LizardKing’s Enlightenment Fizzles the Light

By: GeekyGamerGirl87

Developed by LizardKing and published by Coconut Island Games, Enlightenment is a twin-stick rogue lite dungeon crawler game, that is currently out on Steam. I will admit that twin-stick shooters are not my strong suit, but I have been able to play them and end up liking them just by tweaking a few settings. However , for Enlightenment I was a little let down. I really wanted the game to work because it looks like a Bioshock meets Diablo game and the game could have been so much more. However, there were so many things that just didn’t feel right with the game. Before I do go into my review I would like to however thank both LizardKing and Coconut Island Games for providing me with a free copy of Enlightenment to play for this review. If it was not for them providing me with a copy of the game, I would not have been able to write this review.

As I stated earlier, I really wanted the game to work because playing the game you get this vibe of Bioshock meets Diablo. As I loved both of those games, I was more than eager to play Enlightenment. Graphically, I thought the game was great and it really set the atmosphere, but again there was just so much more that could have been done to better the game.

Starting off, I feel that the game didn’t do very well on presenting the story, and to me Enlightenment felt like a game, that needed the story to be better told. Some may argue that you can look up with the story is about in the game’s synopsis, and I would agree you can do so. However, it would be more player friendly if the story was laid out for you. From what I gather you wake up in one place and go through the tutorial and then after that you go into The Ark, that is all I gathered. It doesn’t answer the main questions like “Why are you at The Ark?” or “What happened to The Ark for it to be overran by the undead or enemies?” You are just simply there, and as someone who enjoys a good story to a game, this really did lack the story. The only time you get pieces of the story is during the load screens, but most of the time the load screens are just quotes, so again the player is left asking themselves; “What is going on?”

The game starts off and you awake in a room, again you don’t know why you are there it just goes into a tutorial that is a bit broken. It’s not even the fact that the translations at times pop up in Japanese and then quickly switches to English, but most of the time the controls in the game do not work. I first attempted the game with keyboard/mouse and the game felt very clunky, nor did half of the controls work such as hitting 1 or 2 to switch weapons, using the shift key to run just to name a few. I then switch over to the gamepad hoping that it would play a bit better as this is a twin stick shooter and again the controls were broken. There is a part in which you must use a syringe to heal yourself. It tells you to use the directional pad. It doesn’t indicate which button on the directional pad to press to use the syringe. It just shows the directional pad. I even went into the control settings in the game, and it still doesn’t tell you how to use the item on gamepad. I ended up having to use the keyboard to use the syringe to heal because the control healing just did not work. Another big issue with the controls is that half the time the controls just didn’t work. I was supposed to run during a trap and my character would not even run when I used keyboard. I finally got him to run using the gamepad, but it took me dying at least once to do so.  I even tried changing some of the key binding in the game and they did not stick after dying or entering other rooms. So, the controls definitely need some improvement.

From there was the melee system, which left me a tad bit annoyed at first until I figured out how it worked. You can only melee once and then you must wait until the gauge – which I assume is a stamina gauge –  empties before you can melee again. I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, because it makes the player use the melee as a strategy and I liked that. However, the problem with the melee is if I can only swing once and there are three to four enemies on me, I am stuck at a standstill. Again, not saying that I want the enemies to be nerfed, but the melee needed to be adjusted. I should be able to melee a few times before I get exhausted and must wait to melee again. Doing just one hit and then being able to melee would be great if the hit was strong enough to take out the enemy, but a lot of the time it isn’t.

Another issue I had was when you collected ammo. You just collect ammo which again collecting ammo isn’t where the issue lies. The issue is you have no idea what ammo it is you are collecting. I started off with a pistol and a rifle at one point and I had no idea where the ammo was going. When I ran out of ammo for one gun I would switch to the other and it would not fire. It doesn’t tell you how much ammo you have, and again when picking up ammo there is no indication on where the ammo is going to. In another playthrough I received a cross-bow and when I picked up ammo, I still couldn’t fire the cross bow, nor could I fire the pistol I was given. This can easily be fixed by the developers clearly stating what the ammo is going towards such as “Pistol Ammo” or “Cross-Bow Ammo”. The player shouldn’t have to play the guessing game when it comes to the ammo.

Due  to the current state of the game I am not sure if you will be able to play the game long enough to gather achievements. However, if you are willing to play the game does offer thirty-one achievements that you can collect. For those of you who enjoy collecting trading cards, I can tell you that the game does not offer trading cards. In the past, I have seen games add trading cards later. However, as this game has been out for almost a year, I can only speculate that they will probably not be adding them, unless people ask for them.

Overall, I cannot say that I recommend Enlightenment due to a lot of the bugs and issues that the game currently has. If this was a game that was still in Early Access, I would be okay with the bugs because you expect that from an Early Access game, but not from a game that has launched and been out for almost a year. If the developers could fix those issues with a patch update, I would be willing to give the game a second try and even do a second review. If you would like to give Enlightenment a try for yourself, you can do so by purchasing it on Steam for the price of $11.99 USD.

For those of you who would like to view a gameplay video of the game. I have included my YouTube video of the gameplay below; just so you can see the game being played. As I have written a review the gameplay video does not have any voice over. It is simply just the gameplay of the game.