

Thanks to squadmate heals and healing cards, you’ll be back to full health by the time you face the hardest enemy, and so the cycle continues endlessly. The biggest issue here is the difficulty, as rather than constantly increasing to test your skills, the enemies cycle back around to low level fodder after you take out the toughest one. These wood shavings in the meatloaf are endless battles, where you’ll face the same set of enemies from the story mission, except once you sweep them they’ll loop back around. World missions are deliberately dropped in to stop the progression, forcing meaningless grinding to slow down the story.

There’s not much to these, but at least they feel like there’s actual progress being made. Story missions will see you fight a set of enemies (something like three to six), often with a slightly stronger one at the end. There are two types of missions: story and world. Even without the brain dead autoplay feature, it never really feels like you’re playing the game. If you actually want to play the game though, you just tap tap tap until your brain begins to rot. It tends to make the right choices and it’s about as quick as a player might be, so there’s zero benefits to not letting the game beat itself then hand you the rewards. You can even just select the ‘Auto’ button by your deck of cards and the game will literally play itself. There’s nowhere near enough of a range of cards for you to build tactically, even if you stump up the money for the cash-only cards. Credit: Stacey HenleyĮven the decks themselves are a bit limp. Also, while you can tap the cards to select them, flicking is the default and this often causes the app to close, adding to the frustration. At first, it feels like the colour system is adding more agency for the player, but you quickly realise that most opponents are so weak it’s never that important. If all chosen cards are of the same colour, it nets you an attack bonus. You start off each round of combat with a hand of five cards and choose three to attack. The worst part? It’s not even very good at that. Where Union/Unchained is a nifty little mobile version of the console Kingdom Hearts games, Dark Road feels lazy, lifeless and designed to frustrate you into paying up for a smoother gameplay experience. The free-to-play deck builder has been attached to Kingdom Hearts: Union χ (previously known as Kingdom Hearts: Unchained χ), but aside from the Kingdom Hearts branding, the pair have nothing in common.

It looks like Kingdom Hearts, it sounds like Kingdom Hearts, but it’s all too hollow. This, in essence, is what playing Kingdom Hearts: Dark Road is like. Walt Disney World reopened recently, with a slightly unsettling advert showing the park workers going about their day while wearing surgical masks.
