Very buggy and unplayable. Don't recommend to play in the current state.
Having reached Level 5, I have faced many save corrupting glitches, that broke my game and made me quit. Even without the bugs, the game is quite bland, where every level is basically following the same formula: find an NPC/note, collect Sigils of Entry, collect several items throughout the map, push switches and then teleport to the next level, while fighting annoying enemies.
But on the positive side, the game has a potentially good story, interesting communications with Daedra mechanics and humor and the game could be very enjoyable if was remastered properly.

without irony, the first Elder Scrolls game that is actually decent enough to recommend as something more than a mere exercise in history. why is that? character creation is simplified but otherwise has not changed much. combat has not changed at all. due to Battlespire's status as a spin-off, there are much less RPG elements. there certainly is not any open world to explore. Battlespire's superiority is for one primary reason: it actually has half-competent level design, likely in part due to its more limited scope.

Arena's levels, while as far as i can tell are "hand-crafted", are simply bad; they are labyrinthine to a fault, senselessly "designed", and hurt to navigate without a strategy guide. i would say this is in part an artifact of the game's open world ambitions but i am not entirely sure that is true. Daggerfall's levels are at least as intolerable, and in many ways arguably worse: every level, main quest or procgen slop, uses the same goddamn brick/cobble/tile textures fucking everywhere. you generally cannot identify what -- again main quest -- level you are on based on a screenshot. not only that, levels are constructed out of prefabs stitched together. both games' spaces are, holistically, monotonous homogenate; utterly devoid of soul.

enter Battlespire. the first thing one notices about it is that it is not an open-world RPG. it is a dungeon crawler, and when a game is a dungeon crawler, suddenly the dungeon matters a lot more. the game makes use of a diverse set of textures, models, level geometries -- this may sound like nothing, but this is a rather drastic improvement! the levels themselves are distinct from each other. one is a training facility for imperial battlemages. another is a sprawling island with various landmarks spread out across it. the various realms of Oblivion may actually end up sticking in your memory, both while you are playing the game and long after. levels do not de facto require a strategy guide to merely navigate. there are some hiccups with the game being excessively obscure, but it is nothing a brief trip to a walkthrough cannot solve. emphasis on "brief".

Battlespire's setting is a lot more interesting. you are outside of the mundanity of Tamriel, cast into the seas of Oblivion and set to traverse several of its realms flowing with magica. what or who are the residents of Oblivion? that would be the Daedra: divine immortals who instance a panoply of morphologies and personalities. you do not fight a single bat or rat in Battlespire. the resident trash mob is a diminutive satyr which speaks like a pagan from the Thief games. did i mention you can enter dialogue with practically every opponent you meet? this is all to say that the game is simply a lot more interesting and weirder than not only the previous two Elder Scrolls games but also a great deal of fantasy games more generally. you are somewhere between heaven and hell, but certainly not earth.

Battlespire is probably one of the buggiest and most poorly optimized games i have ever played. straferunning exists, which, granted, is far from unique to this game. if cycletime is too high you can both barely move and move in the wrong direction(s). that sort of jank is expected from any dos game really. what isn't expected is that even with cycletime set to what was the cycletime of one of the best CPUs at the time, the game still has noticeable movement glitches, and still performs terribly. random crashes are common. FPS drops by ~half in the presence of transparent textures. enemies either phase into the ground or turn invisible when you attack them sometimes. i can't tell which. one level corrupts your save if you load it from a restart too many times because it generates too many container objects for some reason. the final level lacks music. so it's a testament to how decent this game is, or at least tolerable relative to the hells of Arena and Daggerfall, that it is still basically enjoyable.

This game feels like a big step back from Daggerfall. I think perhaps I'm just not a fan of the premise of this game, as much of the things I take issue with are, TECHNICALLY an improvement (?) or at least seem to be what the designers did intend to do. For example, the graphics are "Better" as they use images more often than pixel art, however, the low res images and models look so ugly in my opinion. The music is also much more atmospheric, which I suppose is "better" but to me, it is so much more boring and drab compared to the great soundtracks of Arena and Daggerfall.

The world itself is also not a "World" it is simply a building, a very boring building in my opinion with giant open rooms... that are empty a lot of the time, the plot of this game is different to the previous entries as it is stationary, we aren't trecking Tamriel or exploring Iliac Bay, we are instead stuck in a dark gloomy building. Perhaps to some this is an interesting spice up to the series, a more dark, atmospheric setting, but to me, drab, boring and painful to sit through.

The game just overall feels a lot more aimless than Daggerfall or Arena, which is saying a lot considering Daggerfall was an entirely open-ended non-linear adventure, but here you are just placed in a building with no clue where to go or what's going on, and this is by design, the plot is that your player character is mislead into this building and has no idea what's going on.

The mechanics themselves also take a hit, gone are the vastly superior mapping from Daggerfall, and gone are the bare minimum basics of Elder Scrolls, the rest system. The rest system in Arena is tedious, but viable, which was then greatly improved in Daggerfall, so of course, Battlespire chooses to remove it entirely. It does have the grace of giving gradual regen, which is a good addition, but now instead of simply skipping ahead time, your only option is to not rest at all, or to just, wait. Even the character creation and levelling is somehow worse, as youre now given a ton of "points" rather than simply lowering stat numbers, but you must divy up these "points" between every single part of your character. Once again this is an ""Improvement"" as you can dedicate these points to whatever you want, however it just over complicates things as it is pointless to give these points to certain aspects that you can level manually, whilst other things these points can improve are exclusive to this system. Its just a mess, a mess that did not need to be made as it was better as it was previously.

A good addition to this game is the dialogue options with enemies, you can now talk and interact with almost every enemy with branching options for you to choose. This is far better than the NPCs of Arena and Daggerfall, as they mainly exist to either just give you a quest or tell you a location of something, whereas here you can actually have conversations, and all the dialogue is voice-acted to boot. This is one of the few things that is a direct upgrade and is an evolution of the Elder Scrolls formula, rather than a reduction.

I will note that I did not complete this game, nor even play it for a substantial while, so perhaps the game vastly improves going forward. But for the brief time I did have with it, it was a boring slog, so I quit before I lost all will to live. Perhaps if the premise intrigues you of the switch up to the setting/structure this may be of interest to you, but for me, this game is a miss.

Amazing character creation, and amazing lore (this gave us most of what we know about daedra in the elder scrolls), I mean, we are literally in a medieval magic powered spaceship, how is that not cool?

The game starts with a very interesting character creation system with a point system that lets you debuff yourself in exchange for more points to spend on more skills or stats. It's one of the most interesting systems I've interacted with.

It also has an interesting system where you can talk to the enemies instead of just fighting them, perhaps convincing them to not fight or help you.

That's cool and all... if I could control my character. I'm being serius when I say that if you press forward, your character doesn't go forward. Is skews to a side randomly, you don't have the same speed in every angle and it doesn't seem to be consistent with anything for you to get used to it. That literally made me quit the game. It's unbearable. Which is sad, because I had tons of fun making the character.