I got PS4 Dreams around mid-June using only the duel shock controller and so far my experience with it has been fairly positive. As a creation platform, PS4 dreams are by far the most user-friendly and flexible game creation tool that I have ever worked with. That said, rarely will I find creations that will hold my interest for more than 30mins. Dreams as of right now are a product that you must invest yourself in to really get its full value and that may not be what most people are looking for. So far the user experience can be divided into two parts, the creator aspect and the consumer side of things. From a consumer standpoint, dreams still haven't had enough time to build a good library of interesting titles outside of the ones that Media Molecule has already created, but there are definitely a few notable games that I have played. The creation tools on the other hand, now that's where the good stuff is.
Dreams is what I always dreamed of having as a kid. I remember asking my parents when I was young for the game creation programs only to be disappointed to find out it was mostly just copied and pasting pre-made assets. Even just using the Dual Shock controller, the creation workflow for dreams felt very intuitive to me and I found myself creating beautiful set pieces after just an hour or two of fiddling with the modeling and painting tools. Dreams is definitely a powerful tool when it comes to creating game worlds and music, but how does it fare in what its main focus is, making games?
Dreams use a sort of visual programming logic, and it comes with a lot of tools too. There are logic gates, collision boxes, global variables, movers, triggers, almost everything you would need to manipulate your levels and characters to create the game you've always dreamed of...almost. As of right now, dreams is very good at creating platformers, narrative-focused adventure games, and small scale action games, but games that require to save a lot of information about the state of the world or the player are very hard to create in Dreams. The artist is limited to only a few Global variables that can be carried from scene to scene. This means that in games that require extensive databases (primarily RPGs), the artists are going to be very limited to how much data he can bring from scene to scene, such as player health, level, items, money, etc. There are a few ways around this, people have ways to fit it a bit more memory by using binary encoding, but even that has its limits and it can be hard to keep track of.
Another Problem is the tagging system is very finicky. The problem I encountered is that tags are not actually applied to the collision box of the model it is actually attached to, the tag can only be activated from the actual tag component. This to me makes zero sense and I'm still not quite sure why it is this way.
TL;DR
Dreams so far is a fantastic tool to create the game you always envisioned with a few limitations. If you've ever been interested in creating music, art, or games, dreams is a MUST HAVE. If you're only interested in the games that people have created, I would say wait until the full release.
