The Elder Scrolls series is coming to our mobile devices… again. After a rather criticized game called The Elder Scrolls: Blades, a new one with the subtitle Castles is coming to our handheld devices. As the name of the game already suggests, we are talking about building a castle, or rather, your own castle, because you, playing one of four pre-selected characters, will become the king or queen. The idea and principle are simple. Build and expand your own home so that your subjects will be happy and bow to their almighty smallness. The design, tasks, and the work that you will entrust to your subjects, at first glance, may remind you of the successful and popular Fallout Shelter. This actually makes sense since Bethesda is behind the new Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series. And although at first glance Castles may seem like a plagiarism, the developers are trying to give this fantasy world its own personality, and not just copy mechanics from a post-apocalyptic world. But whether they will do it correctly is another question. But let’s start from the beginning.
The gracious king is killed, and you, as his successor, set out to build what he left unfinished. You have to provide your subjects with enough food, building materials and oil. It subtly replaces the electricity from Fallout Shelter, so if you don’t have enough oil, your rooms will gradually go dark. And at that moment, the work you are doing in these rooms will also stop. In addition, you will have to take care of the well-being of your population, because with a smile on your face, shared values are formed a little better, right? In order for this to happen, in addition to the correct layout of the job, you will need to scrape correctly. What’s new compared to Fallout is that your subjects come to you with various requests and requests, as well as events that happen in the world around you. In this way, you will constantly resolve minor disputes of this or that peasant, but at the same time decide which side you will take in the conflicts around you. Does this sound interesting? At first glance, yes, but at second glance you will quickly discover that the tasks are somewhat mundane and constantly repeated. Either you will accept your subjects, which will cost you precious resources or gold, or you will prioritize materials over their satisfaction. You will also often encounter problems where there is no correct solution and you will have to choose, for example, between two characters or races. In such cases, you are faced with a morally gray decision where one side or the other always leaves the throne room in anger.
Decision making itself is a very good mechanic that brings your own perspective to your castle building, but the decision style and often pointless arguments will soon become boring and won’t impact the game much… that is until your subjects will dethrone you. Just as quickly, you will discover that where there is a visible profit or a nice amount of material, there is a hidden curse or an unnoticeable hook. Additionally, the problem is the large discrepancy between how quickly you can upset someone with one decision and how quickly trust is restored. Unfortunately, there are very few scenarios here, and the mysterious story of the murder of the previous king that you have to unravel is exactly as banal as you would expect from a mobile construction game.
The difference here from Fallout Shelter is that the rooms are not pre-defined, so you can customize the castle to your liking. Do you need a huge room with a forge and a lot of space? You must have it. Unlike an atomic bunker, you can build walls as you wish and place individual workshops as you wish. This is definitely a welcome change and gives you the feeling that you are actually building something of your own, unlike Fallout, where all the bunkers were different from each other in that they had the same rooms.
But the problem arises is whether it is necessary to build so many rooms at all. There are very few individual master classes and premises. You need to unlock all the objects by leveling up, but after the first day of playing I had unlocked everything the game had to offer. One would think that he would subsequently begin to duplicate premises in order to make production more efficient and expand his estate faster, but no. At this point, a difficult choice arises: microtransactions or an extremely long grind. The initial progress in the game is quite fast. You complete basic quests, fight your first battles, build everything the game has to offer, the first inhabitants of your castle are born, and suddenly everything stops. Very quickly you get to the point where you have everything the game has to offer and then you just go around in circles. You can’t build because you have nothing to do without real money, so you simply craft new gear to complete more difficult missions, which unlocks new gear that will help you defeat stronger enemies again.
But unlike Fallout, Castles gives you the opportunity to craft all the necessary materials right in your castle. If you wanted to make new weapons in the Vault, you had to find the raw materials in the wasteland, where you had to send your Vault dwellers on dangerous missions. And although the ability to send subjects on expeditions for loot is not absent here, it is enough, for example, to unlock the necessary steel by completing tasks limited by the castle itself.
While this is a good solution to allow your castle to function more independently, I personally find the post-apocalyptic event mechanics lacking here. Fallout allows you to send explorers into the radioactive wasteland to find necessary weapons and equipment in addition to crafting materials. This adds an element of randomness and a possible sense of good loot to the whole event, whereas in Castle this element is completely absent. In short, you simply don’t have what you don’t do yourself or don’t get for completing missions. This makes your progression very easy and you always know what to expect from the next step, whereas in Shelter you could find great gear early in the game with a little luck, motivating you to repeatedly send other people to explore and take risks for better loot .
Source :Indian TV
