Enotria: The Last Song

Enotria: The Last Song is a solid soulslike with a unique, appealing identity, which is plenty to paper over the rough spots on the quest to free the world from a script nobody asked for.

While the story and graphics were convincing, the gameplay, boss design and enemy variety were not. Enotria isn't really bad, but it's not really good either, and is therefore somewhere in the middle of the crowded Souls genre.

Whether you love Italian folklore, architecture, music, or just want to explore a new souls-like, Enotria: The Last Song, is a title you’ll want to pick up. It features easy to pick up combat mechanics, a spin on parrying, and a fully detailed world filled with foes to defeat.

There is a lot of beauty in Enotria: The Last Song and Jyamma Games deserves to be commended for its efforts to stand out in a saturated market. With immersive connections to Italian folklore and an adoring love of subgenre, Soulslike fans will certainly enjoy the world of challenge. But while the combat is innovative it could use some polish.

Enotria: The Last Song is a compelling little soulslike which has enough of its own identity to be worth a recommendation, even if not all of its elements individually work as well. The emphasis on the game’s melee combat leaves its magic system a little clunky, and despite an impressive amount of flexibility in the game’s RPG mechanics, the ability to swap between different loadouts mid-combat wasn’t all that useful. Despite these minor drawbacks, the challenging boss fights, gorgeous art direction and fun exploration make this a worthwhile addition to any soulslike fan’s library.

Enotria: The Last Song is a faithful recreation of the original Souls games with a fresh new coat of Italian paint, and it brings with it enough personality and mechanics to stand on its own two feet. Unfortunately, the experience is held back by performance issues, bugs, and a lack of enemy variety for difficulty.

Enotria: The Last Song is a solid entry to the genre. Its beautiful design, deep customization, and satisfying gameplay invite players to experience its take on the soulslike formula.

Enotria: The Last Song is a work that stands out for its visual beauty and thematic originality, but it fails to reach the level of execution necessary in its gameplay. The mask system, although innovative, is not well balanced, and combat, an essential pillar in any Souls-like, is hampered by imprecise controls and mechanics that limit the player's freedom. The narrative, although intriguing, fails to develop in a coherent way, leaving the player with more questions than answers.

Aside from the fundamentals of combat, Enotria: The Last Song really tries to step outside of the box when it comes to dressing up the standard soulslike. The sun-drenched environments and wild, Italian folklore-inspired character designs are a real breath of fresh air straight from Italy’s Alps. Combat is fun, even when the difficulty spikes unexpectedly (since most of those fights are optional anyway) and despite the bloat of many, many systems that govern all of the more nuanced abilities and stats. The unapproachability of its RPG systems, and the wonky performance when a smooth frame rate matters the most are what really prevent Enotria from taking center stage.

Enotria:The Last Song is not without creativity or design potential. However, for an inexperienced development team, creating such a large-scale Souls-like game may have been overly ambitious. Poor balance, a wildly inconsistent difficulty curve, and the overwhelmingly negative combat experience overshadow the game's more impressive features, such as elemental statuses, skill build slots, and gear-switching mechanics.

Enotria: The Last Song is a beautiful, weird tale that almost nailed the gameplay and customization side of a Soulslike. It is by no means a bad game, it’s just not one I can easily recommend for all but the most ardent players of the genre.

For all its faults, Enotria: The Last Song is a pretty decent Souls-like, but it doesn't know how to use its ideas, which deprives it of any chance of standing out. Rather than promoting radically different styles of play, the configurations are limited to offering a little optimization at best. Combat balancing problems and its limited lifespan are also major black spots, in a genre rich in titles of far better quality, for a not-so-different price.

All things considered, Jyamma Games' Italian soulslike gave us mixed feelings: the bright side of the coin is made up of a pleasant plot, a first-rate artistic component and a quality soundtrack, while the darker side is made up of design issues related to the bosses and a gameplay formula that is not always well-balanced. Even leaving aside the technical uncertainties that could be resolved with a series of targeted updates, Enotria: The Last Song seemed to us to be a half-successful project, but between the lines it is still easy to glimpse the development team's potential.

Enotria: The Last Song deserves full marks, we are absolutely certain of this. But it is a title full of imperfections: this too is undeniable. Imperfections that denote a certain inexperience of the development team who chose to risk too much, to launch themselves into one of the most complex genres of the current videogame market, where there are some practically unattainable progenitors and a small handful of other exponents who, with difficulty, they did it. Unfortunately, Enotria is very far from all of these and although it offers an experience that, we are sure, will give some satisfaction to those who need to play at least one soulslike a month, it does not allow us to overlook all the problems associated with its game mechanics and the experience it offers. Our hope is that the team takes advantage of the criticism and launches headlong into a sequel capable of drastically improving every single aspect of the game while maintaining a certainly very fascinating imagery.

Thanks to its unusual source material and sunny setting, Enotria: The Last Song looks like a fresh take on a genre so often set deep in gothic nights. Unfortunately, beneath the mask, there's little that sets it apart from other, better games.

Italian folklore makes for a unique setting, but Enotria lacks the smooth combat and smart mechanics you'd look for in a decent soulslike.