Months ago I signed up for early access to Elder Scrolls – Blades – the mobile version of Elder Scrolls. Bethesda are inviting people to early access in waves – a couple of days ago I had an email saying I was now able to download and play the game.

I love the Elder Scrolls series, it is by far my favourite game to play. I do struggle for time though so having it on my phone seems like a great way to be able to play for 10 minutes here and there.

When you open the game, you go through the typical process of selecting which character type you are (I’m Wood Elf), picking your name, changing how you look. You also have to pick a name for your town.

The game itself is stunning. It’s typical of Elder Scrolls and feels like an Elder Scrolls game. The controls are tap to attack, also tap to where you want your character to walk. It can be a bit clunky and you can sometimes find yourself walking into walls or not quite where you want to go.

Combat is tap and hold, then release on the queue that the red circle turns yellow. You can also tap the shield icon in the centre of the screen to shield yourself from attacks, though it can be tricky to co-ordinate both the attack and defend. You also can’t move during an attach so sometimes you have to wait for the enemy to come at you before you can attach. This is mostly annoying with the skeevers.

The gameplay starts with going to a town that has been burnt down. You have to do quests and rebuild the town. The quests take you have to dungeons and some of them can be the same. I quite like how you can open the quest menu and start a quest right away, rather than have to walk for hours like in the game!

There has been a lot of complaint about the P2W (pay to win) style of the game. Like most mobile apps, there are waiting times that can be skipped by using gems. You can buy more gems to bypass this so you can build your town quicker, open chests and buy items from the shop. Though you can get gems from quests, levelling up and fighting.

You can pay your way to the end of the game without doing much, but it’s more fun to play without ‘cheating’ by opening your wallet.

The chest system is a bit annoying as you can only open one chest at a time, the silver chest takes 3 hours to open and as you seem to get lots of silver chests, it seems like you’ll never have enough time to open them all unless you use gems.

There are a few niggles in the game, such as the defending curing combat and awkward moving about, but overall I am enjoying this game so far. I’ve played for about two hours so I’m still pretty new to it all so I can’t wait to see what else I can do.