My Universe: Baby Dragon is a virtual pet game where you will raise baby dragons until they are ready to graduate from your care. Customise your character and dress your dragons up with jewellery, as well as tending to their daily needs and training them to use their magic and flying!
The game has an isometric view, and you will run around the landscape to collect items to feed your dragon and unlock cosmetics. The rune stones will take you to the training areas for your dragon to level up their magic and flying respectively. The controls for the flying training feel a little bit off and it takes some getting used to. In comparison, the magic training feels somewhat smoother to play and is my favourite of these two mini games.
While this is a kids game, it does require a little bit of reading comprehension as there are a few dialogue boxes explaining how to play, as well as little bits of banter from NPCs. There are RPG style quest objectives and while you can complete the current ones on your heads-up display in any order, overall, it is very linear. There is a day and night cycle but it doesn’t really seem to make much difference in how you play the game and explore the terrain, more so you have an arbitrary number of tasks to complete for the day and then you are forced to go to bed before you can do anymore.
Your player character has some limited customisable options which you will get to choose before you start the game but most of it is locked. The dragons can be customised after you have hatched their egg by going into your house and interacting with the wardrobe. Even though there is only jewellery for the dragons, it does look pretty cool and there are various places the accessories can be placed such as the horns, tail, neck and legs.
While I think the dragons are really cute, I think the player characters are a bit too generic looking and I’d really like more clothing outfits as there are only two. You have to collect crystals and craft on the GemStitch sewing machine in your house to unlock character and dragon items, including colour palettes. The items you get are seemingly random, as you can’t choose what to unlock and there’s no progression chart to tell you what you will get next, so it’s a little bit annoying.
After you have trained up the first dragon and sent them off to school, your achievement will be marked by a picture frame in your house and you will start to receive letters in the mail, which is really quite sweet and endearing. Moving on to the second one does start to make the game feel repetitive but I do like getting to play the mini game sequences while hatching your egg, where you have to use different tools to find out information about the dragon. It does mention early on that you want to train a dragon of each element type, so it will be interesting to see if there is a reward for doing so. While the day-to-day gameplay gets tedious, the NPCs you talk to along the way do at least offer new dialogue each time you meet them.
The most frustrating thing about My Universe: Baby Dragon is the horrible amount of loading screens. Every single new thing needs to load and it really kills the flow of the game. However, because of all the downtime, it does make it pretty easy to play this game in handheld mode while watching TV.
Overall, My Universe: Baby Dragon is a cute, easy game that is good for younger kids or anyone that wants to play something a little bit laid back. The lack of variety in ways to play, may make more seasoned gamers like me feel a little underwhelmed and craving more depth. But I completely acknowledge that I am not the target market.
My Universe: Baby Dragon is available now on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, and Mac operating systems.
The game was played on Nintendo Switch for review purposes.