As a detour from Spyro games, I picked up on another game starring a dragon that Amaze (developer of Shadow Legacy and the first two Legend games on DS) made for handhelds.

I don’t think I’ve seen the movie, but I read the book when it was new. Eragon is basically Star Wars with dragons, a pretty basic fantasy story written by a teenager and it shows. It’s not unenjoyable—the success of the book series proves that much at least—but the movie was a huge flop. The games based on the film take different directions to adapt the story; on GBA it’s a turn-based RPG, on DS an action-adventure with touchscreen magic spells, while the PSP version puts the focus more on Saphira the dragon than on Eragon himself, giving us something akin to a flight combat game. Amaze did all three of these versions themselves, but I played on PSP for the dragon-based gameplay.

The game’s fairly brief if you just do the campaign levels, racing through the story and adapting key moments where Saphira is involved either solo or with Eragon riding her. Interstitial scenes are brief or text-only, leaving the plot feeling disjointed; familiarity with the source material is certainly required. The rest of the game is filled out with single-player iterations of the multiplayer arena battles against bots, with varied objectives and armour unlocks. This mode was clearly a focus of development, using the PSP’s touted wireless multiplayer features, but didn’t factor into my experience much. I found it repetitive and focused on the campaign instead.

I had a good time while the game maintained its novelty with different kinds of tasks, but less so when asked to repeat them over and over, or fight waves of bad guys, or contend with the cheap final boss. Saphira has a moveset that befits a dragon, able to fly and manoeuvre like a helicopter, breathe fire, and even pick up and eat some enemies or random animals (fodder!) to restore health. While Eragon is riding you can also shoot arrows, cast spells, or jump off onto the back of another dragon rider to wail on them (the latter only applies in the arena matches, or the final boss). Picking up boulders or exploding barrels and dropping them on enemy machines or fortifications while a cinematic camera angle shows the object’s descent in slow motion is another, quite cool, thing Saphira can do and is frequently required.

So the game’s pretty short and doesn’t look too sharp, but for a PSP game it’s not bad. Playing as a dragon is pretty sweet! I think we can all agree on that!?