After playing Shadow Legacy, it seemed natural to try out Amaze’s take on the Spyro reboot. In development terms it’s a direct follow-up, but skews many things differently and like the whole Legend of Spyro continuity in general, it ends up being unsatisfying.
I was willing to give the Legend of Spyro thing a fair chance. I briefly tried the third console instalment a while back in the hopes of it being a good co-op experience, but dropped it quickly. The focus of the reboot series seems to be making Spyro into A) a more generic action game and B) a more serious story with big-name actors doing voices. I think both goals are misguided and the result loses much of the charm and appeal of the previous Spyro games. One advantage I took away from this instalment was in giving Spyro a backstory and hero arc, but the unwelcome tradeoff is that it comes at the expense of any sense of fun to the world. There’s a few NPCs total and they’re not bad, and integrated fairly well into the game; Cynder is a cool enough antagonist as well. They just come off as a tad flat in your brief interactions, or the truncated, downscaled CG cutscenes converted from the console game.
This DS version of the first part of the trilogy seems to reuse the isometric engine of Shadow Legacy, but streamlines it, removing the open world and scaling back the RPG elements. It’s become a brief, linear action game with a heavy focus on combat. You unlock four elemental breath weapons and can upgrade them over time. There are physical attacks and other abilities, but I managed 95% of the time using just breath attacks, switching when necessary for enemy weaknesses. It’s somewhat monotonous, being locked in a small area and fighting waves of spawning enemies, then moving on. At least there’s some interesting variety of enemy types, but you end up seeing them many many times over the duration.
The game uses a clumsy control scheme, with abilities mapped to different face buttons, but also a requirement to touch certain enemies to attack them or environmental objects to recover health, so you’re always moving your hand position around. The main bash-em-all gameplay is broken up by frequent touchscreen laser-deflection puzzles, while the boss fights are done in a not too disagreeable 3D cinematic style, flying around while tapping the screen to attack.
I can’t really recommend this game, but at least it’s short. My initial interest was seeing how it was built on the bones of Shadow Legacy, reusing many animations and such. And it’s at least a bit more smoothly put together. Just a bit. Check it out if you want to see a game bravely but unsuccessfully try to have its cake and eat it too with a mashup of button and touch control schemes.
