Spyro's back - and he's brought a few friends
With voice acting from Elijah Wood, Christina Ricci and Mark Hamill, gorgeous scenery and a sweeping musical score, "Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon" feels almost more like a movie than a video game. Sadly, for all the production value, the result is a game that is spectacularly beautiful, but not actually that exciting to play.
While there are some opening cut scenes, the game's actions starts almost immediately. Instead of a leisurely tutorial with insignificant combats to start you off, Spyro wakes up to find he has been captured by monsters and is being forced to do battle against a colossal flaming golem trying its best to squish him. Together with Cynder, a repentant disciple of the trilogy's big villain, the two have to escape and become the focal points in a war between good and evil.
The epic finale of the "Spyro" trilogy boasts an epic look as well. Scenery includes damp underground caves, rushing rivers, waterfalls and vibrant forests. The simple mechanic of dead bad guys dropping stuff you can use is actually made into something beautiful in "Spyro," with villains exploding into glittering crystals, making fights an often chaotic and impressive mix of colors from your attacking dragons, their myriad breath weapons and the sparkling gems that mark their victories.
It's good that the fights are visually appealing because they otherwise aren't very engaging. Despite a huge variety of combination attacks available to both characters, button mashing is really all that's necessary to win most typical combats, which often involve swarms of little monsters. A system that tracks strings of attacks may help with big villains but actually detracts from your ability to fight smaller attackers as you need to make sure to disengage even if your numbers are still increasing to deal with other threats.
A wide variety of breath weapons are available to both dragons, all of which are well animated. Cynder's attacks are especially interesting using poison, shadow and fear instead of Spyro's elemental-based assaults.
"Dawn of the Dragon" introduces two new elements to the series, both of which are improvements but seem incomplete. The dragons can now fly instead of just gliding, but they seem to be not very good at it. The boundaries of the game determine when you can soar and when you'll just get as far off the ground as jumping, requiring you to come up with other solutions besides your wings, including climbing and swinging. Other times you have to carry heavy things around, making flying all but impossible. The result is regular impasses where you have to figure out how to maneuver around the terrain, which is interesting at some points and just frustrating at others.
The other new mechanic is cooperative play, and the game is really meant to be played as a pair, with one person handling each dragon. When you're flying solo, the dragon you're not playing essentially serves as a spare battery, someone to turn to when your own health or mana are running low.
The series started on PlayStation nearly a decade ago, and while its graphics have certainly been updated, other aspects of gameplay could use help. "Spyro" has no map or guiding trail, and while this might create the illusion that it is not a linear game, it's a thin one. You can explore huge sections of a zone without completing the objective that would guide you there, but some doors just won't open until the game is ready. The result is that it can play more like a puzzle game than an action game, forcing you to comb through every inch of the world looking for what you're missing. And when that happens even the scenery and music can become tedious and make you wish you could just move on to something else.
"Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon"
Rating: 2½ stars
Genre: Action
Platform: X360, PS3, PS2, Wii, DS