TLDR: the game has a very fun gameplay offset by a bit of an odd balancing (at least on hard), low enemy variety and a quite shallow but serviceable main story. Highly recommended, but play it on normal.


Mechanically speaking, Dream Tactics is a delightfully tuned Swiss clock.
I love that basically every object, card or synergy changes gameplay in some minor or mayor way (you'll barely see the boring classic of "using this will increase damage by 3% on Wednesdays if you ate burritos for breakfast"), and there are so many of them that if you love to come up with your own builds this game will hook you instantly (even though the sheer number can be overwhelming). However, this is offset by some detrimental design decisions.

First, the enemy variety is abysmal, putting the same pillow enemies on a different costume doesn’t really make for a new enemy, and with one (1) exception all normal enemies occupy a single tile (enemies that occupy a lot of tiles or have weird shapes could serve to block paths, or make for interesting fights where you have to surround them or something, I don't know, it's a dream world, literally there is no limit to what you can come up with and with the exception of the final boss no enemy design is interesting). Which brings me to,

Second: encounters start to get repetitive around the time you finish the second world, basically every encounter boils down to entering a room with dozens of enemies and bonking your head against a table because every time you manage to reduce their numbers they get another round of reinforcements, up to three times per encounter, and starts to get tiring fast, especially because,

Three: Maybe its because I played on hard, but balancing isn't the best. In every encounter you are overwhelmed by 4:1 AT LEAST, you get surrounded extremely easy, and almost any single enemy can leave your unit around half their hp in a turn, so you get killed very fast. The problem is that there isn't a good way to counter this if you get hard stuck. I'll put as an example the only two times I got really stuck, the boss of the kingdom realm and the final boss.
In the first case, the arena is a straight line designed so that basically no matter how little you move towards the boss, you'll inevitably catch the attention of a ton of the enemies between him and you, which you can't really avoid or surround as the arena is NARROW. So, you think, "ah, the game wants me to be extremely cautious, patient, and try to attract as few enemies at a time as I can", well, no, because simultaneously there are enemies advancing towards the boss in a parallel line, which you can very hardly reach with anything that isn’t one of the very few long range attacks, who will cause the boss to make an unavoidable attack on your units when they reach him. This is telling me the opposite thing, that I should advance fast and reach the boss before they do. I try for 5 hours but I simply can’t, the enemies overwhelm you constantly and I’m lucky if I reach the boss with a single unit alive, only to get obviously obliterated by him, as it’s the boss. I proceed to try a bit of other worlds to try and level up a bit. Only to realize something. This game has level scaling. And extremely stingy at that (but maybe its so stingy because of the hard mode, I don’t know). The enemies of every encounter are at most 2-3 levels under you, so it basically doesn’t make a difference. The only reason I managed to defeat him is because I completed another realm which gave me a unit with an ability which countered perfectly situations where a lot of surrounding enemies are together, otherwise I simply couldn’t have won.
I understand the purpose of level scaling here, as you can enter any of the four worlds in any order, but they could have made it so that once you enter a world, it gets fixed in order, say, second world, calculated what your max level would be if you fought every enemy in it, say 20, and the realm would get balanced around that, so that if an encounter is too hard, you could farm a bit in other realms and win. You know, a universal strategy in nearly any rpg in existence, but with this strategy not being viable makes me question why even bother introducing levels, as most of the improvements your units get is from items and cards found exploring anyway.

Now. The final boss. At this point I have collected every item and card available, have a team of the units I think are the most powerful with a set of items I think benefit them the most, and with some good synergies. I can’t win again, and this time I’m at max level and have every tool already at my disposal, but I have already optimized my team as much as I can so I don’t know what to do, I get very close to winning, but I can hardly reach the dps checks. I’ve been here before, with the kingdom realm boss, I’m not going to waste either another 5 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours in failed attempts or expend 10 hours trying to come up with some stupidly broken build. I retort to trying to find a guide (It’s not this game’s fault, but its lack of popularity, and therefore of available resources, makes finding guides to anything in the game a pain in the ass). After quite a while searching I manage to find a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNO7G_GSKEc&t=1249s) that shows the build the poster used to win and copy it to the last coma, I find it boring, with units I don’t like, cards I don’t find very useful, and synergies I think aren’t the best, but it’s the only thing I can find where someone wins while showing how, so I follow it and manage to win in a few attempts. Hooray.
Honestly the real problem with this game’s boss fights (and encounters in general) is that they are way too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ long, and they don’t even have checkpoints in the middle or anything. I wouldn’t have cared so much a bout keep trying the final boss if failing didn’t mean wasting a literal, real world, 3600 seconds, hour if you get dunked on in the final phase.

Those are my main gameplay complaints, a few other ones are that there should be some kind of training to try builds and that there should be a new game + (since you only really get everything available right before the final boss, you can’t explore the full range of possibilities for most of the game).


Finally, I won’t extend myself a lot in my narrative complaints, as I have been writing this for two hours and I want to finish already.
It’s serviceable, but the way it’s told is weird, at times it seems like a story for children with how simple it is and the themes it has, but then you get quite a few moments of dark humour, so I would hesitate to let a kid play this. It wants to make you worry about its characters (a lot, considering the only twist in the game), but basically wastes any chance to develop them. It frequently tries very dry humour but falls flat most of the time. Except for the very end, the characters you meet in each realm aren’t accounted for at all outside them, so they seem kind of superfluous to the narrative (I won’t really complain about this, as it’s most likely due to budget constraints).

So yeah, amazing game, dry story and a bit repetitive and drawn out.

The game has some excellent ideas and just enough meat on it's bones to present them, but by the end of the game you'll have so many items and cards to keep track of that redesigning your party build becomes a huge undertaking. The synergies are so specific that the game can do very little to help you keep track of them.

The player characters are each very unique, and as you unlock new cards and items for them you will have to discover and rediscover how to make them work effectively. Some of them can be built in such ways as to effectively eliminate any challenge to the game, and those synergies are not always obvious.

The game is a mostly linear series of battles split into episodes, the main 4 of which can be played in any order, and you can drop in and out between them. The enemies and the arenas offer only enough tactical depth to force you to pay attention to what your doing, but most of the encounters are not especially interesting.

The game has a silly sense of humor and almost every character is cartoonishly evil.

I liked the game for the most part and it's ideas, but it's so bare in many respects and so overburdened with things that simply weren't well enough thought out, that it is difficult to recommend. There are plenty of other tactics games which will offer a better experience, even if their ideas aren't always as interesting. I hope this game inspires others.