Review #560: Spyro - Enter the Dragonfly

 Ain't no Bruce Lee in here, but this game deserves a one-inch punch.

 I would be frowning too if I had to star in a game like this.

 Even though Insomniac left their purple child behind, the powers that be wouldn't give the poor Dragon a rest, so Universal Interactive got a new team and tasked them with bringing Spyro into the next generation of Videogames. Then they rushed them to meet a deadline, and thus the story wrote itself.

 Everything is fine and dandy in the Dragon Realm, and the baby dragons are about to get their companion dragonflies, but not before Ripto returns and scatters them around 8 different stages, so Spyro is back to collect everything he can. While a measly 8 stages sounds small, and there's a single hub world, each stage is fairly large, with 10 fireflies to collect and about 800 worth of treasure to find. The story is even less prevalent than in Spyro 1, and characters are pretty much forgotten. Bianca appears twice, in the opening and in the ending, and Moneybags appears once and charges you gems that single time, which makes treasure pretty much useless, besides 100%, since access to levels is gated behind your firefly collection.

Bianca is back!... for a grand total of two cutscenes.

 Everything looks the same, albeit in higher poly-count thanks to fancy PS2 graphics, but feels off. This is the most slippery Spyro has ever moved, the hover move doesn't work very well, so expect a lot of your glides to end outside the platform you wanted to get to. That's when it works, since sometimes Spyro has trouble standing over certain surfaces, like bridges. Getting on top of frozen NPCs, required on the first stage, is almost a nightmare. For the first time since I played a Spyro game, the camera felt stiff and uncooperative. I used to play with Active camera, but this time it didn't cut it, and even though now we have the right analog stick moving the camera... it's so slow and stiff! And Sparx seems to miss gems on occasion, so expect to backtrack for missing treasure. Finally, Spyro's trademark headbutt charge feels weak and lacks oomph.

 And don't even let me get started on the horrid framerate! The game struggles so hard to keep it steady, but it fails to. If you get to play that is, the game is ridden with extensive loading times and loading screens FOR loading screens. Incredibly enough, load times are inconsistent, you might get lucky and the game might load a bit quicker than usual, some times. The loading times REALLY kill the flow of the game.... not that the bugs and glitches don't already do that just fine. Let's see... the game froze once during a loading screen, one time it failed to load part of a level and had me running over an empty void and I had to exit the stage to fix it, another time I went through a barn's gate before firing up the fireworks, which meant I had to do another round through the level, plus, numerous audio and graphical bugs. Oh, and the last boss may enter his vulnerable stage two times in a row, or it might take upwards of five minutes before he does. It's so wonky!

It looks the same, but combat lacks oomph. It feels like your hitting air instead of solid objects.

 I felt that Spyro's moveset pretty much tapped out at Spyro 2, something Insomniac probably realized which is why they added more characters in 3. Well, the one thing that they could've done, which they toyed with in Spyro 3 with the Frozen breath, was adding elemental breaths. And they did. And they suck. Fire breath is your default breath and behaves just as it used to. Two challenges require it in order to burn scarecrows under a time limit, and that's all the 'unique' use it'll get. Bubble Breath is useless and can only be used to catch Fireflies, since it does no damage. Good luck catching them, though, as it only seems to hit under a tiny, minuscule radius. Frozen Breath is used to put out fires in two challenges and is the only way to defeat robot dinosaurs on the Jurassic stage, it doesn't make any sense, but that's its single use. Finally, Thunder Breath is used to activate a few lightning rods. It's the breath that you'll use the most for its unique ability. And that's it, elemental breaths could've been a great new addition, but they barely get any use. In combat they are basically the same and there are barely any puzzles that require creative use of them. Another new move is the Wing Deflect, which is only required in a single stage to deflect energy bolts. That's it.

 At least the core of the game is decent. It shows that the game could've been good with more time in the oven. If they had ironed out the bugs and the loading times, the end result could've been a decent, albeit far from great, Spyro game. Because the platforming is still decent, when it works, and collecting stuff is still fun. They even managed to get sliding right, as a matter of fact, slides are the only thing that work better here than in the first Spyro games! There're some very interesting levels, like the one drenched in Honey, or even the one infested with Robot dinosaurs, it's a shame they couldn't polish the gameplay and tweak the physics so that Spyro didn't have trouble standing or hovering onto things.

Monkey Monks. Why not?

 I think the devs were on the right track, and their hearts were on the right place, it's just that they didn't have the time or the experience to get it working right by the time the deadline hit. Unless you're a hardcore Spyro fan, this one's better off skipped.
4.0 out of 10