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Enjin is a second-layer blockchain built on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s designed to add utility to games and make managing video game-related assets easier. It’s the 95th largest cryptocurrency in the market and it’s the only crypto recognized by the Japanese government as gamer-friendly.
Enjin has ambitious plans to be used as a currency at gaming conventions, on arcade machines, and on third-party marketplaces to purchase NFTs. Which was the whole reason I first got interested in Enjin token last year. Thinking about the conventions I’ve been to and the gaming adjacent items I often purchase for a collection or two, I though investing in Enjin was a smart gamer move.
Unfortunately, I invested in Enjin near its all-time high. The result has been a noticeable decline in the value of my Enjin assets. And since little to no gaming conventions outside of Japan have recognized Enjin as legit, I can’t use the tokens I have yet. The Enjin token is worth about $.40 at the time of writing, coming down from a high of $4.82 not long ago. It has a total market cap of over $400 million and moves over $119 million in 24 hours.
Though Enjin is included in the top 100 cryptocurrencies and though it was created with gamers in mind, the games developed on the Enjin blockchain are often dismal, dysfunctional, and depressing. The dev teams for Enjin-based games are usually smaller than seven people, and many developers have full-time careers outside their games. Compared to other blockchains, Enjin-based video games clearly lack quality. I don’t know what factors contribute to this. I do know that Avalanche, Solana, Harmony, and Polygon have better gaming projects for gamers to enjoy. I know this because I play games on those blockchains and the difference in every kind of metric is staggering.
Enjin-based games have their high points, but the are far and few in between. Meanwhile Solana is attracting all kinds of projects–and all kinds of money–to its ecosystem; Avalanche is so enticing, games are leaving their home chain for its benefits; and Polygon, which is a layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum like Enjin, has scooped up some of the best video game developers in the industry. My experience on Enjin made me appreciate the investment of time and care other blockchains have put into their ecosystems. It also made me further regret my investment into Enjin. I have since split some of my Enjin tokens for other tokens that have more utility.
Hopefully, Enjin will attract more developers and projects to its ecosystem in time, but for now, these are the best the blockchain can produce. That doesn’t mean these are all to be avoided. Many are more complete games and have a more outlined plan for the future than the competition, which is why they’re on this list. But they’re all missing something; quality art, tokenomics, or a native English-speaking editor.
Regardless of the art quality or smoothness of the graphics, the games featured on the Enjin blockchain are no less lucrative or profitable than other blockchains. They have discords and Twitter followings, they have fully doxxed development teams, and they have a dream to create a good game. If that’s all you’re looking for as a gamer, then look no further.
What I Learned
If you don’t feel like diving into the meat of Enjin’s best games, let me simplify it for you. Stormrite is the highest quality game Enjin offers. Lost Relics is the most lucrative. Alterverse is the best metaverse. And Forest Knight focuses on tokenomics the most.
Now you know.
How I Chose These Games
Finding the criteria to judge these games by was not as simple as other blockchains. Many of these games don’t have a native token, for governance or utility, which means I can’t track the game’s economy. Many games use Enjin’s token to run their game and only offer an in-game currency–like gold coins or zenie–which isn’t a true cryptocurrency, it is limited to the confines of the game. By doing so, the game’s profits and market cap and daily volume are wrapped up with Enjin’s data. That made it difficult to find which game was the most lucrative, or even to judge games equally.
In the end, I went with the games that Enjin themselves seemed to be marketing the most aggressively. Some of them have native tokens currently, and some have plans to release them down the line. Some are built entirely on the Enjin blockchain, some only use Enjin to manage their NFT marketplace. After finding the games Enjin was most proud of, I researched their roadmaps, their user base, their gameplay mechanics, and their options for earning crypto. These are the best games that I came across on the Enjin blockchain.
Moonshot Voyage
Moonshot Voyage is a top-down looter shooter with fast-paced action and a minimalist art style. Take the role of a furry bounty hunter in space and embark on a journey to find the mysterious and powerful Moonshot, an ancient spaceship that was lost centuries ago. You’ll explore dead moons, haunted forests, and alien breeding grounds in search of the elusive Moonshot. Your bounty hunter is also a cat. So there’s that.
Moonshot Voyage is built by Safemoon Inu, a company with plans for a meager metaverse that uses their token, SMI. Moonshot Voyage is the first game produced by SMI, but they plan to integrate any further IPs into each other for full interoperability. All characters and weapons and items are NFTs to purchase or sell to other players. However, the NFT artwork is so atrocious it’s almost laughable. And I thought Splinterlands was bad. The NFT drawings may be bad, but rendering them into Moonshot Voyage makes them much better. The NFT art is essentially just poor sketches, but once in the game, it looks sleek and stellar.
Moonshot Voyage is not a popular game. Nor is it lucrative. Though their social medias are active, they have less than 500 followers on Twitter and the price of their SMI token is worth less than $.00000226. They don’t have any plans to market the game in the future, and with the Giga bear market we’re experiencing at the time of writing this, I’m not sure how well Moonshot Voyage will survive. But one thing it has going for it: it’s a fun game to play. I actually had a blast dashing around and murdering everything that moved around me. Much more enjoyable than the button clicking that amounts to gameplay on other games and I’m definitely not referring to CryptoBlades. Okay, I definitely am.
Moonshot Voyage is available as a demo for PC and early access for NFT holders.
Forest Knight
Forest Knight is one of the clunkiest, most old-fashioned-looking games I ran across on the Enjin blockchain. It’s not just the NFT artwork that looks bad in Forest Knight, it’s every creative drawing you will encounter as a player. The gameplay is more rudimentary than in The Oregan Trail and it feels like the development team put less time into world-building than any other aspect of the game.
Why then is it on this list?
Because Forest Knight has the best tokenomics of any game on the Enjin blockchain.
Not sure how that came to be. There seems to be almost no balance among the developers. They wanted their economy to be strong and long-term, so they put the bulk of their skills into financial understanding. But it seems at a cost to every other aspect of the game. Forest Knight is the only Enjin-based video game with deflationary mechanics employed in the ecosystem already. Most games don’t even have deflationary measures on their roadmaps. Forest Knight has a native token, KNIGHT, unlike other Enjin-based games which merely rely on the Enjin coin. Forest Knight has plans for plots of land, pets, and other features that will only bolster its rankings down the line. All of that puts it far ahead of its competition.
At the moment, Forest Knight is a strategy and turn-based fighting game. You play as one of several classes–raider, knight, sorcerer, samurai–and your role is to defend your forest home from the invading skeleton lord. Fight off hordes of undead skeletons and protect your small corner of the forest. It’s like a crappy Plants vs. Zombies. No, that’s not quite right. It’s like a crappy Plants vs. Zombies in rough draft form made by a group of 5th graders intending to interpret the the War of Roses but they only ever got their info from TikTok videos. Yeah. I said it.
There are multiple KNIGHT tokens on the crypto market, but Forest Knight’s KNIGHT is worth slightly over $.02 at the time of writing. Their market cap is so low it’s incalculable, but their daily volume is a whopping $4,000. Forest Knight is available to play on PC or Android. It’s free-to-play at first, but to enjoy the full game, you’ll have to purchase a few NFTs. Though their gameplay is low-quality–and I mean low–and their current market stats aren’t great, Forest Knight could present an excellent opportunity to make an early investment into something that could eventually 10x or 100x. Which is mind-blowing to think something this poorly made could someone explode one day, but that’s crypto for you.
Alterverse
Alterverse is a more polished, mature metaverse than its Decentraland or Sandbox cousins, mainly because they use Unreal Engine 5. The avatars look realistic, not blocky or cartoonish, and the world is meant to bring about immersion. Alterverse is a metaverse that exists in a future where Skycities are a commonality and hover cars are so old school. Jet cards, sports arenas, and virtual yacht clubs dominate Alterverse’s experience.
Alterverse, like The Sandbox and Decentraland, is built as a place for gamers to socialize. Whether it achieves that as well as its competition remains to be seen, but they certainly pull off a better art style. There are plenty of mini-games throughout Alterverse, but they lack the sheer variety and scope of the mini-games offered by The Sandbox.
Another game that revolves around an NFT marketplace, Alterverse’s NFTs are mostly cosmetics or vehicles. There are a few weapons to pick up and use in the combat arena, but just about anything you purchase will be expensive. The cheapest item I found was a helmet for $60.
Alterverse is a shiny, graphically gorgeous metaverse to explore. But the lack of activities made me feel like a 60-year-old retiree trying to figure out how to waste the remaining years of my life. Do I want to visit the art gallery or go yachting? Do I want to watch a sports match or go on a cruise in my luxury airliner? Should I go shopping at those high-end boutiques or have a bottle of virtual wine at a 5-star restaurant? The dryness of it all left me longing for the zany, chaotic world of Alterverse’s cousins, even if their art style is deliberately low quality.
Alterverse is also the hardest game to earn crypto in. They hardly have any features in the game for you to make crypto. Instead, they offer affiliate, mod, and streamer programs. If you recommend people to play, you’ll earn discounts in the marketplace. If you act as a mod in discord and help people learn how to play, you’ll earn more discounts. And if you stream yourself playing, you’ll open even greater rewards. That all worked the cheapen the actual gameplay experience of Alterverse for me. As if the team behind the metaverse doesn’t want you to earn anything off their project, they only offer you discounts. Made me feel like I was working at a company that didn’t pay me, they only offered me discounts on their products. Which is… wrong. But as an Enjin-based metaverse with tons of mini-games to master, it could do a lot worse. Could do a lot better, too. But it could also do a lot worse.
Lost Relics
At one time Lost Relics was one of the most lucrative web3 games on any blockchain. A bear market and formidable competition have since dethroned Lost Relics in the eyes of other blockchains, but they remain a heavy-hitter on Enjin. They continue to foster a lively community and they plan to roll out several updates soon.
Lost Relics is a game heavily inspired by the hack-n-slash adventures of the Diablo franchise. The result is a blockchain Diablo game that features NFT weapons–some of which are so rare, only one exists in the entire game–and billions of dungeons to explore. Developed by Codebit Labs, an Australian company, Lost Relics is a game with plenty of content to dive into, even if some of it feels repetitive before long.
Though Lost Relics is a free-to-play game, you will only have access to limited parts of it in the free version. To gain access to the entire game players must purchase a membership crystal. Membership crystals, once activated, cannot be turned off or traded to other players. Crystals come in 1, 7, 30, or 90-day versions, and even the largest crystal will only set you back $60.
During the first eon, people prospered and gained nigh limitless knowledge from the elements. Alas, that knowledge was lost during the Deception War. Now, in the time after the Deception War, people are trying to find the lost knowledge and power of the time before death and destruction. They are trying to find… lost relics. The main way to make money in Lost Relics is by obtaining, you guessed it, lost relics. You find them by completing quests and missions and killing tons of enemies in the process. You can then take those lost relics and sell them at the Royal Marketplace or on a third-party marketplace like OpenSea. Of course, if no one wants to buy your relics, you’re out of luck.
Lost Relics is a game that could be a lot better. I’m sure you’ll have the same initial reaction I did upon seeing the game in action, “Really? That’s it?” The graphics are poor and the enemy design is from the 1990s; enemies are all the same framework reskinned in different colors, and their only offensive tactic is to charge head-on at you. But the design of their automated buy/sell feature in the Royal Marketplace is heavenly and there’s no reason why every other blockchain game can’t implement it themselves. Seriously, that feature alone earns Lost Relics a spot on this list and I put the question to every other crypto game in existence, why can’t you be as good as Lost Relics is in this department? How can you stand to let something as mediocre as Lost Relics show you up? Shame.
Lost Relics has a team of builders who like the game as much as players and want to see it stick around, so Lost Relics could be a much, much worse investment. It’s still a bad investment, but the point is it could be worse.
9 Lives Arena
9 Lives Arena brings permadeath and unforgiving progression mechanics to the Enjin blockchain ecosystem. Though 9 Lives Arena has plans for open-world exploration and RPG elements, for now, it’s little more than a 1-on-1 PvP deathmatch. There are a multitude of skills to figure out and plenty of weapons for your character to master, but you’ll only ever employ them against a single opponent.
9 Lives Arena is still in closed alpha testing, meaning they’ve been “testing” their game for over two years. That’s not a good sign. Especially when the fruits of their two year long labor are a low quality game with a low quality community. But their closed alpha is still highly sought after in the crypto space. 9 Lives Arena holds giveaways and whitelist spots for their closed alpha every week, and the number of entries usually numbers well into the thousands, which is a good sign. But the game is more than a little rough.
There are some minor features rolled out aside from the PvP arena. There is a mode for treasure hunting and fishing, and the game plans to implement a home base feature to level up as you progress. But the bread and butter is the deathmatch. That’s the only way you’ll earn more NFTs to make your avatar stronger.
The coolest aspect of 9 Lives Arena is that your character only has 9 lives. No, you’re not a cat, you’re a supernatural warrior. Just a coincidence the number of lives is 9. I guess you could be a cat if you want, but that’s not the point. Once those 9 lives are used up, your character will become a phantom. Phantoms can still play the game and they even have a chance to regain their humanity. But they won’t enjoy the same luxuries as the living. Similar to Soulslike games that punish players for their permadeaths, 9 Lives Arena makes dying a serious offense. Also an expensive offense.
The Six Dragons
The Six Dragons feels like a blatant rip-off of Everquest. Everquest? Anyone? There may be few gamers from the early, heady days of the 2000s who remember the ambitious elven adventure that is Everquest. But The Six Dragons feels like someone may have just copied and pasted the game onto a blockchain.
The Six Dragons is an MMORPG with an open world to explore and dungeons to conquer. There are plenty of fearsome beasts and monsters to defeat on your journey, though where that journey is headed is anyone’s guess.
The Six Dragons is driven by a player-focused economy and its fate is meant to be decided by its community of gamers. It’s still in alpha testing, though, three years after its initial release. The alpha is open testing, so players can download and start playing the game right now if they want and need not wait for entry into a giveaway. But it’s clear that not all gameplay features have been rolled out by the developers yet and that lore and worldbuilding will be the next big stages of development.
The Six Dragons is a large fantasy world with lots of areas to explore. But aside from crafting and enchanting items, there’s little to do. There’s no story to speak of, no evil sorcerer to subdue, no war-hungry king to usurp. Just a world for you to explore. Which for many players is more than enough reason to download the game and start wrecking demonic dragon lords. But for me was merely an excuse to yawn continuously the entire time I played. Maybe in a few years, if the devs keep at it, the game will be worth a gamer’s time. Or if their dev team grows by at least a dozen people, maybe that will push them over the cusp toward greatness. As for now, you might be better off playing good old Everquest.
Stormrite
Stormrite is objectively the best video game on this list. It’s also the only game that’s not entirely built on the Enjin-blockchain. Stormrite is a medieval fantasy game that’s based around combat and minor exploration. It’s for Xbox and Steam and its graphics are the highest of the games collected here. The developers decided at the last minute that they wanted their skins and cosmetics in the game to be NFTs. That meant they needed to enlist a blockchain that would run with their game and manage NFT assets. They went with Enjin.
The result is a hybrid video game with one foot squarely in traditional markets and the other inching its way into web3.
In Stormrite, you play as a young squire tasked with achieving greatness. Your path is before you, but you decide where you wish to walk. Will you be a warrior and wield the mightiest melee weapons? Are you more inclined to pick up a bow and fire at enemies from a vantage spot? Or perhaps magic and sorceries are more to your liking? Choose your playstyle, ally with as many stormrites as you can, and become the most powerful warrior alive.
Though this game is the highest ranked game of the Enjin blockchain, I, personally, wouldn’t rate it higher than a C+. You’re better off looking elsewhere for a game to invest your time.
FAQ
Question: I invested in Enjin tokens a while ago. Does that mean I can play these games?
Answer: Yes! If you have any Enjin tokens, you can put them towards playing these games. Many of them operate their NFTs on Enjin’s NFT marketplace, which means to buy anything you’ll need Enjin tokens. If you already own some, you’re ahead of the curve.
Question: If you had $100 to spend on any game on the Enjin blockchain, what would you buy?
Answer: I try to look for passive profits in crypto games that I play. The less I have to play to earn, the better. Unfortunately, there are no games on Enjin that currently offer staking, liquidity pools, or passive income. Forest Knight is the only game with clear plans to add those mechanics in the future. So, though I prefer to spread my purchase power wide instead of deep, I would probably dollar-cost-average $100 into KNIGHT and stake it the minute staking is opened. But that’s just me and that’s definitely not financial advice.
Question: These games are objectively garbage. My little cousin built something better in her free time. If I wanted to build an Enjin-based game to show them how it’s done, how would I go about doing that?
Answer: I hear that. Head over to Enjin’s website and under the solution tab, you’ll find a place for developers. Scroll down, follow the steps to create a platform account, and you’re in. You can look at the anatomy of games currently featured on Enjin and you can start building your own.
Question: Hey, where’s Age of Rust?
Answer: In the corner sitting in time out, that’s where. If you would like to try your hand with Age of Rust, be my guest. But I predict Age of Rust will be rugged before the end of the year. If Steam says you don’t have your stuff together, you most likely don’t. Steam lets all sorts of swill on their platform. For them to ban Age of Rust tells me Age of Rust is the lowest of the low. Not to mention Age of Rust has zero transparency, hides who its backers–if any–are, and they don’t seem to care about players or a community. You might see Age of Rust as popular online, but you shouldn’t trust everything you read online.
Including this.
In Closing
When I first got into Enjin last year, I saw it as a revolution for the gaming community. A token with more utility than people knew what to do with. But with NFTs gaining hatred equal to their adoption and with bear markets hitting developers in the wallet, Enjin has fallen far behind their blockchain counterparts. If a player’s goal is to play the absolute best games that web3 has to offer, they are, alas, on other blockchains. But, if players are looking to get into potentially blockbuster games when their tokens are low and their communities are small, these games are a good choice. They have solid foundations under them, they have years of experience, and all they need is a little push in one department or another to once again rival the web3 greats. Until then, DYOR and WAGMI.
If you don’t feel like investing in the Enjin blockchain and want to base your decision on tried and true models, then perhaps you want to check out this list of games that are similar to the behemoth, Axie Infinity.
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