Ashen manages to make the most of the N-Gage's limited hardware, and is worth playing.
For the most part, Ashen is a competent shooter, and plays like a standard first person shooter. You'll go around shooting monsters and finding ammo and flak jackets to stay alive. Your arsenal consists of an alien pulse gun that is weak but has unlimited ammo, a pistol, dual pistols, a shotgun, a machine gun, a sniper rifle, a grenade/rocket launcher, and a gatling gun. The game uses just about every key available on the N-Gage to perform the various actions, including jumping, strafing, switching weapons, reloading, and looking up and down.
The single player game has eight chapters. As you make your way through each chapter, you'll be given objectives which appear in your journal. The story, which is told with still images and text during the game, involves the main character trying to locate his sister in Seven River City, who has managed to find a portal to another world. As you might have guessed, that world is where the enemies you'll encounter are from. There are several types of enemies, with a variety of attacks. There are crawlers, there are fire demons, and there are larger spider like enemies. Perhaps the one unique gameplay element in Ashen are the ghost vision goggles, which illuminate dark areas. They also allow you to see the Wraiths, which are invisible otherwise.
You can't save your game at any time, only at chapter midpoints or upon completion of the chapter.
The problems with the game are rooted in the N-Gage platform. The N-Gage's tiny screen and low resolution makes it hard to pinpoint enemies, and the low polygon count on the enemies don't allow for much detail. The game never runs at 30 frames per second, so there's always a slight jerkiness.
The N-Gage isn't really suited for playing complex games, but Torus Games manages to make the most of the N-Gage's limited hardware. All things considered, Ashen really isn't a bad game, and is worth playing if you have an N-Gage.