My final Spyro handheld game to cover is this poorly-titled java phone release. It was released alongside Shadow Legacy and uses the same light/dark world mechanic, and it’s an OK game.
First off, I like the graphics here. Apart from the “dragons to rescue” icon, which looks to be ripped from Shadow Legacy and doesn’t match. The backgrounds are nice and lush, the enemy sprites appropriately cute/creepy respectively in the light/dark world, and Spyro himself is a nice little pixel guy. Sure the sprites and backgrounds have different levels of detail but I think it works.
I had a bit of trouble with the controls, since I was running this in a phone emulator inside a Windows XP virtual machine. Buttons stuck sometimes which got me in hot water, and I had to use a virtual keypad to hit asterisk. Otherwise it was fine; I like that Spyro automatically flap-glides after a jump. Awkwardness arises from the “action” button which is used to attack and activate portals. Spyro also has three attack modes: one for breaking baskets and chests, and one each for light and dark world enemies. This means lots of toggling. They’re also upgraded separately, which is the role of different coloured gems in this game.
There is some backtracking since the upgraded headbash can break stronger containers, but it’s optional. The game’s short too, only six levels plus a basic boss fight against the Sorcerer, but the last few levels become quite large. There’re two themes, the dragon city and the snowy mountain.
And that’s the game in a nutshell. There’s a fair bit of blundering around the levels, getting stuck and then shifting between worlds, which then requires toggling moves. But it’s inoffensive. It’s weird that Spyro has no breath attacks at all, but that was shafted in favour of the chi/kata theme of Shadow Legacy. It also cuts out all the NPCs, which was one of the things I liked from SL, and can’t be completely attributed to the format. Eh.
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