Elder Scrolls: Blades is something I never would have expected: a full-blown Elder Scrolls game that is mobile-friendly and playable with just one hand.

I know that's how it was introduced way back when at Bethesda Softworks' E3 2018 press conference, but it's tough to truly appreciate what that means until you play it. Now that I have, I'm convinced: longtime Bethesda lead Todd Howard wasn't making an empty promise.

When you strip away all the trappings of player progression, loot, scoring, and other dangling carrots that keep players invested, video games all boil down to one thing: mechanics. How they play, and how you play with them.

Elder Scrolls: Blades has a lot of other things going for it. It looks great and runs super smooth on an iPhone XS Max. It's not structured in quite the same way as other recent Elder Scrolls games, but the menu-based quest selection and contained play spaces work well for something that's supposed to be play on the go.

None of that matters if the game plays like trash, though.

Some players might prefer a more familiar two-handed control scheme, and that's an option. If you flip your smartphone into landscape mode, the game automatically adjusts and gives you twin virtual controls in the bottom left and right corners of the screen, to manage your movement and gaze, respectively.

When Elder Scrolls: Blades starts to roll out later in 2019, the one-handed option will be my go-to.

I tried that. It seems fine. But when Blades starts to roll out later in 2019, the one-handed option will be my go-to.

Moving from A to B is as simple as tapping on the screen where you'd like to go. Sometimes you'll see flashing objects in the environment: a door, a chest, some other point of interest. Tapping on those allows you to inspect or in some other way interact. It's simple and immediately intuitive.

Combat consists of pressing and holding in one spot while a meter fills up, and then either releasing or swiping to slash. You can continue holding your finger down after a slash to immediately start filling the meter again if you want to keep the combo going.

Once a fight begins, you're effectively locked into a 1-versus-1 perspective until it's over (think Infinity Blade). So there's no need to worry about movement or the surrounding environment; you can just focus on the fighting.

The hold-and-swipe approach is surprisingly satisfying, especially as you start to get the timing down and string combos together. People with smaller hands or larger smartphones might struggle to cover the full breadth of the screen in one-handed play, but I feel like most people will be able to get down with it.

Combat apparently gets even more complex as the game goes on and you open up access to shields, learn how to parry, and build up a pool of spells to cast. I only had a little bit of time to play, however, and I unfortunately didn't get to see any of that.

I also didn't get a sense of the larger game, which involves going on quests, finding treasure, and customizing your own, personal town. Blades is a free-to-play game monetized around using gems to unlock treasure chests: you can spend time playing and build up a pile of them, or you can spend money and buy them outright to get sweet loot more quickly.

All of these other elements -- the advanced combat techniques, the feedback loop of adventuring and town-building, the balance between gems earned vs. gems purchased -- are crucial to Blades, and their success or failure will reflect back on the game as a whole. But none of those things count for much in a game that isn't fun to play.

Based on the little I played, I don't think Elder Scrolls: Blades is going to have that problem. We'll all find out together when it starts opening up for early access later in 2019.



