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Illuminum The isometric RPG appears to have found a new home on mobile phones, with it's hack and slash action and text-based conversations proving to be a perfect fit for the portable format. Illuminum manages to provide a decent, challenging level of game-play, and also happens to be quite funny as well!
You take on the role of Eric, perhaps not the most heroic of names unless you're a Viking or Bananaman, who is destined to become the saviour of Annon, destroying the enemies who populate the area. While these start off fairly lightweight, with the likes of rats and slugs, they do get a little bigger and badder as you move along.
Before beginning your epic adventure, Eric will need to find the town, where he's able to talk and barter with traders, visit the tavern, undertake quests and even save your game. Saving costs money, though you should be able to gather plenty of this up as you kill your enemies. Despite the cost of saving, it's an important thing to do, as the last thing you want is to spend ages grinding through enemies, levelling up, only to wind up getting killed and losing it all.
Controls are fairly simple, with the d-pad or 2468 keys controlling your movement, while 5 or the action button handles your attacks. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any means of blocking enemy strikes, but as long as you're a quick hitter with your sword and have plenty of health items in your possession (which you remember to use) it'll all be good.
The game doesn't really give you much in the way of directions of where to go, if any, leaving you to wander the maze of tunnels somewhat aimlessly, smashing up enemies that you come along. Naturally, it can get annoying if you wander around fruitlessly for a while, without actually finding the exit to the next level, especially if you wind up being cornered by enemies and drained of a spot of health. Still, a bit of exploration doesn't really go amiss, though the occasional helping hand would have been nice.
As for the visuals, these are okay without setting the world alight. Enemies are easily to distinguish from yourself, and the captions that appear when in conversation with traders are quite smart. The only real issue that springs to mind is that on certain tower floors, the corridors are quite narrow, meaning that you either can't see the enemies that line them, or worse still you can't even see your own character.
Other than this, though, it's a fairly decent hack and slash game, which gives you a nice amount of action for its budget price. If you like the action genre in particular, then you should get plenty of enjoyment out of this one.
 
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