ENYO review
Price: FREE
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App Reviewed on: iPhone 5
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Tinytouchtalesis a great little mobile developer best known for Card Crawl, a smartly designed and challenging dungeon-crawler-meets-solitaire game. ENYO is their latest game, and it shares turn-based and strategic elements, but is styled like a gladiator-themed, turn-based strategy affair instead of a fantasy card game. The result is another great little mobile game, but there are a few things that keep it from making the same impact.
Hooky hero
In ENYO, you play a not-so-well-armed character battling against all sorts of mythical creatures. Your goal is to use your shield, hook, and general mobility to defeat your foes through ten procedurally generated and increasingly challenging levels.
On any given turn, you have four actions at your disposal: shield bash, throw, hook, and stun leap. It's up to you to use these abilities to push and pull enemies into environmental hazards or even their own attacks. Although you don't get any new abilities in ENYO, some of them can change between turns depending on how you act. For example, if you use the throw command, you can throw your shield, but doing so will keep you from being able to shield bash until you retrieve it.
Die 1,000 deaths
As you progress on a run in ENYO, the enemy variety does too. This increases the difficulty of the game but also helps keep things fresh. If everything was as simple as just pushing enemies into lava pits, ENYO could get pretty boring pretty fast.
The interesting thing that comes with these new challenges is that it forces you to experiment a lot more and discover some subtle nuance to enemy behavior and how some of your abilities interact with different enemy types or situations. As a result, you may be spending your early time with the game frustratingly dying repeatedly. But like other games of this ilk (e.g. Spelunky), sticking with it and learning as you go can yield some pretty satisfying results. Also similar to Spelunky are ENYO's game modes, which feature two separate difficulty levels and a daily challenge, helping to add to the game's replayability.
Stranger things
As fun as ENYO can be, there are things about the game that are a little irksome. Playing on a smaller screen, for instance, can be difficult, as dragging and releasing your finger to move obscures the screen and can make it easy to miss the spot you meant to move to.
Beyond this, the scoring system in the game seems like it leaves a lot of your score potential up to the random placement of enemies, since you need to string together actions that affect enemies to score any points at all.
The bottom line
ENYO is pretty great fun, but doesn't quite hit the high bar that Tinytouchtalesset for themselves with Card Crawl. It's still worth playing if you enjoy roguelikes, but otherwise it may not hold your attention for long.