REVIEW | DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms

LifeisXbox’s DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of The Nine Realms review | Licensed games aren’t what they used to be. Somewhere along the way licensed games simply stopped appearing. For two reasons. One, THQ collapsed by the huge financial uDraw issues. A publisher that released many licensed games and two… well these games sucked. So gamers got fed up and stopped buying cash-grab shovelware. Luckily there is a rise again for licensed games, thanks to Outright Games. Who calls themselves the family-friendly publisher, you can’t say they are lying as they previously released PAW Patrol, Gigantosaurus, and the game series you are reading this review for, DreamWorks Dragons. Based on the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, three movies that have an average box office of $500 million. As you can imagine that’s a huge potential for game sales and I’m glad that Outright Games takes this more seriously than another game of theirs, Super Pets. A game worthy of a dragon’s Dracarys. Indeed, writing a dragon game review with some kind of Game of Thrones reference makes perfect sense. I’ll just continue with DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms before I start daydreaming again about Sophie Turner and Nathalie Emmanuel.

ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox Series X | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion of the writer.

What we Liked!

• Gameplay | DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms has some typical travel-to-point A and B platformer gameplay, combined with some fun and easy-to-understand combat. One particular thing I loved was that enemies you defeat don’t die but flee away. It can become challenging for the younger generation, in the late levels you can get a bit overrun with all kinds of different dragons that require tactics to defeat. All playable dragons have an element, for example, ice or electrical attacks. You know, the usual Pokémon stuff. Platforming difficulty comes from not getting lost in the straightforward levels, things can look a bit similar making it difficult to find your way around.

• This definitely should be stated, lots of language support! | The list of audio, interface, and subtitles is impressive. For my Belgian followers, DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms can be played completely in Dutch. Other audio languages are Arabic, German, Danish, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (happy Catarina ‘CAT’ Ferreira?), and Swedish. I personally switched over to English but I’m sure many people will appreciate seeing this language support.

Mixed Feelings

• Story | Humans haven’t found the dragon world yet, so it is purely about the magnificent creatures. Bit weird that Thomas Kullersen, the main protagonist in the series Dragons, is the narrator during story moments as humans are nowhere to be found. Anyway, that aside the story is pretty basic and is a simple way to connect a few levels. Earthquakes are messing up some of the dragon orders that kids will know from the source material. It is an okay story but nothing as hot as Sophie Tu… ahum fire breath.
  
  
• That damn orange crystal | I didn’t know dragons loved crystals so much, even during my time with Spyro I wasn’t educated. You’ll be destroying and collecting many of them, the most secret one is an orange crystal. One I freaking hate! There’s this weird design choice around it that if you manage to find it you get rewarded with a… forced quit of the level and you’ll need to restart that damn thing again. I’m still flabbergasted by that days later. Other crystals spread out in the levels by thousands award you with a currency to upgrade your playable dragons with more powerful combat moves.
  
  
• Decent sound and graphics | For a children’s game DreamWorks Dragons: Legends of the Nine Realms offers very decent visuals. the winged reptiles don’t look as good as the Targaryen dragons in Game of Thrones but they are charmingly colorful and Thunder really has one of the cutest faces in the dragon world. Locations are very varied with your typical fire and ice landscapes, developer AHEARTFULOFGAMES doesn’t do wonders but the result is more than decent. The same can be said about the sound and music, fighting sounds are often repeated but they didn’t really bother me as the overall sound and voice-acting were good. Seeing Thunder and his dragon friends fly over the environments is pretty cool.

What we Disliked

• A game clearly designed for cooperative play… without cooperative play | You can freely switch between two dragons, allowing some much-needed healing for the dragon that is resting. It seems to me that the original idea was to make a cooperative game that parents could play with their kids. Would have made the game much easier to recommend as some parts of the combat and level design will be confusing and difficult for younger kids. Bit of a shame that they didn’t go in that direction.

How long to beat the story | 5 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 8 hours

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