DreamWorks How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon plays like it has the potential to be a great family game as well as one of the better movie tie-ins releasing this year, especially for the fantasy-driven children in your family.

Viewing this title from an adult perspective is wrong. After watching my son play for a number of hours, I can tell I'd be bored to tears with repetitiveness of the whole thing -- fighting, leveling-up, feeding the dragon, fighting, and repeat. But as proven by at least one player, this could very well appeal to the pre-teen gamer in your house.

There's very little to like in this package. With a backbone as strong as How to Train Your Dragon, there shouldn't have been much of a problem creating a fun game for children with the license.

From my perspective, this title fails to find its audience – it doesn’t deliver enough content for the older kids, and the frustration factor is too high for younger kids. I’d say you could catch this one when Toys R’ Us runs their next 2-for-1 sale, but I’d be hard pressed to recommend it at full retail price.

The mix between Pokémon-like gameplay and the movie itself doesn't work out well. Sadly, the developers haven't put much effort into this game, because the potential would have been great.

How To Train Your Dragon on consoles seems to suffer from a bit of an identity crisis. It wants to dabble in everything, while managing to avoid executing anything particularly well.

A charming gameworld. [July 2010, p.92]

To shallow for teens or adults, too overwhelming for kids, and too mind-numbingly repetitive for everyone, How to Train Your Dragon sets the bar pretty average for the rest of the movie license line-up coming this year.

It takes about 15 hours to get through the game, but it's too boring to be worthwhile.

The game looks good and the controls are not hard to understand, but this is another in a long line of games that are riding the crest of the feature film and not offering anything compelling enough to maintain interest for long.

How to Train Your Dragon is definitely a step backwards for Activision in terms of licensed games. It doesn't have the same level of polish and dedication that the previous offerings brought to the table. Still I respect the fact that the developers did something totally out of the ordinary for this game instead of the run-of-the-mill platformer we are usually spoon-fed.

How to Train Your Dragon isn't a bad game; given its status as a movie game it has a level of polish that's really quite admirable. The game design, however, is all over the place.

Surprisingly entertaining for a movie tie-in. [July 2010, p.98]

If Pokemon had 487 fewer monsters and only one tournament, it would still be more thrilling than this movie-based game. [Jun 2010, p.82]

The gameplay is cumbersome and doesn’t seem to gain any momentum in the fun factor department.

When it comes down to it, if you’re really, really interested in seeing a bit more of the world and character from the film, then you might have some enjoyment with this game, but just a little. But without some varied combat or something that doesn’t feel like filler, it’s hard to say that anyone else will enjoy it.

This game has a lot of potential and with another year of development could have been a great game for someone of any age. What we’re left with is a boring, stale, tedious shell of a game that simply won’t appeal to anyone.

Because of the bad gameplay and graphics is How To Train Your Dragon not a special game. It's a better idea to spend your money on a ticket to see the movie version in a cinema.

How to Train Your Dragon is just so "bleh." You can make a fun game for kids, but this isn’t one of them.

Yet another licensed yawn-fest where neither missions nor collecting of silly items is any fun, at all. Not even for the younger gamers, sadly.

Although based on a neat idea, this movie tie-in is hampered by a severe lack of content. A broken battle system and some extremely tedious gathering of items make How to Train Your Dragon hard to recommend to anyone.