DreamWorks Dragons: Dawn of New Riders

My expectations walking into a DreamWorks movie tie-in were, frankly, subterranean. Licensed games aimed at children have a long history of coasting on IP goodwill and shipping something closer to an interactive screensaver. What I found instead was a game that has clearly been built with some genuine craft, even if it never fully escapes its own limitations. The setup puts you in control of two original characters rather than recycling the film's leads. Scribbler is an amnesiac scholar and Patch is a Chimeragon, a hybrid dragon whose chimera-like biology becomes the core design hook. You can swap between them on the fly, and that switching is where the game earns its keep. Patch progressively unlocks elemental abilities including ice, electricity, and fire, and the puzzles are built around combining those with Scribbler's melee toolkit. Freeze an enemy with Patch, swap to Scribbler to follow up with the axe or hammer, or park Patch on a pressure plate while Scribbler crosses to the other side of a room. It is Zelda-lite logic in a Diablo-style top-down wrapper, and for its target age bracket it works cleanly. On the RPG side, familiar franchise faces like Hiccup, Astrid, and Gobber serve as functional shopkeepers where you trade herbs for health potions or bring weapons to Gobber for upgrades. Three weapons, each upgradeable three times, plus a basic armor crafting system round out the progression. Thin, but purposeful. The caveats stack up fast for anyone older than twelve. There is no voice acting, which stings in a franchise built on personality. Dialogue lands via text-only cutscenes over the occasional grunt. Some level sections, most notoriously a lengthy ice area, repeat the same switch-and-node puzzle until the patience runs dry. Combat is shallow enough that repetition starts to bite around the midpoint, and the flying sections on Patch are a genuine low point: what should be a kinetic highlight feels sluggish and constrained relative to the grounded combat. A few bugs including characters clipping through scenery are minor but noticeable. The runtime sits at roughly five to seven hours for main content plus side quests, which is honest for what the game is but demands a fair price to match. What the game does right is harder to dismiss. The art captures the animated films' warmth faithfully, the music fits the franchise without being a lazy copy, and the boss encounters against controlled dragons are the most engaging fights in the game. The difficulty calibration is handled well for its audience without making adults feel patronized. Crucially, the story is an original side narrative set between the second and third films rather than a retread, so it has room to do its own small thing without being trapped by a script it cannot change. Steam community sentiment sits at 88 percent positive across over 200 reviews, driven largely by HTTYD fans who appreciate that Climax actually tried. If you have a younger player in the house who loves the How to Train Your Dragon series, this is one of the better co-optable gaming gifts in that space. If you are an adult fan playing solo, the game is agreeable for a single sitting but only at a discounted price. Anyone with no attachment to the franchise will find the thin mechanics outweigh the charm quickly.

Alex · Scout Team

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