The idea is to manage resources, not get your king killed, keep the people in the castle happy, have children, go on little quests, etc.
The Elder Scrolls: Castle games has quite a few nods to Skyrim, which is my favorite video game of all time. I received an Ulfric Stormcloak character within a week or so of downloading the game to my iPad. There are also the different races found in the Elder Scrolls/ Skyrim world, so if you're familiar with that, you won't be surprised to see Dark Elves and High Elves, Khajitt, Argonians, Bretons, etc.
I started playing the game on September 10, when it first became available, so I've been playing it for 13 days. I'm already a little bored with it.
It starts out with the assassination of the king, so the player gets to choose a king. My first king ruled for 10 years (each day is a year in the life of the kingdom) before somebody stabbed him in the back. Then I chose another king, who is currently ruling.
The king has to make rulings on various and sundry things, like someone isn't working well with somebody else in the kitchen, the warlocks wants to land on the shore and will curse the kingdom if not allowed to do so, and so on and so forth. The rulings make the subjects happy or sad, and sometimes makes someone an enemy of the king.
People can be banished, but I have only banished one person because I simply don't have enough workers to keep things going. I can't summarily banish people for sleeping with somebody else because I wasn't paying attention to who was married to whom. I look for my current king to be stabbed shortly, if I keep playing.
The quests are rather boring because there isn't much to do besides stick your fighters with good weapons and armor and send them off. You can watch them take down the enemy and occasionally use a special effect or a healing potion, but there isn't much else to do to make the quests interesting.
The castle world is promoted through experience points, and those allow upgrades of such things as the kitchen, the mill, the oil press, the workshop, etc. You can also put up little decorations that add to happiness or knock 1 second off of production of certain items.
I found Fallout Shelter to be much more engaging, even though the cartoonish look of Castles is cute. They are both repetitive types of games, but Fallout Shelter offers the opportunity to quickly get to 100 or more little characters and they all have something to do; Castles makes me feel lucky to have 50 and have them working. The aging thing in Castles is too quick, and older little workers die off while it takes a long time for the kids to grow up.
I am also more than a little irked that Microsoft owns Bethesda as of 2020, and the app is not available in the Microsoft Store. I prefer to play on the PC. I prefer a mouse to my finger on a tablet. I would have thought that Microsoft would have made this available as an app to its users, but apparently not. I know a lot of their games - maybe most of them now - go through the XBox game pass, which I do not use, but this isn't available through Microsoft for my PC at all.
I give Elder Scrolls: Castles a strong C- . It is not as much fun as the game it's based on, Fallout Shelter, and I'm surprised I've already grown bored with it.
Bethesda needs to figure out how to make the successor to Skyrim sometime before I'm old and too feeble to play a new game.
Thank you for reviewing this game. You've intrigued me over the years by talking about different games, but I really don't know where to start my gaming adventures.
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