Well this is a weird game.

I'm not the type to play a bad game for a few minutes then quit and talk trash on it. I understand the work that could've gone into a title like this, albeit perhaps work aimed at squeezing every last penny out of a very, very young and impressionable audience. I like to get a good feel for every feature before I pass judgement.

And I must say, I have gotten quite a feel for this game.

The first problem here is that these developers are working with an IP that is very clearly targeted at a young audience. I know a lot of adults who go crazy over Toothless and I'm sure you do, too, but the game is designed in every corner to be aimed at really small kids. They'll get their parents to download it or they'll play in-browser, they'll see the shiny armor or dragons or they'll try to use the farm and lord knows that most kids aren't patient enough to wait 10 minutes for a plant to grow. So they'll get their parents to buy them gems and the money JumpStart wants is made. It's really damn grimy.

The second problem, ignoring the business model and focusing on gameplay, is that it is very buggy and prone to crashing. In the (at the time of writing) 9 hours I've spent playing, I have crashed while simply jumping around or walking about 6 times. I've frozen at a loading screen 3 times. And my menus have glitched and stayed onscreen with no way to close them about 4 times. That's just 3 kinds of bugs I've run into, and I'm sure only just 3 of many that OTHERS have had to put up with as well.

And as far as the questing goes. What the hell? It consists of walking back and forth between movie characters, getting shown a little movie clip sometimes, answering some trivia, and being told to go do the same minigames over and over. Of these minigames I've gotten to play so far, there's a target practice railshooter thing and a flying challenge. Initially you cannot use your dragon to play these, you need to use Toothless every hour for the railshooter, and you have to use another dragon for the flying challenges. For the flying nonsense, there's also a huge repetoire of dragons from the movies/show that you can use as well, but of course, only if you shell out the cash for the lovely microtransactions. And my favorite part of that is that every single one of them is 250 gems (about $2.00)..... except Toothless. He's 500! (about $5.00).

You can use your own dragon after you level it up and then age it. Teen years are good enough for the railshooter and glide challenges, and then adult is what you need for actual flying stuff. But all this takes "Energy" from your dragon, which you can only replenish by either waiting or by feeding him fish you've caught in the fishing minigame thing. Well I mean, there's also microtransactions to help with the whole energy ordeal, but seeing as so far there've been microtransactions tied to almost every single facet of gameplay, this shouldn't be any surprise at all.

There's also the farming. The way this works is you have your little plots to plant seeds and you can eventually get coops and pens for some animals like sheep, yak, chickens, and some seasonal stuff as well (at time of writing, turkeys are purchaseable. I own one because of the microtransaction gems you're given for free to start with. Gotta love turkeys, man). All of this works off of a timer. All of it. Every last bit of this is timed, and every single part of it can be "hurried" with microtransactions. Feed your sheep to get it to grow wool. Or feed it, then dish out some gems to make it instantly grow wool. Plant some cool plants and wait a certain amount of time dependent on the plant itself. OR, pay some gems and have that sucker instantly matured (just like real life). Ran out of water in your well for watering your plants? No big deal, gems are god in this land. Pay out a few of them and your well will be full again.

And my absolute favorite part about farming (and fishing, but it's not even that notable to explain or talk about in my opinion), my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE PART is that there's bounty boards tied to exchanging your farming/fishing goods for money. In every scenario where I mathed out how much I'd be getting back compared to how much gold I was putting in to producing these goods, the amount I was getting back was NOMINAL. It was like 40-50 at absolute maximum for profit, after pumping in something like 100 to begin with. I understand the MMO grind, but take note that you can spend some gems to get a big lump sum of enticing, juicy gold, and realize just what kind of game this is (if you hadn't realized already).

There are almost no redeeming factors for this game. The fishing is kind of fun (although buying new rods takes gems, and that's just.... ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Just why?), the farming is okay if you're a fan of Harvest Moon-y kind of mechanics, and the flight is kind of fun even if it's really clunky and you get stuck on terrain a lot. That's it. That's all I can think of that I've had fun with in my entire 9 hour first sitting with the game.

In other words, unless you REALLY, REALLY like this series or you love to laugh at poor, greedy design at every turn (like I do), avoid this title. And honestly there's no reason to NOT avoid it. There are so many good/passable free to play MMOs on Steam now. Go have fun in one of those.

Too bad the two films didn't show you how much money Hiccup had to spend to become a "Dragon Master"

It's a free game, however due to the obnoxious amount of time it spends throwing paid-for features in your face with popups, prompts and limitations it stops you from actually enjoying the game. A huge amount of content is only pay to get.

How to get the most out of this game.

1. Create your viking using two or less options in every catagory!
2. Fly a dragon at 5 mph!
3. Click on some eggs which opens a window!
4. Get asked to pay 85 dollars for a membership!
5. Say no which will instantly crash the game!
6. Uninstall!

So here's my short opinion on School of Dragons.

I downloaded it with some friends because we were all curious about how a game based off this particular franchise would go. To be honest none of us really expected much. Upon downloading we were greeted by, if you have not already guessed from the other reviews, lots of loading screens. Loading screens aren't a bad thing...normally. But these are heavy and a bit sore on the eyes. The attempts to get you excited by all the new content fall flat when you cycle through the same 5 ads over and over for 10 minutes. They could be better designed but moving on.

The intro experience is a bit clunky but long story short you get to pick from a few dragon breeds and get your baby dragon. The colour customization is actually pretty solid and the dragon models are great for the level of graphics the game can handle. Excellent textures a fairly well contructed world and you're off to level up yourself and your baby dragon.

The game attempts to be educational and actually does a fairly decent job at being engaging about it...at first. You have some quests involving the scientific theory and although the game gets a bit 'please allow us to shove this information directly down your child's throat, you are very welcome' the sentiment does not go unnoted. You collect different minerals and see how they interact with dragonfire and check the results against your hypothesis. Actually kind of rad.

Too bad all the other science related quests are replaced with this Candy Crush Simulator that makes NO SENSE WHATSOVER. But I digress. I was fairly impressed at this point.

Then I tried to meet up with my friends.

After the initial dance of 'where are you' and 'meet me here' we finally made it to the same location. Only...my friends were not there. Ok, so there are different servers. No way to see which one you are on? No problem. We'll just exchange friend codes and teleport to each other. Only...you can only befriend someone on the same server as you.

Oh. Well then...challenge accepted. We spent the next hour switching from single player mode back to mmo mode until we found each other. Grand. Only there is a chance that when you leave the area you could swap servers. Graaaaaaand. No matter. We'll meet up later when our dragons can fly and explore together.

By the time our dragons could all fly, we had stumbled upon the most ridiculous series of bugs and paywalls imaginable.

Gems, in this game, just so happen to be truuuuuuly outrageous. They can be obtained for free, rarely and in small quantities. Otherwise you have to pay for them. That's fine, I don't need Gems right? Ho boy. You can't do anything without them.

Want another dragon? Gems. Saddle? Gems. Another go at a race? Gems. Open a chest you found? Gems. Start a clan? Gems.

Heck, some places you can't even get to without a membership. Not only that but if you don't have mum's credit card to get those sweet, outrageous beauties you can forget about playing at all. You're dragon can run out of energy. How do you fix that? Feeding them. How do you feed them? By fishing. Fishing bait costs gold which can be obtained through quests...which you need your dragon for. If your dragon is tired you can't do quests. Hazzah! I think you can recharge your dragon by paying gems though. So, yey.

Bugs include, quests that can only be completed by logging in on someone else's computer after attempting to light a campfire for two hours, quests that you never took, lead no where, and simply don't exist, and, my favorite, incomplete maps. INCOMPLETE MAPS.

There are literally places in this game where you can be flying over a mountain and suddenly it looks like the entire world is see through, like your minecraft server crashed or you're trying to play on your mum's flip phone again to prove you can. I was flying in the glitchy ocean (which should have a seziure warning on it btw because the shaders are bugged) and heading towards the island only to find a neat surprise. Its flat. Its literally a 2D render of the island the disappears when you pass go. I mean, come on. Don't make flying there an option if you're going to be lazy.

Half the trees are flat. There is a forest of 4 very sad, out of place trees in this one location that you have to go to for any quest involving chopping wood. MUST I GO ON?

And do you know what the worst part about this game is? It has freaking potential. It has such a good base but it feels like no one is working on it. I want to shut it down, give it to a team of college kids, and put it back up in a couple of months because it would probably be ACES and I would probably LOVE IT. Because flying on your own dragon is COOL and the setting is CHARMING but it all feels like an alpha game that someone ran out of energy for halfway through and still had to turn it in.

I hate this game and I want someone with some fire in their soul to take over the whole freaking project so I can sleep at night instead of sketching out ideas for a better system that does not wreek of being a quick cash grab. Ugh. Don't play it just go send some letters to the developers or find a kickstarter to fund. I don't know just don't download this until someone takes responsibility for this beautiful disaster.

How to train your credit card and it's sequel how to uninstall.

10/10 would recommend

I tried, i really did, i really wanted to like this game...I love the IP its based on.but this this is just crap. The graphics are, well to put it lightly, 10 years old. Its just not good enough for a modern game. The textures are just aweful. but this is not the worst part, i can live with bad graphics.

Lets start with account registration. You have an age choice, 5 options. Are you 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? yep thats right. The game assumes that everyone playing it is under 6. through the registration process you rapidly discover a complete lack of tab change. so you cant just type in the answers into the fields you have to select the field first. This is just the start of the bad GUI design.

Apparently this game is a mobile phone port because the game puts huge buttons up on the screen for you to click on to accelerate and slow and also apparently fire fireballs, though that button was only flashed at me as a taunt, and accelerate consisted of going from standing still to a slight snails pace. After the rather basic flying tutorial you are required to then go choose a dragon. First it asks you a series of questions and recommends a dragon to you, then basically tells you to pick your own anyway and leaves you to try and work out what the eggs refer to. A more knowledgable person might know the IP enough to remember the names given to each of the dragons in the movie and what each looks like and does...i couldn't, went for one that looked good on the graphic next to the egg, and then got one that looked quite different to what i was expecting...

I then followed the arrows to 'flight school' where i promptly disconnected from the game for the 2nd time in 15 minutes and decided enough was enough.

I'd like to say the game has potential. but the truth is, with all the faults in the game, to fix it you probably pretty much need to scrap the engine and start from scratch, this time with an aim to be more graphically similar to the movies. They might be able to do something with it...but it would need a huge overhaul in the graphics just to make it look reasonable, and a big overhaul in the user interface.

I thought this was a cute and fun game. Kinda like a Facebook pay to win game though, but I have patience and refuse to pay for games, it ran decent-ish on my old computer, I loved the movie, just wanted to zone out... a lot of reasons to play it.

But this game blows so bad.

You can just glitch through the floor and fall forever. Then you can hop on your dragon and try to ride it back up and never get up there!

The camera controls are terrible, even if you zoom out and get to a position that is acceptable, it resets all the time whenever you do something, anything. Fly? Reset. Fireball? Reset. Zone through? Reset.

Speaking of controls, little to no volume controls - you can turn it on, or off. On is ear-blastingly, RIP headphones users loud. Off is... not even really off. Occasionally when you zone through or activate/turn in a quest, sound will come blasting out of nowhere and blow your eardrums out.

There's nothing really to do at all. It's all gathering quests, retrieval and delivery quests, and what appears to be a selection of daily quests (Hiccup will keep making you do his scientific theory BS over and over again and play the same movie scenes despite it having NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SUBJECT OR TASK AT HAND). There is absolutely no PvE. There appears to be some kind of PvP which is really just minigames vs each other.

Fishing sucks. It takes forever. You gotta buy, with real money (gems = real money) a better fishing pole so it doesn't suck.

Flying sucks. The only way for you to dismount is if you plow into the ground and hit the dismount button (or press R) but you cannot dismount in the air and there is practically no way to just LAND. LAND. LAND.

Speaking of plowing and dismounting, you can't use either of those words. So, the word for GETTING OFF OF YOUR DRAGON TO WALK AROUND, is censored.

Also for some reason this game censors what appears to be a selection of American first names. However, you can still make a character using those names - but if someone tries to call you by your name, nope, you are censored.


Oh my god why am I even writing a realistic review for this? Nobody cares and everyone already knows this game is crap.

EDIT ADDING TO THE LIST OF STUPIDLY BANNED WORDS:
plow
dismount
random American names
5, 10, five (you cannot even tell anyone what level things unlock and when your dragon levels up)
ANY FREAKING NUMBERS AT ALL omg mommy said I couldn't tell anyone how old I am on the internet or I'll get molested.

and my favorite, fart.

i wanna die

As a huge fan of the franchise

This is a disappointing corporate cashin.

I wish I could say I like it, but I just can't. It's a terrible game with horribly outdated visuals that does nothing what makes the movies so amazing.

I'm still holding out hope for there one day being a good skyrim like HTTYD singleplayer RPG, sigh.

Game sucks, but nostalgia hits hard, if it got a rework it'd be perfect