It's difficult for a development team to write a deep, involving game with weeks, if not months, of gameplay for the iPhone. With many games delivering a short lived experience for the price of a snack, it's unclear whether a large number of users want richer, fuller games that are appropriately priced. Enter Zenonia, a port of a game that has done well on mobile phones across Korea. Gamevil have taken a risk with this game, but have they pulled it off?

We made a good effort to try and complete as much of the game as possible before reviewing, and we still haven't got to the end yet. As alluded to before, this game is huge. It's the biggest game that we've seen thus far - and that's due to a clever mix of quests, areas and balanced combat. Not only that, but the game includes three classes of main character, each with their own weapons - and a good/evil system, where the actions you choose will affect the storyline. You will get many hours out of the game if you so choose.

The story is somewhat generic, but the good/evil balance does mix things up a bit. You'll be assigned quests from either the Guild of Light or the Guild of Night depending on where your allegiance is - the game has a nice quest system which includes a map of the world, plus there's many small side quests to get stuck into as well. Slaying monsters, retrieving items and traveling to many different locations are just a few of these goals. Of course, side quests do not have to be cleared to move on, although you may find that their use is necessary to help build your stats.

Yes, the game does involve some grinding to level up your character - but we never thought it was an unfair challenge. Enemies get stronger from area to area, but they can all be taken down the same way. The only exception to this is boss battles, which may involve another condition to be met as well.

The item system is pretty deep too, with many different health potions, food types, several armour varieties and lots of weapons that you can wield. Food is used for a dual purpose - restoring your hunger and special attack. The hunger level is denoted by the size of the yellow bar, and the colouring determines how much special you have left. If you don't eat, the size of the bar will decrease - but remember that both health and special refill automatically, so you will only need to use items if your health drops significantly, or if your hunger bar is negatively affecting how many specials you can perform.

Drilling down a tiny table with the on screen pad is the wrong way to utilise the touch interface of the iPhone.

We found the UI to be good in some areas, weak in others. The on screen directional pad is frankly not the best we've come across, but it's functional and works for most things - the double tap dash can be often invoked accidentally though. The main action button is of a good size, but the "quick selection" icons at the bottom are not. It can be a pain to activate whatever is in the slot - if the developer stripped out (or relocated) some unnecessary detail they could have been made bigger. This also highlights once of the major flaws in the game - small text and icons everywhere. Game-breaking flaws they aren't, but drilling down a tiny table with the on screen pad is the wrong way to utilise the touch interface of the iPhone.

Visually, the game impresses with its classic look and feel. It's not as high resolution as we'd like - indeed, if you take a closer look at the game it's quite pixellated, with elements not appearing as crisp as they otherwise could be. Again, this is not game breaking as the quality of the sprite visuals is very high overall. The game is packed into a less than 10Mb download, so we're not surprised that the music has been chopped short. Many loops last less than a minute, some only a few seconds - the good news is that there's a lot of them, but they can start to grate, especially as you cannot play iPod music.

The issues Zenonia has are simply cosmetic. If you love RPGs, then its minor flaws aren't going to upset you - there's a whole lot of good here. If the developer fixed the UI and ironed out the spelling mistakes (there's quite a few) it would be the definitive article. We still highly recommend that you download it anyway.

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