A spectacular action role-playing game from the same studio that brought your classics like Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is a free-to-play iteration of the mainline class Elder Scrolls series available for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphones.
Combining the beauty and danger that lurks around every corner in The Elder Scrolls’ Tolkien-inspired world with the pick-up-and-play convenience of a portable title, this fantasy RPG promises a full TES experience in a smaller form factor. Scheduled for release in 2018, The Elder Scrolls: Blades is touted by Bethesda as a full-fledged entry in the Elder Scrolls series, promising both single-player and multiplayer elements in the game.
How to Download The Elder Scrolls: Blades
When it becomes available you will be able to download The Elder Scrolls: Blades from Google Play Store or Apple App Store. To start downloading click on the Download button at the end of this review. The download is free.
The Game Review
Controlled from a first-person perspective as is the tradition in most previous Elder Scrolls games, Blades was crafted from the ground up with smartphone and touchscreen devices in mind as most of the controls are gesture and tap-based with the occasional on-screen virtual stick making an appearance in the user interface as needed.
As in the mainline Elder Scrolls games, takes will be melee, ranged, or magic-based, depending on your character’s specializations and the player’s choice at the moment. Ostensibly a dungeon crawler, The Elder Scrolls: Blades will feature dungeons that are both handcrafted and procedurally generated and it will give players a virtually endless amount of gameplay to trod through. As in most role-playing games, players will be able to level up abilities and get better equipment as they play through this mobile RPG.
The game will have three main game modes: Abyss, Arena, and Town. Abyss will be an experience akin to an endless dungeon roguelike game, meaning that you only get one life and your character has to see how far they can make it through the dungeon. The term roguelike comes from the classic PC game Rogue and typically denotes a game with a one-shot life mechanic that is brutally difficult.
Arena will, as the name implies, be a player-versus-player mode that will allow The Elder Scrolls: Blades’ gamers to pit their characters against each other. A popular feature in almost every massively multiplayer role-playing game on the market, PvP will be strange to players of the mainline Elder Scrolls games but should be familiar to veterans of the Elder Scrolls Online variant.
Town is the game’s hub mode and will be the area where you can receive quests, interact with non-player characters, as well as all the other things that will be involved with the game. When the game begins the player’s hub town is destroyed and the player is tasked with rebuilding it, a sequence that opens more and more quest lines up as the player progresses. In addition to building their own town, players can visit the towns of other players. In a nod to versatility, The Elder Scrolls: Blades will be playable in horizontal or vertical view modes.
