The Spyrocalypse continues with the first of the GBA “trilogy” by Digital Eclipse. It’s a good attempt at a faithful Spyro game but understandably limited by the platform.

As with other post-PSX Spyro games, Season of Ice picks up after Year of the Dragon, with Hunter and Bianca (plus the Professor) as the returning cast. Also returning from YotD are tedious Sparx shooter sections, and Rhynocs as the pervasive villain species; this gives the baddies less variety but they try to make up for it with appropriate costumes in each level. The big bad is Grendor, king of the Rhynocs. It’s good to see at least some new stuff in games like this, to expand the world of the series.

SoI closely follows the formula of Insomniac’s games. There are several homeworlds with portals to levels. In the levels some NPCs give you a couple of tasks, which usually boil down to kill the Rhynocs or find some thingamajigs. You then traverse what’s usually a series of islands in various deadly substrates, picking up mucho gems and rescuing MacGuffin collectibles, in this case fairies who’ve been frozen.

The game looks nice enough, with plenty of cartoony, colourful environments, and many sounds are taken directly from the PSX games. But they were always going to struggle making an authentic Spyro experience with 2D graphics on a GBA, from an isometric perspective. The camera feels quite zoomed in, so it’s more dangerous to charge around, and jumps must be scouted first. This, along with punishing insta-deaths everywhere, slows down the experience. On top of this is the depth perception problem; it can be hard to distinguish discrete altitude layers. The visual and level design do a decent job of alleviating this, but they don’t do enough to stop you getting lost. Market Mesa is the only level that I found actually navigable, so I hope to see more like that in the next two games. In the meantime, the maps on the fansite darkSpyro were invaluable.

Spyro has all his abilities that make him Spyro: flame breath, gliding, charging. They’re just not as well served in this format. “Speedway” levels exist too but in this game they’re more Space Harrier-style scrolling shoot-em-up levels. They’re demanding and repeating them several times is necessary. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem but SoI pulls the nasty Rayman 1 trick: every single fairy must be rescued in order to see the final boss. You can miss plenty of gems but getting every fairy is a tall order, especially with each level having an objective of “flame 10 objects around the level”, which reset when you die. At this point in time, savestates are much recommended.

I sound pretty down on the game, but I had fun with it. Engaging the game on its own terms is, as always, an important step, but also flagrantly bypassing its intent with emulation features helps. I used the TempGBA port to PSP to play it, the first time I’ve used this method to play a full game, and it worked well. I mapped the controls to be more like the original games, as the GBA only had two face buttons. As an accompaniment to the console games, it does a good job but it was never going to be a full, proper Spyro game. And that’s OK.