Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Hands On First Impressions From EGX

Last week, I headed to the largest video games expo in the UK, EGX, to check out the latest Disney video games and while LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens also had a demonstration booth at the event, that was just the free Demo at has been available since launch.

But the main Disney game playable at the event, was Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, which had four PS4 booths available, originally 2 were setup for the port of Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance and the other two PS4’s had the new Kingdom Hearts 0.2 A Fragmentary Passage. However it didn’t take long for all four to be set to 0.2 at the request of the players.

I headed straight to the Square Enix booth once the gates opened and played through the entire demo of 0.2, playing as Aqua while trying to collect 5 gears to set the clock back on the castle, reversing time to allow Aqua to cross the bridge. There was also a boss battle at the end of the level, which was pretty impressive and took plenty of special moves to defeat it.

My first impression was that it looked amazing, the background was beautiful and the moves just blew me away. I absolutely loved the demo and would have happily hit reset to go again but there was a queue building behind me and every time I returned to the booth, the queue seemed longer than before.

One thing I instantly loved was how the level was so twisted, it went up and down, everything was shattered and totally unique. Jumping was so much fun, Aqua felt more like a superhero as she leapt from building to building. The combat was also extremely quick and equally as impressive, the special moves again just looked so epic, that I just had a huge grin on my face while playing the demo.

Playing 0.2 was without doubt a highlight of my trip to EGX and that includes my first time using PlayStation VR. I can’t wait to play Kingdom Hearts 2.8 again in January, when it’s released on the PS4.

I also tried out many other games at the event including LEGO Dimensions, Sonic Mania, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, Final Fantasy XV and Skylander Imaginators.