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The Smurfs: Dreams is the latest of many videogames involving the little blue creatures, and while The Smurfs 2: The Prisoner of the Green Stone was a 3D platformer, while The Smurfs: Village Party was mostly mini games, this latest title is very much like a Super Mario 3D-style roamabout game, as well as Super Mario Sunshine, for the times when you’re walking about with a squirt gun.
Plot-wise, the evil Gargamel has cursed the Smurfs in order to capture them, in which when they eat sarsaparilla leaves from the bushes, they’ll fall into a deep sleep, as if they’ve just turned on a Piers Morgan broadcast by mistake.
You’ll have to wake up all eleven sleepy Smurfs in this game – including Brainy Smurf, Tailor Smurf and of course everyone’s favourite, Smurfette, across 4 dream worlds containing 12 levels, plus 16 mini-levels, collecting magic orbs (which looked like mushrooms to me) in order to achieve this, although you can pass through the levels whilst missing some of these out, and still resurrect your friends. However, the OCD in me gets annoyed that I’ve missed something out, so need to go back through and get the rest.
Now, as much fun as The Smurfs: Dreams is, there are some issues with it. First, it’s a pain that you can’t redo a level from complete scratch, meaning that early on, I had to complete a level three times because I missed the location of two orbs across the first two times, and had to do a lot of editing afterwards!
If I could’ve gone through them again cold, it would’ve taken much less time than the editing did!
Just why do some games sometimes do this? The Smurfs: Dreams isn’t the first and won’t be the last, but it’s so annoying! I’d love to go through a level from scratch each time, so I can get a more polished gameplay video as a result.
Additionally, the camera is poor, all too frequently, as it’ll look like I’m safe to jump from one platform to another, but with everything twisting about, it’s not always 100% clear, and so I fall into oblivion, hence lots of unnecessary deaths.
If you want to phone a friend, you can play this game co-op style, but for me, I prefer to play with myself.
NOTE: At the time of posting this review, there’s more gameplay to come, but I’ve held some back as Youtube’s system has gone a bit screwy in the past couple of weeks, so I’m holding back a bit before resuming a more usual schedule.
Overall, The Smurfs: Dreams is great fun, but sometimes frustrating for unnecessary reasons.
Thanks to our friends at Microids for the review code for this game.
The Smurfs: Dreams is out now on PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC/Steam, and PS4.
Important info:
- Developer: Ocellus Studio
- Publisher: Microids
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
- CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
- Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
- RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
- Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
- 1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.