Thursday 10 July 2014

How to Train Your Dragon 2 - The Game

My immediate thoughts when I heard of the How to Train Your Dragon 2 video-game were of being able to essentially watch the movie but be in control of the characters. My main expectations were that the player would be able to fly the various dragons, race them and complete challenges.

These expectations were met. But sadly that's about it for the game. Unlike most movies turned games, HTTYD2 focuses on a small aspect of the movie which, as far as I've played, doesn't have any new movie-plot spoilers. All it says is that they've started the "Dragon Games" which is made up of 5 mini-games you play as part of tournaments at different levels. As you complete tournaments you level up your dragon and it's fairly challenging. Just incredibly repetitive.

Unfortunately there are more bad things I can say about the game than there are good. So, lets get started.

1- The graphics are lazy.
I don't mean just lazy for a game but for a game based on an computer-animated movie it just ruins the franchise! When you have a game based on a movie you expect the graphics to be dulled-down versions of the original, but we have seen what studios are capable with in these movies and when you have something computer-animated vs something computer-animated you're going to compare the two very harshly. Now I have to say that games need to be simplified compared to animated movies or they won't be able to work. Games cannot achieve movie-quality detail without freezing and buffering every 30 seconds. But this is ridiculous. It reminded me of the original Harry Potter game on Playstation1. That's how much it hurt to look at. This is not what I expect from a game on the same platform as The Last Of Us. I can excuse the fact that there's a 3DS version, you expect the graphics to be weaker for a smaller screen but for PlayStation it's just unbearable.