Dreams Universe Review – A creator’s wonderland

The early access for Dreams Universe on PS4 has been out for a few weeks and it has proven to be an interesting game. We got to spend some time trying it out and have included our thoughts of the game in our review below.

Intro

Dreams Universe is made by Media Molecule, the same developer behind LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway series. It is a game where you can build and interact with your creations. However, it lets you do far more than LittleBigPlanet allowed. Using the rich set of tools available to you, you can make character models, animate those models, add a soundtrack, and more. Basically, you can create almost anything you can think of. You could even create an entire game, provided you have the ability and creativity to make one.

Tutorial

To start out, we decided to go through the tutorial. Selecting ‘DreamShaping’ here shows you a bunch of tutorial sessions you can play through. The basic ones are essentially crash courses on using the Move tool. This is what you’ll be using a lot, as it allows you to navigate around the dreamscape and manipulate various objects, such as rotating or resizing them. There are also tutorials on how to create characters, music arrangements, and logic-based conditions for a variety of things.
In terms of difficulty, the tutorial isn’t that hard once you get used to the controls. That said, there’s a lot to keep track of so it can be very confusing at first. The “Imp” you use to create things can also go off-alignment easily so you will need to hold the Option button to center it quite often.

Homespace

The Homespace is your playground, sort of a base you use to make your own little creative space. It’s also a puzzle of sorts when you first start out since there are a few marble balls you need to collect that are locked behind obstacles. Creative use of the tools provided by the game will help you obtain them, making it another fun way to enjoy Dreams Universe.

Creating

Once done with the tutorial, you can head back over to DreamShaping to try creating something on your own. But being guided through the tutorials and making something on your own are two different things, so don’t expect the creation part to be easy.

In our case, we spend over an hour just to make and connect a winding stairway to a pillar. Even then, the end result wasn’t all that good. That was enough to tell us that we weren’t ready for anything complicated. We were made to realize that the creation process will require a lot of time, effort and planning.

Community Sharing

If you’re not much of a creator, no problem! There are already more than a few projects shared by the Dreams Universe community, which you can play on your PS4. The variety is astounding as we’ve seen flight simulators, time attack racing, and even a hammer game where the avatar is literally a hammer.

Controls

You can play Dreams Universe with a Dualshock 4 controller or use a pair of PlayStation Move controllers with a PlayStation VR headset. We managed just fine with the DS4 but found that the second method gives you more control. If you’re seriously planning to create something complex, using the second method is probably a better option.

Final thoughts

Dreams Universe is a game that’s may be easy to learn but difficult to master. And master it you must, if you want to make anything fancy. If all you want to do is play around with what other people have created, that’s fine too. The tutorials are also easy enough to understand so even kids can have fun with it.

There’s no doubt that this game has an amazing toolset and platform for sharing, enabling many of like mind to create and play with. If you have an idea you want to try or just want to flex your creative muscles, this is certainly the game for you.

Intrigued yet? You can get into the Dreams Universe early access now by purchasing it here, or through the PlayStation Store via your PS4. You can also follow the developer’s Twitter account for news.