The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey Review (N-Gage)

A portable Elder Scrolls? Sounds like a plan. But despite the exciting prospect, fans of the series will find themselves severely underwhelmed.

Shadowkey is an interesting prospect: the Elder Scrolls series is a long-running PC staple that boasts massive worlds completely at the whim of the player. There’s no set path to follow, and adventurers may travel wherever they like from the start. While this has endeared it to hardcore RPG fans everywhere, it’s a name not so familiar to the mainstream, making it something of a surprise that Nokia would pursue the name.

Shadowkey isn't the first portable ES game, as the previous two Elder Scrolls Travels games are downloadable java games. Shadowkey is, however, the first Travels game to use a fully polygonal world, and is available only on the N-Gage.

The storyline this time is centered around a struggle involving the Battlemage Jagar Tharn and the Shadowmage Skelos Undriel. Basically, you've got to stop Skelos Undriel before he garners power from the Star Teeth. The story is both hard to follow and surprisingly uneventful. While it has the vagueness present in most Elder Scrolls games, it lacks the magnitude and cohesion that brought it all together.

Whereas previous entries based much of their replay value on the numerous sidequests available, dwarfing the main quest, Shadowkey is fairly straightforward. There are several sidequests along the way, most of which really don't require anything special…