Review: My Life: Riding Stables 3 is a Vast Improvement over its Predecessors, Held Back by Store-Bought Horse Animation and Bad Balancing

I sometimes conduct polls in our Discord or Facebook Group about what games I should review next. My Life: Riding Stables 3 has been part of several such polls since its release in late 2022, and never got a lot of interest, so I’ve been deprioritizing it behind things like Ghost of Tsushima, The Sims 4: Horse Ranch and even My Horse: Bonded Spirits. But part of my joy in writing these reviews comes precisely from telling you in excruciating detail about the games you don’t already know and care about. This game has 11 reviews on Steam in total, so I can actually add relevant insight here – and I personally was very interested in this game considering the history of its franchise. 

To briefly summarize: The My Riding Stables series started all the way back in 2005, got a very successful sequel in 2008, and then two decidedly not great successors in 2018 and 2020 respectively. A good overview of the (overlapping and confusing) titles can be found in the horse game database. 
This latest game is a departure not just by having an even more nonsensical name combination than ever before, but mainly by being developed by a new studio who wanted to do some things differently. If you’re curious about what that meant for the project’s development, make sure to have a look at this interview. As for the game itself, well, I’m two years late with this, but let’s finally take a look at the latest entry in the My Riding Stables series and how it holds up. 

Character & Horse Creation

Despite the game being sold as part of the Wendy franchise in its home country of Germany, My Life: Riding Stables 3 lets the player create their own character. In fact, the only tenuous connection to the IP is a brief introduction by Wendy’s grandmother - and even then, that character has a different name in the game than in the original comics and audiobooks for some reason. 

The character creation options are nothing spectacular, but offer a solid bit of variety, even including separate sliders for body shape and head shape rather than a simple binary gender choice, which is cool. The facial expression and proportions are quite awkward though, unfortunately. 

The body diversity is quite limited, but I always like it when games do something that’s not just a clear binary

In the comics, Wendy’s grandmother is called Hertha, but hey maybe this is her other grandma and they just look very much alike.

Up next comes the horse creation, which lets the player pick one of six breeds and then customize colors and markings. What’s nice is that I can see that some of my criticism of previous games in the series was applied: for example, Friesians now only come in black, and there was obviously an attempt at giving each of the breeds a bit of body shape variety. 

Sadly, it’s quite plain that there’s only so much you can do with tweaking the Horse Animset Pro model for this purpose: I can see that an attempt was made, but unfortunately the resulting Hanoveranian becomes Giraffe-like with its comically long neck, and the slightly thicker legs on what is supposed to be a Black Forest draft horse are enough for a “you tried ⭐” sticker but not really convincing enough to actually satisfy the gaze of someone who knows what these horses look like. 

A brown horse with black mane and tail is called a Bay and has black lower legs, which is pretty much the most common color for horses so why do games keep failing at it? And don’t come at me about wild bays, those have black points too, just lower ones.

The Black Forest Horse is a light draft horse, known for for its liver chestnut coat and flaxen mane and tail.

Further disappointing are the selectable coat colors, which do feature okay combinations of coat and mane coloring, but forget about the fact that the dark lower legs are not optional when making a convincing bay or buckskin horse. That I can’t see my horse or rider from any other angle while customizing is particularly annoying when editing markings, or mane and tail styles later in the game. All in all, the horse customization ends up being better than any other recent game in this series, but it’s still really far from good.

Stable and Care

After a short tutorial for riding controls, we arrive at the titular Riding Stables and are instructed to take care of our horse’s needs: Trust, Workload, Hunger and Hygiene. I have to also note here that the first I saw of my horse was it lying down curled up while wearing its tack, which just looks awful.

The HAP sleeping pose isn’t convincing on the best of days, but combined with the fully tacked horse is gets a bit painful.

Love the open stable, hay rack and silly hat options.

The hoofpicking minigame is among the better I’ve seen – removing dirt and stones feels pretty satisfying – and manages to avoid feeling overly long, which is nice. And yet, I ended up only ever using the brushing minigame, that being the most efficient combination of increasing Trust and Hygiene at the same time. Brushing has gratifying visual and audio effects, but then undercuts its own UX quality by forcing you to fill up an additional progress bar to finish the minigame even after Trust and Hygiene are already filled up. 

Something I want to point out as a positive is that My Life: Riding Stables 3 features an open barn where your horses move around freely in a group, rather than being confined to single stalls. I like that, because horses being shown in constant solitary confinement is something that increasingly bothers me, considering these animals’ needs for friends, forage and freedom. The setup here ends up being a bit awkward however, because unlocking additional space in the barn basically just clears up rubble from a small area while the pasture surrounding the building is large from the start. The horses’ behaviors aren’t super complex, but they do walk around the open space, which is nice.

Hoofpicking has an alright user experience and the game doesn’t ever force you to do it

Depending on which of two brushes you use when grooming, either Trust or Hygiene fills up faster.

Training and Riding

Four values define your horse’s movement and abilities: Stamina, Agility, Speed and Scope. Later in the game – when you’ll have earned enough “Equis” – it’s possible to buy horses that have some of their stats-bars half-full already, but your starter horse is going to need some training time first of all. 

The way to increase your horse’s abilities is to complete small race and obstacle courses all over the open world map that surrounds your stables. The game here takes some obvious inspiration from its 2008 predecessor, but vastly improves on the formula to result in what is by far the most competent and polished horse improvement system this series has ever had. Your horse’s workload stat keeps you from progressing too far in a single in-game day, as overworked horses won’t gain stats as effectively. Completing training courses gives the player reason to explore the world, following the star pickups of each course is satisfying and simple, and managing your jump height and stamina adds a tiny bit of challenge to make it interesting… At least in the beginning. 

Early game training session with a low-stats horse

This horse with its stats maxed out handles much faster and smoother

As your stats improve, so does your horse’s handling: you can gallop faster and for longer stretches at a time, jump higher and make tighter turns. It’s a good thing too, because the initial horse movement speed looks and feels like it’s in slow motion. This isn’t the only game that recently made me notice that many game devs seem to have no idea that despite being the “second slowest” gait in theory, moving at a trot actually feels like a pretty brisk and efficient pace to get around at in real life.

In My Life: Riding Stables 3, the controls do away with the walk entirely and only let you move at a trot, canter or gallop. Which, well, uh, buzzer noise. The riding controls further irritated me by using camera-relative movement, which means that if you’re moving the camera around your horse, there’s eventually a switch as to which direction of your joystick means what. This is a player preference rather than a hard rule admittedly, but for me personally it meant that I repeatedly turned the opposite direction of where I wanted to go at times when I wasn’t looking at my horse neatly from behind. Well, it’s still nice that I can at least turn my camera this time around.

Animations and Other Visuals

The horse animations in My Life: Riding Stables 3 are disappointing. It uses the omnipresent Horse Animset Pro, which means crappy horse anatomy all around, with constantly s-curved forelegs being the worst offender, but far from the only problem. I’ve harped on this one asset pack so many times that I am an absolute broken record about it. In this case, I know that the dev team was aware of its flaws but utterly unable to plan for custom horse animation within their very limited budget. Meaning, at least here I know why it was used, but that doesn’t change the fact that this one asset pack keeps ruining horse movement across so many games and I just really wish either the creators would bother to update and improve it (which may happen one day 🤞), or that somebody would finally make a viable alternative. 

Aggressively mid horse asset pack continues to be aggressively mid, more at 11

Where everything apart from the horses themself is concerned, it seems like Korion Interactive have made good use of either existing assets or efficient modelling techniques: The game world is colorful and inviting, featuring four different biome areas between Fields, Forest, Beach and Mountains, each with their own style of flora and architecture.  

The lunging is wonky to control, but at least it shows us our horse at a walk.

This doesn’t look or feel good, but look I also would not want to have to implement satisfying open world controls and boundaries for a project with just 8 months of total dev time.

The open world does suffer from a bunch of invisible walls and other awkward boundaries, admittedly, but there’s still a certain satisfaction to initially exploring it, riding new courses as you find them and picking up the occasional collectible gift. It may not stay all that interesting for a long time, but it for sure is an improvement over all previous My Riding Stables games I’ve played, as well as over the recently reviewed My Horse: Bonded Spirits, not just in terms of the world design itself but also in the controls and riding experience used to navigate it.  

“There’s a consistent art style and nothing looks out of place” may seem like faint praise, but honestly it’s worth appreciating considering what we’re used to in our niche. If we ignore the slightly odd proportions of horses and characters, My Life: Riding Stables 3 looks downright charming. 

Upgrades and Progression

Progressing in My Life: Riding Stables 3 consists of training your horse, participating in one competition each day and eventually investing your competition earnings into unlocking new areas, additional buildings on your farm, or buying other horses. Although any horse’s stats can be maxed out with a bit of training over time, buying a new horse can be a shortcut or a welcome change in aesthetics. Especially if you’ve for some reason picked the giraffe-like warmblood horse and desperately want to swap it for a slightly less wonky-looking Andalusian, like I did.

The game offers a randomly generated horse at a discount every in-game day, or lets you buy and customize a horse that comes with lower or higher existing stats, depending on the price.

The ingame map lets you toggle different horse views, displaying which star courses are still available for training today for that particular horse, which is really neat.

Apart from the aesthetic change of pace, there’s not really any benefit to buying new horses – on the contrary, maintaining several high-trained horses at an acceptable workload range is actually an incredibly time-consuming task. This could be really cool in theory and does make some sense realistically, but the balancing is way off. Having to ride several courses every day is fun, but needing to grind away at every single available course across two of the major map areas to barely fill up each horse’s workload halfway is not. I did not end up keeping two horses for very long in my playthrough, because I flat out wasn’t able to get their needs met.  

Buildings and new world areas can be unlocked either through the shop menu or by walking up to them in the game world.

Customization items for your horse and rider are another fun money sink, but I found them quite expensive considering I can only earn about 500 Equis per day through competition.

The workload gets vastly more manageable again once you unlock the lunging hall, which is a neat option to have, but not in itself a particularly enjoyable feature: Like in some previous games, lunging here includes switching to the right lane and tapping the right button where you’re prompted to. The minigame doesn’t however give the player control over the speed the horse is going at, but instead speeds up every few prompts, which leads to the weird and oddly difficult situation of leading your horse into a tiny circle at a full gallop. 

Another possible building unlock is the therapy center, but the benefit you get from massaging your horse is adding Trust, which you can get much more easily through the horse care minigames, and reducing its workload stat, which wasn’t really something I ever needed.

Competition Variety

Something the game deserves praise for is its variety in competition disciplines: Competing in one tournament every day is your main source of income, and across the Meadows, Beach, Forest and Mountain areas that you can unlock, there’s a total of 44 different courses, made up of 8 different disciplines. The different races don’t offer a ton of mechanical depth, but switching it up between Gallop Races, Slalom Races, Hurdle Races and more still makes for a valuable change of pace. I particularly enjoy slightly more creative disciplines like “Walk and Ride” where you have to dismount and remount in specific locations, or “Collect Rings” where you have to hit a target with a lance. 

Beach, Forest and Mountain as well as higher ranked races are locked at the start and become available as you compete and unlock the areas.

You can start competitions through the menu or by visiting the arena in each area of the open world.

Every race type comes with its own brief tutorial, which is nice.

The jumping races unfortunately become frustrating instead of an interesting challenge over time: higher obstacles are incredibly fidgety to clear, even with a fully trained horse. That poles don’t respawn after dropping when a tournament requires multiple laps sure doesn’t help, and neither does the fact that I can’t practice high jumps anywhere in the world outside of competitions and the riding hall. It’s a shame, because I generally enjoy the challenge of timing my jumps and found the riding pretty satisfying once the horse has its stats nice and high.

Once you’ve competed and won some of the races – I’m not sure about the exact conditions, but it feels like a decent amount of effort to get there without requiring total completion – you eventually unlock the Final Cup, a series of four challenges in the previously established disciplines that you complete back to back. I liked that the game provided a proper “ending” this way: you can continue doing every aspect of the gameplay afterwards, but it’s nice to have an overall goal and be rewarded for it with money, a special podium screen and a dialogue popup from grandma. 

Rarer competition types like this Flag Race provide a neat change of pace, even if they don’t reflect any specific real life equestrian disciplines.

This particular hurdle race is closer to a steeplechase track than a showjumping course, which isn’t the most interesting track design but a perfectly fine variation.

Accessibility and Other Thoughts

My Life: Riding Stables 3 commits to accessibility for a young audience, which I really appreciate: you can save the game at any time, you can start competitions and end in-game days via the menu if you don’t want to walk up to the relevant buildings, you can initiate the grooming interactions via the horse menu if you can’t find or don’t want to search for your horse in the pasture and if you don’t want to or forget how to saddle your horse you can just ride without tack. At every opportunity, the game makes it as easy as possible for players to progress however they want, which I think makes a ton of sense for the audience aged 10 and under. 

At the same time though, that I can end my day somewhere out in the field rather than put my horse home and take off its saddle feels almost like cheating to me. I could have refused to use that functionality, but didn’t really feel immersed or interested enough to commit to that bit of role play. 

The user experience and interface are really solid and a vast improvement over the 2018 and 2020 predecessors overall. 

I also want to add that the game has a hot seat multiplayer mode where players can take turns riding a course and get their scores compared at the end, which I assume is nice for siblings who have to share a controller, but probably not much of a selling point for adult players. 

I knew from my interview with Korion that the breeding and guest house mechanics would not be making a comeback in this sequel. While I would have liked to see those features get the same kind of overhaul as riding and training did, I think it made a lot of sense to cut them and focus on getting a reduced feature list polished and working rather than adding more half-baked functionality.

A horse’s sales price depends on its skills and condition, so buying a low grade horse and training it can be another way to earn money.

Pretty much everything in the game can be done either through the menu or through interacting with the world.

Conclusion

My Life: Riding Stables 3 is by far the best game in the franchise since 2008. It has a somewhat satisfying core loop, coherent visuals and offers an overall competent user experience, which is something I absolutely do not take for granted in our genre. The game kept me busy for about seven hours of play, and although some of that time was spent mindlessly grinding for workload while listening to an audiobook, I found it a vastly more polished and less tedious experience than either its 2018 and 2020 predecessors or the recent My Horse: Bonded Spirits. 

Whether that makes it worth your while and worth its purchase price is a matter of expectations, as always. I’m giving it a thumbs up on Steam because I appreciate the obvious improvements that went into it on a tight budget, and because there’s a lot of things the game does well, within its confined scope. 

I imagine that especially for younger players, the game’s cute visuals and very accessible gameplay are a big selling point. For teen and adult horse enthusiasts though, the ever-wonky Horse Animset Pro animations are probably going to be a dealbreaker, because there’s just not enough new or interesting about the game to look past the fact that looking at your horses isn’t very satisfying in itself. Still, if you wanna have a classic, overall decent horse game experience to relive some childhood nostalgia, My Life: Riding Stables 3 is a better choice than many alternatives.

My Life: Riding Stables 3 is available on Steam for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. The Mane Quest was provided with a free review key for Steam PC.