My Fantastic Ranch [Xbox]
Developed by Piece of Cake Fabulous, My Fantastic Ranch is a ranch management game that is brilliantly simple for kids to follow, with voice acting to read out your instructions via the helpful fairy, Feritella, explaining everything you need to do. There are two gameplay modes available: Normal and Dreamer, with Dreamer having a more relaxed playstyle - allowing you to create your ranch exactly as you please, with no limitations or story to get in the way of your plans (making it fantastic for younger kids that don’t have the patience to go along with orders!). You can adopt creatures for your ranch, and build facilities for them to use and learn - and with Feritella keeping you right, it’s really easy to get into the swing of things and gather a huge family of unique creatures, each with their own designs and types (with different types across both Dragons and Unicorns).
There are a variety of buildings for you to set up for your ranch, from Snug Stables for your creatures to rest, Cosy Dorms for any students that you’ve enrolled, and Snack Barns for all of your creatures’ yummy treats! You can conduct Dressage lessons, as well as Target Practise and more - and doing these will earn more gems and improve your reputation, providing your creatures behave! Taking care of your creatures in between lessons and allowing them time to eat and rest is essential to keeping them happy and well-behaved, so upgrading your buildings is a great idea to improve the flow of things in your ranch. After each in-game week has passed on your ranch, you’ll get a special report from Feritella to give you a rundown on your progress, and this is helpful to show you where things could improve and what you’re already doing really well with - and then with the next week beginning, new creatures will become available to adopt!
Visually, My Fantastic Ranch is gorgeously bright and filled with cute creature designs and adorable animations of the unicorns and dragons playing and exercising around the ranch. You’ve got a lot of freedom as to how you place the various buildings and fields, as well as having a selection of decorative items that you can use to spruce the place up - though many of these serve no purpose other than aesthetics, such as fancy fountains that everyone just walks past and paths that nobody follows. Appreciate the beauty, damnit! The soundtrack is nice and peaceful, with a relaxed vibe that keeps things feeling nice and chilled out at the ranch.
Following the storyline, there’s a clear line of progression and satisfaction that you’ll gain from seeing this - with upgrades to buildings becoming available as you earn enough, and the ability to do tournaments once certain targets have been met. My daughter found it to be a decent pacing as she didn’t feel too restricted at any point with what she could or couldn’t yet do, and she had fun laying out her ranch to make it look as pretty as she wanted. You learn to get better outcomes from completing different lessons by matching up riders with creatures that go well together, signified by a heart that is bigger the better their relationship - with super duos being the best choice - again making it nice and easy for kids to understand.
At the top right of the screen, you can see the clock as well as a note of the current day, along with the controls to toggle to slow down or speed up the passage of time - which comes in handy whenever a disaster is happening and you need to slow down until you can locate it and deal with it! Even with this permanent visual reminder of time, it doesn’t feel like the game puts too much pressure on you to do things at speed, aside from the occasional timed bonus objective that will appear in the bottom left - though these are levelled out with a selection of untimed objectives, so you aren’t likely to miss out too much if you can’t satisfy all of these.
Over time you’ll be able to take part in different levels of Festivals, with these allowing you to impress the Prince and Princess and increase your reputation in the Kingdom. Having a well decorated and busy ranch will improve things, with plenty of students to train and send off to compete in tournaments, as well as earning plenty of gems to allow you to buy more dragons and unicorns - even unlocking some special, rare ones! It’s not an overly long game, though having the freedom to go at your own pace (or even remove the story entirely in Dreamer mode) makes it ideal for kids, particularly with Christmas coming up - though is a little on the higher side cost-wise, coming in at around £35 on Xbox. If you’re interested in My Fantastic Ranch, you can find all of the purchase links here.
In the end, we decided to give My Fantastic Ranch the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.
Are you interested in My Fantastic Ranch? What do you think of it?
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- V x
Thank you to Nacon for the My Fantastic Ranch Xbox review code!
