The Elder Scrolls: Blades popped up on my phone today as available to download (still in Early Access). I don't know how long it's been available, but at least now that I got the notification, I decided to try playing it. I knew almost nothing of it going in, other than the graphics looked Skyrim-ish. The preview images in the Play Store were just a few scenery shots and that was it.

So, I'm going to write a little summary of the game for people curious about trying it out (or wanting to know why they should stay away).

The story of the game seems to be that while you were out adventuring for some reason or another, your town got burned down perhaps by some crazy queen because your village didn't pay its taxes. You return to town to find it almost completely abandoned, and somehow it's now your duty to repopulate and rebuild the town.

The game jumps back and forth between the town, which serves as a central hub where you can do things like crafting and talking to unlock quests, and the quest areas where you fight monsters and bandits and stuff while gathering loot.

And gathering loot is pretty much the meat of the game.

The controls are pretty simple and actually pretty intuitive. You can slide your finger around to look around, and then tap anywhere on the ground to walk to that location. You can also use a more dual-stick-like approach by using one thumb to move and the other to turn.

Combat is pretty lackluster, as you'd expect from a mobile game. Basically, you just hold on the screen and a circle will grow. When it reaches its maximum size, your attack is prepared, so you can let go, and you will attack. As you level up, you'll gain skills and magic that you can access by tapping their icons on the screen.

There's quite a bit of customization in the game (though some of it is more just "feels customy" and not really that much of customization). As you gather materials and bring in lost townsfolk, you can build buildings in the town, as well as decorate it. Basically there's a bunch of empty lots and you choose which building goes where. Your character weilds whatever armor you equip, which is always fun. You also get to create your character at the beginning of the game. I can't remember what all races were available, but I think it's the same lot you could choose in Skyrim, maybe minus one or two. There's a variety of pre-made head shapes, nose shapes, etc. and you can change the style and color of your eyes and hair and stuff. The mustache selection is very light, so if you're a mustache fetishist like me, you will be a little disappointed. But like all of the NPCs seem to sport the mustache so that's good.

And then there's the... actual game. As you know, these freemium games always revolve around some kind of catch (or often, multiple catches) where the game will suddenly become unbearable or frustrating if you don't pay money.

Blades's catch is in its loot box system. As you go through quests, you find and earn Chests, which contain valuable crafting materials, consumable items, and even sometimes weapons and armor.

The problem with the chests is that they take real-life time to open, and you can only hold so many. So you'll either have to go questing and forfeit all of your new chests you may get, stop playing and wait a while for your chests to open to get space for new chests, or spend the premium currency to open the chests immediately and continue playing unhindered.

At least in the beginning of the game, you seem to get a lot of wooden chests which open in 5 minutes. But you'll also somewhat easily grab other chests that take an hour or more to open. After my first little bout with the game, I was filled up with three hour-long chests and six of the five-minute ones. I had already started opening one of the hour-long ones, so I got "stuck" and couldn't continue playing unless I wanted to forfeit all my upcoming chests.

I'm assuming if I were to play long enough, I'd just end up with like 8 of the hour-long chests and have to come back every hour opening them for a while until finally I could play the game again.

Like all of these kinds of games, you have daily missions and stuff that you can do, as well as a main campaign mode. I'm not sure how easily it will be to complete all of the daily objectives and quests without paying to open your chests. It doesn't seem like it should be too bad, but again, I've only played for maybe an hour and a half.

Surprisingly, for a Besthesda game in Early Access, I've come across a total of 0 bugs so far. I'm a bit bewildered!

Anyway, the dungeon exploring feels nice, even though the dungeons are largely linear (maybe they will be less so later?) and it's always exciting to find chests and other loot laying around. The combat already feels stale and doesn't feel like it will get any better by leveling up and getting new abilities; it basically will boil down to your character being strong enough to win or having to level up and get new equips to win. There's not really much in the way of strategy. But I mean Skyrim was like that, too, heh.

If you want to crawl around dungeons and pick up loot casually, it would be a pretty fun game. If you're wanting to get intense into upgrading your character and stuff, you're going to be really restricted unless you dish out tons of cash, obviously. If you don't mind lootboxes and you like TES, totally go for downloading it.

So far I'm enjoying just trodding around and nabbing items, though, but I like that kind of thing. I'll keep playing it for now. Hopefully the game evolves so that we can visit each others' towns, create guilds and add friends, etc. Of course, we're still in Early Access so the game will have to manage to keep my attention until they add stuff like that. When even the high-quality Dragalia Lost didn't manage to win me over for more than like a month, things aren't going to look so great for tap-and-hold-to-win Blades right now. But I do like the aesthetic and as long as the dungeon-crawling feels relaxing, I might keep going for a while.

Good Stuff

• You can play in portrait or landscape mode!
• Intuitive and easy controls.
• Graphics and sound are pretty nice; runs fine on my old Galaxy S7.
• Looting dungeons is soothing if you like dungeon-crawling.
• Decent amount of customization.
• Mustaches, albeit few.

Bad Stuff

• Combat gets stale after about 2 battles.
• Loot and mats will probably get stupid rare really fast, unless you buy more lootboxes.
• Lootboxes with random contents.
• Lootboxes with pay-to-finish timers.
• Lootboxes with carry limits.
• Lootboxes.