I’ve never been the biggest Elder Scrolls fan but some stuff stuck with me with the other versions of these games; The sense of exploration, character building and the story. The combat always felt a bit too random for me, so I went with the ranged options - or just trying to diplomacy my way out of most situations. Elder Scroll Blades on mobile devices is the distilled essence of walking along linear maps to try and accomplish cookie cutter quests while doing a ton of combat. Not my cup of tea, even if as far as mobile first person games go, this wasn’t terrible.
The first thing the game teaches you is how to fight. Everything works with tapping the screen or buttons representing your spells and abilities. Pretty much all of it is timing based as well, so you just need to read your opponent’s movements and block when they attack while attacking when they’re open. You also have spells that you can cast to deal damage or confer yourself some small bonuses and you have abilities that are more useful for the martial type. Even if the combat is timing based, I didn’t find it terribly fun. Playing it on an iPad was a bit unwieldy and I usually resorted to casting my spells and just mashing attacks until I won. Some of the finesse seems like it was lost on me.
I created my character, unsure what the game would be like and when I saw what the skill tree was like, I decided to change my starting race. I had to do a ton of dumb stuff to restart my game and couldn’t just select an option in a menu somewhere. But I went with a magical class and started walking around. The movement isn’t -too- terrible, but it feels like your character is always drunk, walking in the strangest lines across incredibly bland landscapes. Having to destroy every barrel and then tap on every small item to collect them felt like a chore really quickly, especially when all the items you collect are used for a myriad of busywork-like activities such as repairing your gear, upgrading your town, or resurrecting if you die.
Some maps have secrets you can find, which at least gives them a sense of place, but for the few hours I’ve played I fought in the same forest and the same dungeon at least ten times. You fight through boring quests that ask you to defeat all enemies or find a certain number of resources and all of that feeds back into building and upgrading. The core gameplay loop isn’t great. I wish ESB would’ve focused more on the exploration and fighting, not unlike Infinity Blade games of the past. Having to walk around an incredibly empty town that you can rebuild into useless buildings. Their skill tree system is okay and the gear that you find in chests has different attributes that you can use to build a character somewhat like you want, but the core of what you’re doing is pretty boring.
ESB isn’t for me. Maybe if you’re a die-hard Elder Scrolls fan that just needs something to play on your phone, you could do worse than this game, but after completing the nth identical quest and coming back to my town where I could spend some currency to upgrade my statue (?) I decided that this was as good as any a time for me to stop.
