The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon

I have a confession to make and it's definitely not about the suspicious blood-like stain on the living room carpet. I really loved the original Spyro games. The early PlayStation platformers with the little dragon not only had a charm which managed to cut through my many layers of cynicism but were very well crafted titles. The series has since changed developers on multiple occasions and the final instalment of the Legend of Spyro trilogy, Dawn of the Dragon, is the first time I have revisited the franchise. 

The plot of this instalment follows Spyro and his female colleague Cynder as they are released from imprisonment by a band of strange creatures. With the assistance of a friendly cheetah, Hunter, they inevitably set about trying to prevent the usual threat of world destruction by a generic evil villain. The plot itself was never likely to be a seminal masterpiece of storytelling but it has been done countless times before.

Disappointingly the characters themselves have been "re-imagined" from the original series and not for the better. I was shocked to see the starry cast that lends their talents to the game, with Gary Oldman, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood particularly standing out. Although they don't have much to work with, they give you some motivation to proceed and no doubt kids will be entertained. With this new tone, some of the humour and charm has gone and the overall feel is rather serious and at times it borders on being depressing.

Dawn of the Dragon plays out as a rather standard platformer with underlying role-playing elements and character building. The game centres on Spyro and Cynder being shackled together by a supernatural chain and as such a co-op mode is available for two players. If you don't have a willing partner or the gaffer tape wasn't strong enough to hold someone, then the computer AI controls one of the characters for you. Swapping between characters is easy enough requiring the tap of a button, which is necessary as you'll need to use both characters' unique abilities to progress and solve puzzles.

The game is very much divided into exploration and combat. Exploration is the game's strong point with plenty of hidden collectables to discover which elicits a real desire to recover everything available. Most of these collectables will upgrade either Spyro or Cynder's magic, health or experience levels. Experience is important and introduces an RPG style upgrade system where you can purchase new moves and abilities. This works nicely and there is a refreshing range of different moves and styles available. The other main collectables are pieces of armour which give you extra bonuses but are limited to three sets. This works nicely and introduces a tactical element as you pick your style from defensive, offensive and "fury".

Yet, despite entertaining exploration, the combat is disappointing and infuriating. A set of complex and imprecise controls don't help and there are times when this saps all the fun from the title. When controlling Spyro or Cynder you never really feel completely in charge due to fiddly buttons and a tendency for the game to misinterpret your actions. The combat itself is largely dull and repetitive with three buttons being utilised: one for grabs, and the others for strong and light attacks. It was all too easy to pick one good combo and endlessly repeat it over and over without fail. With the introduction of some of the more powerful techniques, I simply invested all my experience in those and just used them in every single situation.

However, the ease of these "overkill" moves is offset by monotonous combat and endlessly similar enemies. The game often spawns opponents in waves and if you fall off a ledge, likely due to the controls, with one baddie remaining, then all of them magically reappear. Dawn of the Dragon also seems to increase the easy difficulty by making the camera infuriatingly vague. At times the camera will find a wall behind far more fascinating than the perilously high ledge you need to navigate in front. Whilst the camera can be manipulated, it is only by ninety degrees which is little consolation unless you want to see a little bit more of the aforementioned wall.

There are many faults elsewhere: enemies stuck in mid-air, clipping through scenery, some rather dubious co-operative AI and assigning multiple context sensitive actions to the same button. The latter resulted in one of the most torturous thirty minutes I have spent gaming in recent months. In a bizarre decision the button to wall run is also the same as the one to grab. So after countless times jumping towards a wall, only to try and grab its moss covered surface I finally succeeded. Suddenly the camera went haywire resulting in me falling off and having to do the whole thing again.

The game itself is a good length and there are some decent attempts at providing variety with a healthy selection of set pieces and locations, but it ultimately falls short. I found it difficult to get motivated and the attempts at interjecting humour into a grim and bleak story, especially towards the end, seemed very out of place. The biggest disappointment with Dawn of the Dragon is that it has ended up a very average platformer. There are some good ideas here, but all too often they are overshadowed by obvious and exasperating gameplay issues.

Dawn of the Dragon acknowledges all chapters come to an end. Let's just hope the new chapter manages to rekindle the excitement of the opening one.