The Elder Scrolls: Blades Review - Nice, But Not TES (Topic)

This game could have originally been just another mobile grind. It would be possible to pass by her and not even pay attention, but no. Todd Howard announced from the E3 stage that The Elder Scrolls: Blades will be a full-fledged sequel to the series, but only on phones. We were promised: dungeons, pumping, huge territories for research, the development of our settlement and pvp battles. As a result, all this is in it, but as it turned out - it's a completely different game.

Recently, TES: Blades went into Early Access, and reviews of it began to appear. Again, the game could have passed us by right away, but alas, words such as "the official continuation of the series" force us to stop at it. We collected the impressions of people from the forums, reviews, criticism and tried the project ourselves in order to describe what the game is like in the review of The Elder Scrolls: Blades.

TES: Grind

From the very beginning, Blades breaks the already established rule, where our main character is a prisoner who is miraculously freed. The game's plot begins shortly before Skyrim takes place. We play as the Spy of Blades, the king's secret squad that protects the dragonborn. After signing a treaty with the Aldmeri Dominion, the blades are dismissed and hunted.

After these events, we return to our hometown, and find that it is destroyed. The task falls on our shoulders to rebuild the burnt city from scratch and attract the inhabitants back. True, a reasonable question arose here, why exactly we? Yes, you understood everything correctly, we are getting to the bottom of the plot of the game for mobile phones, but Besezda is to blame herself. At the very beginning, our city is only one empty site with different zones on which to build houses or workshops. To build them, we need resources obtained by completing quests.

Now the game works in the spirit of modes: a city-planning simulator and an abyss. The Abyss is an eternal dungeon where you go down and kill enemies. Interesting at first, but over time it gets boring.

In city mode, the more houses, the higher its prestige. The level of prestige determines which quests you can take and which you cannot. Quests are taken from NPCs who always stand and do nothing. After that, you simply teleport to the scene of the quest, where you need to clear everything from enemies and collect resources.

Basically, this is the whole gameplay at the moment. At a certain location, you kill mobs, collect resources and sometimes upgrade your weapons. The tasks themselves become more difficult each time. Grind of pure water.

Lore goes under the tail of the Khajiit

Conversations with NPCs, so to speak, they are, but even poorer than in the joke about the ring of answers in Fallout 4. As a rule, you have only two answer options, which do not affect anything. The answers of the mobs are also poor. And this is the saddest thing. It didn't cost the developers anything to create a more branched dialogue branch so that what was happening and the lore had at least some meaning. For example, our main goal is to restore the city, we ask the NPC: "What happened to the city?" Answer: "He burned out." I know that it burned down, how ?! And we are not given an answer to such most obvious questions. Why did the fire start? Where does this city come from, what is its history?

Alas, it's hard to come up with a story for a city that has never existed in the official universe. Ok, it's kind of understandable, each player builds his own city, but at least some general story before we took on it should be?

There are no books or notes in the game. In the dungeons, where a cane of the dead is on you, you will not find anything either. The environment does not carry any narrative. The fact is that we loved the TES series of games for such small narrative elements, but they simply do not exist here, like laura in general.

There are only a couple of facts - the city is located somewhere in Tamriel and the robbers of the "Blood Queen" are raiding it. There are also mysterious catacombs underneath.

Sweet roll, candlestick, toffee - forget it

Give Blades its due, for a mobile game its locations [dungeons and woodland] look good and at times non-linear. Almost all chests or boxes on them are decorations. Loot barrels are always kindly highlighted and they contain money, gems [donated currency], resources for the city and even potions.

Nothing but money falls from enemies, and equipment cannot be removed from them. All improvements can be bought in forges or in chests for those same gems. Chests are sometimes given to you as a reward for a task, and you can open them in your inventory. In short, these are damn loot boxes and that says it all.

The chests do not open immediately. Normal ones in a few seconds, and some golden chest can open in six hours. Inventory space is limited, so either open and wait, or buy another slot. And do not forget that you can drop out re-equipment or junk. Local inventory management prevents you from collecting various items like in the original games of the series, and there is essentially nothing to collect, except for donated loot boxes.

All this enrages, because it unnecessarily stretches the gameplay.

Boosting

And so, since this is a real game in the series, should there be pumping? In Blades, this is just an RPG element, but not a full pumping. You get experience for quests, and as you level up, you can pump either mana or stamina. Also, one more point is given for pumping the tree of abilities: magic or skills.

The mechanics of stamina in the game have become similar to mana. You pump various perks that consume stamina during their use. Blocking with a shield does not take anything away. In principle, the boevka is implemented normally and does not enrage. A bit like Diablo with its evasions and skills that need to be applied in time.

There are lags, but they are not serious. Perhaps there are problems with the balance in the game. You can suddenly meet a character who kills with one hit, and you have to grind for a long time to kill him later.

The situation, of course, can be corrected with gems, apply them to complete the level. Here they are positioned as a time-saving currency. However, this is one of the worst monetization models where parts of your game are so terrible that the player wants to pay just to skip them.

Draw swords?

From a technical point of view, the game is very good, there are practically no bugs, but it looks normal for its level. Even compared to Fallout 76, it's much better. Users also point out that the game has a cool vertical mode. Seriously, Todd Howard didn't lie that the game can be played with one hand. The battles themselves are not infuriating and even enjoyable.

But in terms of the fact that this is a continuation of the TES series, everything is bad. It's just a good grind, but by no means a continuation of the legendary series. In other words, the mobile grinder turned out to be a mobile grinder - what a surprise.

The Topic of Article: The Elder Scrolls: Blades Review - Nice, But Not TES.
Author: Jake Pinkman