Yesterday, Square Enix released Kingdom Hearts: Dark Roads, a new game in the Kingdom Hearts series, exclusively for mobile devices. As an expansion to the other Kingdom Hearts mobile game, Union Cross, the game uses a very cartoonish art style. This game serves as a prequel to the first Kingdom Hearts game, showing the rise of the evil Xehanort, the villain from the first “phase” of the Kingdom Hearts games.
This game follows a young Xehanort, after he leaves his home on Destiny Islands, and makes his way to the World of Scala ad Caelum, also known as Daybreak Town. He joins a school to become a Keyblade master, but during this, the upperclassmen go missing. Because of this, Master Odin sends Xehanort and his friends find them. They run into heartless and battles ensue across two worlds: Agrabah and Wonderland.
A game is nothing without good gameplay. Dark Road has a very interesting style that keeps you playing.
The way that you fight heartless is through a card battle, where you select three cards, making a match of 3 colors. Some of the missions that they make you do are very tedious. They want you to defeat more than 500 heartless as one PART of a mission.
Since most of this game consists of grinding, Square Enix, added an autoplay mode, where the game plays itself. The cards will fly off the screen and Xehanort and company will attack the heartless on screen. However, at the beginning of the game, you will die a lot. In order to progress, you will need to grind a lot of BP so that you can level up Xehanort.
As of right now, there are a total of 21 missions that you can play, with most of them either going up against bigger heartless, or killing hoards of smaller enemies. IN the entire 21 missions, I have defeated around 6500 heartless. However, Square Enix knows that you are going to grind a lot. And like Union Cross, in order to level up a character quickly without a ton of grinding, you would have to buy a really expensive pack of gems, and card tickets.
The card system in this game is also very interesting, with the first card that you choose is the main power you use during that turn. In order to power up your attack, you have to choose cards that have the same color as the first card you picked. Don’t worry. It is way easier than it sounds.
In order to get better cards, you have to buy them. You can buy 1 card for 300 gems or 10 cards for 3000 gems. If you want better cards, you have to use golden tickets which are very rare, and you can only get them from finishing a goal sheet, or by buying them.
Even with all the in-app purchases, this game is really interesting and is fun for the first few hours.
Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road Rating: 7.5/10
TL:DR
Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road makes a great new addition to the Kingdom Hearts canon, but the amount of grinding you have to do makes it fall down. However, the story seems to be interesting and I am excited to see where it goes.
What did you think of the new Kingdom Hearts game? Tell us in the comments below!
PixarNerd Studios is a writer for Geekly Goods, and an artist. You can contact him at @pixarnerdstudios on Instagram and @pixarnerdstudio on Twitter.