This game is as flimsy as Spyro's neck.
Just like Crash before it, Spyro couldn't avoid the very same pitfall upon which Crash's reboot fell: A promising first game, but a bad sequel. Welcome to The Eternal Night, a game that fails to capitalize on the first game's strengths and only exacerbates upon on its faults.
Picking right after A New Beginning ended, Spyro has lost his powers but rescued Cynder... not that it matters, since Cynder decides to set on her own journey and the dragons' temple is attacked by the Ape army of Gaul. This is the last you'll see of the dragons from the first game, disappointingly. The first game brought a great new take on Spyro, and its world and characters were begging to be developed, but this game fails at that. I mean, the Dark Master from the first game finally gets a form and a background, but Spyro barely gets any development, and Cynder, arguably the ensemble darkhorse, gets very little as well, coupled with a sparse three appearances in the entire game. Sparx got recast, thank god, but the voice acting is a step down from the first game's, Elijah Wood seems to have been missing the context of a couple of lines, so his delivery left a bit to be desired this time around. All in all, the story is passable, but I expected so much more...
My thoughts exactly, Spyro, I don't know what went wrong here!
Not much has changed in this game... sadly. Combat is pretty much exactly the same as before, with circle being your 4-hit combo, which can be extended into an air combo, R1 being your headbutt while Square and Triangle are your breath attacks. In this game you'll be getting the same 4 elemental breaths from the first game, which is disappointing, but they've been completely overhauled so that no two breaths are like. Earth produces a chained-ball of energy that you swing around or a ground-stomp as a secondary attack, Thunder shoots a energy ball on a straight line that you can explore at will or make Spyro spin in an electric Tornado, Ice is shot in an arc or you can use a spinning tail attack, while fire is more like a shot-gun or lets you use a fire-charge. It sounds great, but in practice it doesn't offer any new options for combat. It's not like you can create lengthy combos or switch between breaths mid-combo. So, yeah, thanks for the variety, but they offer very little with the game's engine as is.
And there's a lot of repetitive, dull combat in this game, almost as much as there was on the first game. I was already tired from the first game's mundane, repetitive combat, so having to dive right back in onto the very same combat engine with barely anything new was quite tedious to say the least. Thankfully there're puzzles this time around, albeit very simple ones that can be solved pretty easily. They added 5 life extension items and 5 breath extension items, as well as about 20 feathers for you to find, which is rather welcome... but it's still a very linear game, and health and breath upgrades felt negligible, while feathers only unlocked art, so not much of a reward there.
Enjoy what little story you can get, it's the best thing about this game.
There's a final new mechanic: Dragon Time. By pressing L1 you can slow down time for as long as your DT gauge lasts, and this gauge refills automatically when not in use. Dragon Time adds very little to combat, albeit you'll use it for some platforming more than anything else. And man, they ruined platforming, they messed up the second jump timing, so sometimes it won't even come out, leading to a lot of undeserved deaths. By the by, there're a ton of checkpoints placed exactly before a cutscene, so word to the wise: R1 and L1 are the buttons used to skip cutscenes, so don't despair, they can be skipped, even if they chose the most awkward buttons to do so.
The game is five short-stages long, and the game will be over before you know it, thankfully. I just can't stress enough how boring the game can be. There are more enemy types than in A New Beginning, but combat is as repetitive as ever, having to fight durable enemies with limited attack options. There's a recurring boss, a bat, that must be fought once in every level, seriously, and it's the most annoying fight in the game since you have to charge your breath attack juuuuust the right amount in order for your attack to reach the cowering enemy. These battles are just dumb. And Stage 4 reuses, by re-skinning, the same boss fight FOUR times. And this boss is shockingly similar to A New Beginning's first boss.
I know, Spyro ol' chum, this game made me angry too!
I was ready to like this game, I really was, but The Eternal Night failed to capitalize on A New Beginning's strengths. Instead of adding more melee attacks and ways to chain breath attacks into combos, they thought that simply making every breath different would suffice. It didn't. This, in turn, makes combat just as boring as it used to be, but even more so since I played it right after finishing the first game. The hidden upgrades should've been a great incentive to explore, but their upgrade is barely felt. More platforming and puzzles should've aided in alleviating the monotony of the combat, but they broke the double jumping, thus turning this respites into torture. And they replaced David Spade, thank god, but Elijah either didn't care or wasn't given proper context, so his performance suffered in return. And there's very little story development to boot, which sucks since I thought the story was the best thing about this new reboot.
The Legend of Spyro - The Eternal Night is the worst Spyro game since Enter the Dragon Fly, except instead of being broken it's boring.... and a little broken. Hopefully they can finish the trilogy with a decent third part... but I'm not holding my breath.
4.5 out of 10
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