Smurfs: Dreams Review

There's not much to say on Smurfs: Dreams, it is very much a 3D platformer in the vein of games like Super Mario 3D World and Sackboy a Big Adventure. If you have ever played those games before, you pretty much played this.

However that isn't to say Smurfs: Dreams is horrible, just more on the painfully average side. The game is mostly easy with some difficulty spikes here and there but not too many since checkpoints tends to cover everything you did in a level say for example, you collected x amount of a collectible to progress and you collected 4/6 before you died, it will remember you did the 4 so when you die, you will never be set back by an overwhelming amount of time redoing content. There's many checkpoints scattered throughout the level and no limited continues. Also, after playing Astrobot it is rather refreshing to play a platformer where you can take more than one hit before you restart a checkpoint and there isn't nearly as many as Astrobot.

Bosses in Smurfs will respawn you at right at the phase you are on instead of a full restart upon failure which adds more to how the game isn't really too challenging. I don't mind this since I don't think any game can annoy me as much as Psychonauts 2 removing the ability to die in the options which thankfully Smurfs: Dreams doesn't do.

There are some neat ideas here and there like using an ink gun to raise platforms and stop enemies, a hammer to destroy and build platforms, a light that you have to turn on to activate certain platforms and to turn off to reveal others. I wish these mechanics intersected more often or even have the ability to select them so you can stack up these level design gimmicks.

Another positive aspect is that rescuing Smurfs to unlock levels isn't too time consuming and steep, you can just rescue Smurfs and get to the final level with Gargamel just by playing the levels. You only need 8 to beat the whole game if you aren't 100%ing which is another reason why I'm not too harsh. If the game was any longer, I would be much more harder on it.

Some big issues with the game is that the level objective of, "collect 5-6 of something to progress" is here and it gets reused a lot to much for my liking since it feels like the game has no new ways of creating a variation on something already existing.

There is also Yoshi's flutter kick that your player character can use and on top of this, he can also suspend himself in the air inside of a bubble and stop himself from falling for a few seconds by pressing the sqaure button. I don't even get why this is a thing when the flutter kick already exists, I used the bubble ability for a bit then just stopped altogether.

Overall, if Smurfs Mission Vileaf was a Smurfs version of Mario Sunshine and Daxter, Smurfs 2: Prisoner of Greenstone was a Smurfs version of Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Smurfs: Dreams is pretty much Smurfs Mario 3D World and Sackboy a Big Adventure. If that sounds interesting try this game out, just don't expect an amazing game going in.