How To Train Your Dragon is an animated movie by the famous Dreamworks team who also brought you the Shrek series and Kung Fu Panda. It's based on the first in a series of children's books set in a fictional Viking world. This game allows you to play the story mode as Hiccup or Astrid, who were the two main characters in the movie. The music is straight out of the movie and some of the voice talent made the trip too, although Viking chief Stoick is voiced by serial game voiceover guy Nolan North (you name it, he's been in it) and not Gerard Butler, who seems to be in everything else at the moment.

Training your dragon is pretty straightforward as all you have to do is follow a set of button presses to earn the right to use the new combos and characteristic points (like XP experience points—no idea why they called them something different) with which to upgrade your dragon’s abilities (speed, power, health, fire power etc). You’ll have to search the village for vegetables, plants, rocks, chickens and some extremely endearing sheep with which to feed your dragon (which is fun but strangely guilt-inducing, those sheep are so darn cute). Once you’ve attained a high enough level take it to the tournament area to compete against all the other kids from the village.

As I mentioned the beat ‘em up part is the main meat of the game and it plays fairly well. Combos can be learned and unlocked and speed and power can be upped by earning more CP (Characteristic Points) through winning wild fights, tournaments and completing the minigames. The game mechanic is solid and the combos actually work. Some combos (don’t worry, they’re just simple combinations of X and Y) and flame attacks are unblockable which, as always, is pleasing when you’re the aggressor, but less so if you’re on the receiving end. Some dragons are more responsive than others and some have more powerful flame attacks or a longer reach. You’ll definitely develop a favourite and if you’re really bad at fighting games and can only button-bash then the Rhino-like Gronckle will see you through even the toughest fights thanks to its extra health bar. The flame effects are good and very satisfying to use as they’re accompanied with a good rumble from the pad and a smoking opponent. You can dodge attacks or just guard (usually rolling into a ball or using your dragon’s wings as a shield depending on the dragon) and deflect attacks and wait for an opening. It’s a simplistic but fun fighting game, but it constitutes far too much of the overall gameplay.

Ice Sculpting - time your button presses (gold game power gauge-style) to make your dragon melt the ice block into a random design. This one is devilishly difficult on Gold difficulty,

Looping Race - Anyone who’s played a Spyro or Harry Potter game will know what to expect from this test of dragon pilot skill. Guide the dragon through the rings and time the correct buttons presses for a vital speed boost.

Flying Sheperd - Probably the best of the minigames this one sees you plucking sheep from precarious islands and bringing them back to the safety of their fenced-in meadow. You need to press the correct button (or buttons) as you swoop in to pick a sheep up safely, and dunking a dirty sheep in the sea will wash it and result in a points bonus.

Memory Torch - This one is basically like the electronic memory game Simon; just remember the sequence and the repeat it.

Puzzle Dragon - A random dragon—that can be any colour and made up from any of the parts available to you when you customize your own dragon—wanders onto the beach and you must then change a basic dragon to match it.

How To Train Your Dragon is another in a long line of decent enough but rather unimaginative and shallow movie tie-in games. The source material provided a great blank canvas but developers Étranges Libellules (according to Wiki it’s French for ‘Strange Dragonflies’) have produced something that feels far to regimented and compartmentalised, like they designed separate game engines to perform the different aspects of the game and then lashed them all together. The way they interlink is quite cleverly done, but the basic to-ing and fro-ing and large amount of arena fighting will put many gamers off well before they see the end of either Hiccup or Astrid’s stories, which are all but identical. This game might have been a minor gem if it’d been set in an open world similar to that of say, Brutal Legend, or even something like The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon (one of the developer's previous titles), but even when considering the perceived target audience this is without doubt a disappointingly hemmed-in and repetitive experience that even small kids and fans of the books and movie will most likely soon lose interest in.