Kingdom Hearts: Unchained X vs Vaporum: Lockdown
Kingdom Hearts: Unchained X
Kingdom Hearts: Unchained X offers a nice yet rather unlikely mix between two of the most celebrated animated masterpieces, Disney and Final Fantasy, that's set in the “Era of Lost Masters” within the timeline of the Kingdom Hearts lore. If you find this hard to wrap your head around... well, just imagine a Kingdom Hearts world that had just been Disney-fied. Indeed, this 2D game contains numerous references to popular Disney animated shows, characters and even locations like Agrabah from Aladdin.Aside from the Disney influence, fighting the Heartless in this game is something that's pretty easy to pick up since you'll mostly be tapping and swiping to swing that big and iconic keyblade of yours. Interestingly though, the game allows you to use a variety of abilities, ranging from healing effects to experience boosts, depending on the medal you use.
That said, Kingdom Hearts: Unchained X does pale in comparison to any of the games in the Kingdom Hearts franchise and well, that's not exactly surprising considering that this game is free-to-play. However, if you love Disney and/or Kingdom Hearts, you'll definitely want to check this game out.
Vaporum: Lockdown
Vaporum: Lockdown is a first-person, dungeon crawler featuring old-school grid-based dungeon-crawling gameplay with real-time combat, fun Sokoban-like puzzles, cool steampunk-themed setting, and an intriguing mystery to uncover. In this game, you play as a scientist, Ellie, who’s trapped within a locked-down facility called the Arx Vaporum filled with murderous robots and mutated creatures. Will Ellie be able to escape the place in one piece? What will she discover as she makes her way through Arx Vaporum?In terms of gameplay, you’ll be moving Ellie, the protagonist of the story, one grid at a time. Turning to face a certain direction before you can say turn a corner also requires an extra tap of the keyboard. However, this also means that you can actually move like a crab in this game if you’re sure of the path you’re on. Like most dungeon crawlers, Vaporum: Lockdown comes with devious traps, enemies and puzzles. Traps in this game can be rather easily avoided as long as you got the timing down right.
The interesting part about this game is that combat plays out in real-time here, unlike any other old-school dungeon crawlers we have experienced before. This means that it is entirely possible to loop a sequence of “move and attack” when facing something stationary so you can avoid getting hit at all. However, this also means that more mobile enemies can be trickier to slay – it all boils down to timing really.
There are also fun Sokoban-like puzzles in this game. Most of them involve having you to move crates around to fill holes in the ground, block danger from the path you want to take, or even to serve as paperweights on metal pressure plates. For hardcore treasure seekers, the game even has several hidden compartments that an inquisitive explorer might be able to find, each of these alcoves usually come with some nice rewards. There is a sufficient variety of loot, and you can get better gear as you progress.
Being a prequel of the highly-successful Vaporum, Vaporum: Lockdown definitely does the original game, and the Vaporum universe as a while, proud. Besides the few new features here and there, the gameplay is generally similar to the original title and hence, would be instantly familiar to fans of Vaporum. The storytelling here is great as well, offering so much more lore than before, and of course, the fantastic atmosphere here will pull you right into the fumium-obsessed world that Ellie Teller lives in.