Dislyte (Android) First Impressions

I don’t often play mobile games. However, after a few emails from the creators of Dislyte, and a few friends playing it, I was intrigued. Now, this isn’t a full review, because in the current days of mobile gaming I think a review needs to be able to tell whether games are pay-to-win or cash-grabs. So, instead, this is my experience with playing the game for about a week.

Dislyte starts you off with a bit of backstory. The world is now in a sort of post-apocalypse state, with only a few surviving cities after alien creatures called Miramons appeared alongside something called a Miracle. Miracles are monoliths that also happened to give certain humans special abilities. These humans are known as Espers and represent various mythological figures such as Odin, Anubis, Loki, and more.

You start out with Brynn, a woman who awakens to Esper abilities after she and her bandmate Sieg are attacked by unknown assailants. Sieg is taken, and Brynn has to join the Esper Union, the last line of defense against the Miramons and the evil Shadow Decree. The Shadow Decree is an organization that wants to destroy the Esper Union and take control of the world.

Now, before I get into things further, I should mention that music is a large part of the Dislyte experience. Music is how Espers get their powers, or at least music is connected to their powers. A lot of characters in Dislyte have various instruments, and there are even music and rhythm-themed mini-games and aspects of the game.

Gameplay plays out like your average mobile RPG. You have characters of various rarities, each with abilities. You can fuse multiples of the same character together to increase stats, and you can use other materials to level up the character or their abilities. Additionally, you can ascend characters to higher rankings, thus increasing their level threshold and the various things they are capable of.

As with other mobile RPGs of its kind, I’ll use Raid: Shadow Legends as an example, the game plays out with five characters in your party, as well as a potential helper. You can pick your own layout of characters in your party, and depending on what you’re doing, you can use different party setups. Each character has one of three different factions, and each has a different weakness. There is a fourth faction, but it is neither strong against nor weak to any others.

Now I know you’re wondering how much of a pay-to-win experience Dislyte is, and how much money you’d need to invest to succeed. I personally think you could get relatively far without spending any. I haven’t needed to spend any on the game, and the number of quests and things that give you premium currency is diverse and plentiful, so you don’t really need to.

There are a lot of different ways to earn gold records as well, which you can use to get new Esper heroes. Granted, I haven’t really gotten far enough where the higher tier heroes are required to progress, but I think that you can play regularly, and not have to worry about spending money. With that being said, if you are someone who has a hard time abstaining from microtransactions, you might want to steer clear.

That’s just a general bit of advice though. These games are designed to make you want to spend money. However, I think the value Dislyte offers means that a few in-game purchases every now and then won’t hurt much. This isn’t like other mobile games that rely on big spenders to make their cash, and they seem to be working hard to make a fun game for everyone. Now, as I said, I’ve only played for about a week or so. This means I could be off base, keep your eyes open, your wallet closed if you need to, and just pay attention to what the game is giving you.

Overall, Dislyte is fun. I’m enjoying my time with it so far, but I may very well write up another article if I start to see things getting a bit more predatory. I’ve played plenty of mobile games that started off great and turned into cash grabs.