Kingdom Hearts Re:coded

I'd have been more willing to do so had the fighting been more entertaining. Kingdom Hearts battles have always been reasonably straightforward, mostly reliant on rapid taps of the standard attack buttons, with combos emerging if you make enough consecutive connections without being whacked in return. You can assign special attacks to the Y button, and activate the more powerful deck commands by holding the L button and selecting them from a short menu. Once you've accumulated a few specials, you can choose which ones will appear in the list, though it's also worth assigning a potion or two here to quaff during the tougher scraps.

There are two main issues though. The first is repetition; the gloopy foes known as the Heartless come thick and fast and take a fair few blows before they fall, enough to make the frequency of the battles a chore. Quite a few quests take you through areas you've previously visited, and rather than being able to explore them at your leisure, you'll always have a handful of enemies to worry about. As the game wears on, their near-constant presence elicits more groans and sighs.

The second problem is the camera, which seems to take an active dislike to Sora, pointing at walls, floors, enemies – anything rather than centre on the spiky hero. It can be manoeuvred by squeezing the R button and moving the d-pad, but that leaves Sora open to attack. Use the stylus instead and you can at least guide him out of harm's way as you shift the perspective, but unless you've been blessed with several extra fingers on your right hand, you're not going to be able to attack at the same time.

Mindful of the slightly monotonous rhythm of the early stages, Square Enix does at least attempt to mix things up as the hours tick by. Hollow Bastion hosts a 2D platformer sequence, which is entertaining in a fairly rudimentary, old-school kind of way. A Sin and Punishment-esque rail shooter interlude is good fun, too. And for the entirety of the Coliseum world, the game decides it's going to be a turn-based JRPG for a bit – and not a bad one at that. It's certainly more enjoyable to defeat the Heartless this way rather than mindlessly jabbing at the A button over and over.

But outside these moments and the admittedly interesting Matrix system, there's precious little invention here, and the anaemic story fails to pick up the slack. While the graphics are decent enough, the presentation is otherwise a little flat, with lengthy conversations presented in a very static and half-hearted way. The game's obviously been buffed up a bit from its mobile phone debut, but it's lacking the polish you'd expect from a Square Enix game.

Camera and pacing issues aside, there are few real flaws, but equally there's very little you'll remember once the credits have rolled on the 15-hour campaign. While Birth By Sleep pointed a potential way forward for the series, Re:coded is a disappointing step back. The unshakeable sense of overfamiliarity won't trouble newcomers, but anyone who witnessed that first glorious collision of the worlds of Disney and Square will surely think that Re:hash is a more appropriate title.