of the material, you can use gems (Blades‘ paid currency) to make up the difference, but then you have to wait anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours while the building or thing is upgraded or created. You can also spend gems to skip that timer, though.
It doesn't start too bad, with low-level potions and small decorations and whatever else only taking about 10 minutes to complete. It gets much longer as you keep leveling up, though, and that's the point.
As you do more quests and jobs and everything else, you'll be given chests of varying quality. You can also find these by just exploring the world and finding secret locations, which are much more plentiful than they used to be. Those newer loot updates have also removed the timer from chests, so as soon as you pick one up or receive one as a reward, you'll immediately be able to open it instead of either waiting it out or spending gems to force it open. That makes Blades feel much more like a typical RPG and keeps the fun looting going without interruption. Very smart change.
This has made the dungeon crawling feel much more satisfying, on top of there being more variety in the quests and jobs given out each day. Enemies also drop more loot and gem drops are more frequent, and new bosses (with cinematic, sweeping shots!) at the end of dungeons are usually guaranteed to drop a rare or better piece of equipment. It's still not quite a desktop-class experience, but it's way better than it used to be.
Guilds and PVP are also live in Blades after being teased for a while, which adds in a more living social experience to the game. You can join a guild to chat with other players, trade materials, shop in other players' towns, and check out their stats and equipment. If you're more of the fighting type, you can also fight these players in the Arena for extra rewards. They aren't massive additions to the game, but they've fleshed out the Blades experience to make it feel a little more worthwhile.
Aside from that, the differences become a little more apparent. There's no exploring in Blades, like wandering around an open world to find a new cave or town. Everything is its own closed instance that you warp in and out of. There's no looting bodies, or arranging objects around a house with clunky-but-amusing physics, or in-depth dialog trees and side quests. It's not a linear game, per se, but it's certainly not the traditional open-world that you expect from a mainline title.
That's not to say that it's necessarily a bad thing, because Oblivion just straight-up would not have worked on a smartphone. Trying to handle those sprawling maps with tons of AI characters still isn't really feasible on handheld, and managing that much inventory with extra containers and loot on defeated enemies would be an absolute nightmare without a controller or a mouse.
But I would like to see some of that traditional Elder Scrolls flair make its way back here. Let me mix ingredients together to make custom potions, or rename my weapons and armor, or have a house where I can put my favorite spoils of war on a table before watching the physics engine fling them across the room. The newer quests are a step in the right direction, for example.
Visually striking world building
Despite offering a more simplified experience, Blades doesn't skimp in the graphics category. It's a fantastic looking game with the right amount of flourish in the right places. Forests look alive, dungeons look dank and creepy, but nothing's ever too dark to make out what you're trying to do.
All of the character models seem like they were ripped straight out of Skyrim, but look impressive on a phone screen nonetheless. Pre-rendered shadows are cast with great effect, the armor and equipment sets on your character are detailed and immersive, and enemies look just threatening enough to keep you pulled in. Bethesda Game Studios games generally aren't known for being visual masterpieces, but relative to the hardware I think Blades might be one of the best.
Periodically changing environments to match the real world is also pretty cool. The holiday season brought snow and ice to towns, including some unique decorations that you can only get during that time. It's a very cool addition, and something that I hope regularly happens throughout Blades‘ life cycle.
The audio keeps pace, too. Music feels like it belongs in a console Elder Scrolls game, and the sound effects from weapons and armor clangs along without feeling thin and wimpy.
The writing and plot, unfortunately, can be pretty hit-or-miss next to the audio and visuals being so good.
The game sometimes doesn't take itself too seriously, which is great; there are some humorous quips that break up the monotony of the game's traditional high-fantasy “go kill these goblins for a villager” quests.
Again, dialog in BGS games generally aren't winning any writing awards, but Blades just feels odd at times. Nobody ever has anything important to say, and when things seem like they should be important, they're just really awkwardly written. It feels like the kind of game that just has a dialog box to railroad you into the next segment of action.
A newer update has added in some voice acting to make things a little bit better, but it's few and far between. It mostly helps with shopkeepers and walking around so you can hear some chatter to make the world feel more alive, which is, again, just an indicator that the world-building has far outpaced the writing here.
I'd say this gets a pass, but we've seen some other mobile games deliver great stories and writing. That's not limited by the lack of power next to a full computer or gaming console, so better writing and quests is definitely something that could be worked in without sacrifice.
Worth it?
If you're a fan of The Elder Scrolls franchise, dragons and goblins, or just Bethesda titles, yeah, check Blades out. It's free, you have literally nothing to lose, and the first hours are genuinely a blast. Whether you stick with it after the first dozen levels is where things get a little more nuanced.
There are a lot of time gates in Blades, including opening chests, making/upgrading buildings, crafting and tempering items, potions, and equipment, and daily quests that offer the best rewards. They can all be bypassed with gems, but that can be expensive, quick.
If you want to sit down and play this game for four and five hours at a time, you're going to spend money. It's going to be hard to avoid, and that's the point of all free-to-play games, so I'm not calling out Bethesda specifically here. But I will credit where it's due, and the newer updates, including removing chest timers, bumping up the loot, and adding more variety into quests and jobs, has made it much more fun to have longer playing sessions without spending money. There's a fine balance between giving away too many freebies and dangling the carrot too far away from the player's face, and I think Blades launched with a little too much of a grind. It feels closer to the former now, and I think that'll actually entice more players to spend money since they'll enjoy more of the time they spend with the game.
I didn't hate the original game with chest timers and the like, but since those updates have hit, I've picked the game back up pretty often. Instead of doing a quest then waiting for my gold chest to open, I find myself wanting to do three or four quests before bed instead. I'm running lower on potions now, which means more crafting, more material use, and possibly more gem purchases, but hey, maybe that's the point.
As a disclaimer, I've put so much time into other Bethesda games, including around 1000 hours between just Skyrim and Fallout 4, so I'm probably a prime target for this kind of game. But then again, those are some insanely popular franchises, so you might be, too.
