Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom Review

Shiness:The Lightning Kingdom is an action RPG developed by a small French indie studio named Enigami studios. This is the first game that the studio has produced and for a first attempt it isn't too bad.

Shiness:The Lightning Kingdom has a pretty unique combat system at least for the genre, of all the RPG’s that I have played I have never ran into one that uses this style of combat. In fact I would go so far as to say the combat is what kept the time that I have spent in this game even remotely enjoyable. The combat is a “beat ‘em up” style like games such as Street Fighter or Tekken and it does make the game a bit more enjoyable than it would have been if it was a traditional RPG style combat system. A huge part of combat is the elemental attacks and the different types of enemies that change up the moment-to-moment gameplay. For example, to charge up your elemental attacks while in gameplay you have to wait for the arena to change to the colour of the element you are using. This forces you to not rely so heavily on using your elemental attacks so much, or to switch to the element that is surrounding the fighting arena.

Shiness:The Lightning Kingdom’s story is lackluster at best, there is nothing new here or anything that stands out as interesting. The voice acting is also a poor aspect of the game: the characters just didn't seem genuine enough for me, it didn't seem like the voice actors had any passion for this project.

Shiness is beautiful in every way from the small little details scattered around the world to the artistic design of the characters, every part of this game screamed to me this should be in some kind of art gallery. It is truly magnificent how they have made the game shine despite being a low budget indie title. It really is inspiring and made me appreciate the graphics in games a little more.

Shiness will take a player who likes to stop and look at everything close to around 30-40 hours to complete where as it took me (just focused mostly on the story) around 20 hours to complete. This was brilliant as normally I don't play RPG’s because of the time needed to invest in them to get anything fulfilling back out of the experience, Shiness does away with that and it is great for anyone who is looking to play an RPG and doesn't have a whole lot of time to invest into it.