Kingdom Hearts 3 for PlayStation 4: Everything we know so far!

Want to know what’s going on with Kingdom Hearts 3? Here’s everything we know so far

In the early years of gaming, there were quite a few swings taken at the creation of a game utilizing Disney properties. Most of those games ranged anywhere from unplayable to mediocre as far as quality goes.

Then in 2002, Square released Kingdom Hearts onto the PlayStation 2. Disney fans and gamers rejoiced as they finally had a significant video game with Disney characters. Thus far, there have been a total of nine Kingdom Hearts games and here in 2018 Square stands poised to release a new entry to the gaming public.

We have been hearing rumblings about Kingdom Hearts 3 for years now but there is finally light at the end of the tunnel for fans of the series. As it stands now, we should see a release toward the end of 2018. However, what do we know about Kingdom Hearts 3 right now? Let’s take a look.

A whole new world

Since its inception, an important element of the Kingdom Hearts games has been the setting. Part of the joy of these games is the opportunity to explore familiar Disney worlds in a way that is not possible when you’re watching a film. Some of the worlds which have been tapped for inclusion in KH3 include Andy’s House from Toy Story, Twilight Town, Mount Olympus from Hercules, Monsters Inc, Tangled, and even San Fransokyo from Big Hero 6.

With Disney owning just about every existing IP under the sun there doesn’t seem to be many worlds left that are not within their reach. However, everything indicates that all the worlds tapped for inclusion will remain those who lie directly under the Disney Umbrella, as well as some from underling Pixar.

While Kingdom Hearts 3 isn’t a traditional open world game, Square Enix has a clear goal to increase the scope and capacity of each world. Some of these levels are the most expansive we’ve ever seen in a Kingdom Hearts game. You’ll especially feel the scale at places like Toy Box in the Toy Story world, or Mount Olympus over in Hercules’ corner. Despite the increased size, Square Enix manages to create each world with the level of detail that’ll make you feel like you’re in the theater watching your favorite movies all over again. It’s this nice balance of scope and focus that gets us excited to be sucked into Disney’s magical kingdom once more.

Characters Welcome

Another critical element of the Kingdom Hearts series has, of course, been characters. There is something undeniably exciting about running into some of your favorite Disney denizens whilst you progress through a KH game.

While your main characters will remain steadfast – Sora and the gang are back – there are some additions. With the inclusion of the aforementioned worlds, it should come as no surprise that we will see end up crossing paths with their related character inhabitants. You’ll certainly be seeing Woody, Buzz, and the glutton of other toys living in Andy’s room for the Toy Story sections. I, for one, am totally ready to get some heals from Beymax.

And that’s alongside mainstays such as Goofy, Donald Duck, and Mickey Mouse, all of whom have proven to be valuable comrades for Sora over the years.

Gameplay

Kingdom Hearts 3 will seemingly feature a keen blend of all the combat mechanics introduced in each previous title. Keyblades still cut foes down with ease and magic is still here to help you quickly dispel waves of enemies. However, we’ll also be seeing new mechanics such as character summons, keyblade transformations, link attacks, something Square Enix is calling “attractions,” and more. Here’s a quick rundown of what those types of attacks are:

• Character Summons: You can call on one of your Disney or Pixar friends to fight alongside you for a short time.
• Keyblade Transformations: Alongside your keyblade’s normal abilities and combos, you can transform the keyblade after hitting a series of uninterrupted attacks. The temporary transformation unlocks a wealth of new abilities, as well as a finisher attack.
• Link Attacks: Like Character Summons, this mechanic brings your friends into the fray, but instead of being there as a sidekick they’ll execute a more coordinated and powerful attack with Sora.
• Attractions: These are flashy, big abilities that play out like rides you’d see at Disneyworld and Disneyland. For instance, you can call on something like a water ride to splash through a ton of foes.

There will also be other miscellaneous gameplay mechanics that may be unique to certain worlds and sequences. For instance, Sora can take control of robot Gigas at Toy Box to help him get around the store and fight enemies faster. Expect a lot of variety in this regard.

Players will get stronger as the game goes on with a leveling system that should increase your power, health total, mana pool, and offer new abilities. And it’s not just Sora getting this treatment, either – all your mainstay companions have their own experience to grow.

World traversal has been a big part of the Kingdom Hearts series, and Sora’s movement abilities are seeing some interesting changes with this entry. Sora has seemingly been practicing parkour as a new mechanic allows him to scale up, down, and across walls. This is likely to help players quickly maneuver through a world is just as wide as it is tall, with verticality being a staple element of Kingdom Hearts.

As was the case in most Kingdom Hearts games to date, you’ll be fighting enemies who use Darkness for evil. Darkness is both an alternate realm and an actual force of energy. Good characters can use Darkness to augment their abilities, though the bad ones use it with far more malevolent intentions. Much of your battling will be done against those known as the Heartless, a common enemy in the game. The Heartless are actually living forms of the darkness that exists in everyone’s heart. Their goals are likely driven by some evil no-gooder behind the scenes, as the heartless don’t act on any sort of feeling or emotion of their own.

When can I play?

As it stands, we’re still a bit far away from release for us to start holding our collective breath. Everything is subject to change but at this very moment, Amazon has the release date set for December 31st of 2018. This is likely just a placeholder date, with Square Enix expected to reveal the final release date for Kingdom Hearts 3 at E3 2018 (which takes place the week of June 12th, mind you).

If you want to get in line early, you can always head over and preorder a copy for $60.

See at Amazon

In its long and storied history, Kingdom Hearts has done a stellar job of taking the elements that work and adding new ones. Like a fine wine, Kingdom Hearts has (mostly) gotten better with age. At this point, we don’t know everything about what is in store for us but as the year progresses we will undoubtedly see more new pieces of the puzzle unveiled.

I think Square knows that part of the magic and joy in these games is the surprise of running into unexpected characters. I have no doubt that they are holding a few cards close to their chests for the time being but I can’t wait to find out what those cards are.

What do you want to see in Kingdom Hearts 3?

Why are we reviewing PlayStation 4 games on Android Central? Let us explain.

PlayStation 4

• PS4 vs. PS4 Slim vs. PS4 Pro: Which should you buy?
• PlayStation VR Review
• Playing PS4 games through your phone is awesome

Amazon

Update, May 25th: We’ve updated this article with new details about Kingdom Hearts 3’s gameplay from Square Enix’s recent demo.

This is how Xiaomi wants to eventually win the U.S. market

Not with a bang, but with surgically precise planning.

Smartphone nerds are universally familiar with the name Xiaomi, though few in the U.S. have ever held one of its phones. The brand is explosively popular in many other countries in the world, most recently experiencing growth in India and Spain, but you can’t buy a single Redmi or Mi Mix phone from an American retailer yet.

After the recent and spectacular failures of Huawei and ZTE in the U.S., it’s not difficult to understand why the company is cautiously planning its Stateside launch strategy. But even in the face of those events, Xiaomi remains convinced it will start selling hardware to Americans within the next year or so. To make this work, its plan is to sit back and learn as much as it can about this new market and then approach it like the giant it is.

When sitting down with Xiaomi at Google I/O 2018, just after Google announced the Android P developer preview was coming to the Mi Mix 2S, we asked John Chan, the head of Xiaomi’s global MIUI engineering team, about the future of the company’s U.S. plans — and we were as blunt as possible. The answer wasn’t particularly surprising, either.

Our path [to the U.S.] is getting into the carriers. Traditionally, the only brand with some kind of success outside of carriers in the U.S. is OnePlus, and it’s still catered to a very small market of users. People who do their research and have heard of it. We want to bring in our full range, even the Redmi series. We just have to figure out how to get in with U.S. carriers.

Xiaomi doesn’t want to compete with Motorola or OnePlus or HTC — it wants to compete directly with Apple and Samsung. That works two ways here: you either spend a lot of money on advertising everywhere, or you exist on shelves next to the iPhone and Galaxy phones.

Xiaomi wants to be next to devices like the Galaxy S9 and iPhone X on store shelves in the U.S. And that’s really, really hard.

Spending money on advertising largely goes against the Xiaomi business model. It has publicly vowed, on multiple occasions, to never make more than 5% profit on any device it sells, which means marketing budgets are never going to be massive.

Instead, the company wants its phones to be in stores where people can touch them. The logic here is simple: when someone sees a phone that looks and feels as nice as a Galaxy S9 but is several hundred dollars cheaper, they’re going to ask about it. That only happens when you’re on the shelf next to these other manufacturers.

Carrier support may seem obvious, but it’s also incredibly challenging. Google’s Pixel phones are a prime example — excellent phones with only Verizon and Project Fi support, with mediocre sales numbers despite massive country-wide marketing campaigns. People who see these phones love them, but with support from a single carrier it’s unlikely that support is going to grow wildly beyond what exists right now.

Based on Xiaomi’s UK entrance, which included multiple phones on only a single carrier, it seems unlikely we’ll see a big splashy entrance onto all four U.S. carriers at once. Negotiating these deals so every carrier offers these phones simultaneously is going to be hard, especially if Xiaomi expects budget phones like the Redmi line and its flagship Mi Mix experiences to exist on the same shelf. Carriers are cutting the number of phone models they sell, not expanding.

Will we see Xiaomi make a grand entrance into the U.S. within the next year? I think it seems likely.

More than simply talking to carriers, Xiaomi has made a real effort to ensure its Global ROMs are ready for U.S. users. The way people use their phones in China, where Xiaomi is king, is remarkably different from how we use our phones here.

Xiaomi has already learned these lessons when selling phones in India, where its selfie “enhancing” features upset early users by doing things like removing facial jewelry and causing smearing effects on facial hair. The MIUI software, in particular the way notifications and app shortcuts are handled, needs to be catered to the way U.S. users expect Android phones to behave. Xiaomi says it is up to the challenge, and our continued look at how MIUI Global ROMs have evolved over the last year seems to suggest the company is at the very least headed in the right direction.

Xiaomi understands that software experiences are important for U.S. smartphone customers, which means catering MIUI to a western audience.

Will we see Xiaomi make a grand entrance into the U.S. within the next year? Maybe.

The company has already started selling non-cellular hardware like cameras and scooters to U.S. consumers on Amazon, and its collaboration with Facebook to make the Oculus Go headset has so far been quite successful.

By the end of the calendar year, Xiaomi will likely be a much more common name to small groups of U.S. consumers. If it can secure deals with carriers, and those deals don’t go up in flames like we saw with Huawei, there’s a good chance we’ll see the next flagship from Xiaomi on shelves next year. For those of us who have held these phones before, that is going to be an exciting splash in what would otherwise be a fairly stagnant pond.

These are the top Xiaomi phones you can buy in 2018

PayPal now available with Google Pay across a number of new Google services

PayPal can now be used as a payment method across all of Google.

Google’s been adding a heap of new features to Google Pay ever since it ditched the Android Pay branding earlier this year, and the latest addition comes by way of deeper integration with PayPal.

You can already use your PayPal balance to pay for things in-store using Google Pay, but coming soon, you’ll be able to use your PayPal money via Google Pay across all of Google’s services.

What exactly does this mean? If you add your PayPal account to Google Pay, you’ll now be able to use it as a payment method in YouTube, Gmail, Google Play, the Google Store, and with peer-to-peer payments such as Google Pay Send — all while only having to enter your information once.

This won’t mean a lot for everyone, but if you’re a heavy PayPal user, this is bound to be exciting news.

Download: Google Pay (free)

Battle Royale Alpha for Rec Room on PlayStation VR starts today

Rec Room is the social game you want in VR

There are very view games out there that offer the huge variety of content that Rec Room from Against Gravity offers and there are certainly none of them that offer it for free. That and the amazing community that has grown up around the game makes Rec Room a must have for any VR owner.

So what is Rec Room?

Put simply Rec Room is a First Person social game set in a make-believe Rec Room — you know the kind, a huge building with small areas for playing cards and ping pong and a massive outside area to play team sports — the type of places you used to go when you were a little one after school until your parents got back from work. It is filled with little things to do in the main social hub like darts, basketball, table tennis and even some couches for chilling out on and catching up with friends.

And boy is it easy to make friends in the Rec Room. Because everyone has proximity chat enabled you can start a conversation or ask if people want to team up for one of the many games and quests available. Just a handshake in the game will add the person to your friend’s list and a fist bump will set you as a party, it is the least game-breaking way I have seen to make friends. It’s so good.

Like Roblox and Minecraft, graphically, the game itself is fairly simple. It isn’t going to be winning any art awards any time soon, but it doesn’t need to. What makes the game so fun is the interaction between you and all the other visitors to the Rec Room and the games you can play there.

What can I do there?

you can do a lot and right now those things are separated into three categories, soon to be four, so let’s tackle them one by one.

Rec Royale

Rec Royale is the latest addition to Rec Room following on the heels of the insane adoption of Fortnite. It is going to feature a wilderness map for up to 16 players to battle it out for supremacy using the latest arsenal of.. Paintball guns — it’s a family friendly game people, we try not to let people be killed in Recreation Centers if we can avoid it — and with the addition of a backpack to load your gear in you are good to go.

Sean Whiting, Against gravity’s community designer, and a huge presence in the Rec Room Community is practically giddy over this new addition. he had this to say about the new loot system:

The landscape holds summer camps, mountains, forests, outposts, ravines, lakes, and tons of loot for scavenging. To hold all of that loot we’ve added a new backpack system for quick swapping and storing multiple weapons and power-ups.

The backpack is a welcome addition to Rec Room as before you could only hold one or two things maximum, it should make Rec Royale much more entertaining, and a little more tactical. Rec Royale will be available as an open beta the weekend of May 25th including Friday and will come in full to all platforms on June 7th. this section is still sparse right now but we will update this post when we know more.

Team Sports

The Backbone of Rec Room is the team sports you can play inside the Main Hall. By passing through any number of doors you are taken to a variety of crazy simple, yet endlessly entertaining games to play — Paintball is a firm favorite of mine but I get a lot of enjoyment from the kickball, it’s like Rocket League but with people — and there are always people willing to team up to play. Another neat matchmaking trick, the game puts you into balanced teams as you walk into the game, and as there is no skill progression you have as good a chance as anyone else to win the game.

The Paintball game is a prime example of what makes Rec Room so fun. You step through a door in the Rec Room and you have whisked away to the outside area with old containers as buildings and hay bales as shield walls when there are enough players, the game starts and your capture the flag game is afoot! the aim is simple, steal the flag and get it to the goal line and if you get shot, well you respawn at the start and try again. It’s extremely fun and light-hearted combated made all the more fun by the proximity chat and all the people laughing at you losing the flag two feet from the goal!

Quests

Quests are the adventuring side of Rec Room — instead of just playing a team sport you get to team up and seek out adventure — with four quests to choose from there is plenty to keep you going. Using just you and three others you have to take on trolls and goblins or killer robots or even scary pirates! all set to the Recreation Center feel the whole game has. Go behind some of the scenery in the quests and you will see they are just cardboard on wooden frames, probably made by the naughty kids who don’t want to play with others.

My favorite quest is The Quest For The Golden Trophy — yes I know not all the words need to be capitalized but it’s quest so it deserves some pomp — in it you play an archer or a classic sword and board fighter and your job is to work together to grab the chalice and be claimed, victor! Beware though, many a clockwork goblin on wheels is seeking to wipe you out and they will succeed, often. Another charming way the game makes it all feel very friendly is how your team revive each other. Simple High Five your friend’s ghost and poof, back alive to fight again.

The game just oozes fun times and happiness, a refreshing change from the doom and gloom of a lot of games these days. The quests are generally very tough and require teamwork and skill to survive, making them one of the very best VR experiences I have had to date, including Skyrim and another AAA title.

Custom/Private Rooms

Private and Customs rooms are the secret delight of Rec Room. In private rooms, you can use all the features above — except the Rec Royale, they haven’t figured that out yet — but in a closed environment that you control. You control who can come and play in your room as well what kind of things you want in it. In each private room, there is a sandbox machine that lets you pull out furniture, weapons, games, and other miscellaneous items to help make the room your own.

With the use of the sandbox and the closed nature of the private rooms you can create a space for you and friends to meet and have fun without the need to interact with strangers, making it an anxiety-free way to meet your friends in VR, Of course if you want to show off your skill at creating games and spaces you can always make a custom room.

Custom rooms are the crowning achievement of the customization abilities of Rec Room. You can, with a little effort make impressive areas for you and anyone else who knows your room name to play in — they even have circuits that allow you build complex systems to bring a unique feel to every room — and then show them off to the world. I spent a little time making the Mobile Nations fans a custom room called ^MoNaClub that you can access from inside the game, making it with a podcasting area for Russell and Rene along with a Dungeons and Dragons cave hiding in the back. It’s not finished yet but is still a great space for fans to meet up, and I will keep making it better as I learn more about the game.

More: Check out some the best Custom Rooms

So should I get it?

If you are into VR at all then you should give Rec Room a try. With the new Rec Royale mode coming soon and all the other ways to enjoy the game, it seems like a no-brainer to pick it up, especially as it is completely free. When I say free I do mean completely free, no purchase cost, no loot boxes, no hidden fees, just enjoyment from minute one. Try it I think you’ll like it.

Store 128GB of important data with SanDisk’s $26 Ultra Fit USB Flash Drive

Transport documents quickly and keep your files secure with this USB flash drive.

SanDisk’s 128GB Ultra Fit USB 3.1 Flash Drive is down to $25.99 at Amazon while supplies last. This limited time deal saves you $5 off its average price and marks the lowest it’s ever dropped. It regularly sells for up to $38.

This high-speed USB 3.1 flash drive features read speeds up to 130MB/s. You could transfer a full-length movie to it in less than 30 seconds. It’s compatible with laptops, car stereos, game consoles, and more.

Over 200 customers at Amazon reviewed this flash drive with 4.2 out of 5 stars collectively.

See at Amazon