N-Philes

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Posted by Archived.

Along with Crash Bandicoot, there was a second big character on the original Playstation, Spyro the Dragon. When Vivendi-Universal bought the rights to Crash, they also acquired the rights to Spyro. Just like Crash, Spyro has now made his debut on a Nintendo home console (handhelds not included). Unfortunately, the team behind Spyro seemed to have more trouble than the team behind Crash.

This is Spyro's sixth adventure, and the story is a normal platforming story. Bad guy wants to take over the world. Hero must save the world from bad guy. The bad guy in this case is Ripto. The hero, as you may have guessed by now, is Spyro. Ripto plans to take over the world by capturing all the dragonflies as they are being given to the dragons, making the dragons powerless, leaving him to rule. Naturally, something goes wrong. The dragonflies get spread out and don't go to Ripto's holding place. As such, Spyro heads out to collect the dragonflies and save the world.

Collecting the dragonflies is done in three simple ways. The first way to collect a dragonfly is to find it roaming around a level. Each level has a few dragonflies just flying around in a specific area. To collect these, all you have to do is capture it with bubble breath. Bubble breath is one of the four types of breath Spyro can gain. Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, it's harder than it should be. The dragonflies fly away when you try to catch them. This makes it rather annoying, especially when you have to jump from platform to platform and can't catch the stupid thing. The other problem is that the bubble breath doesn't cover a big enough radius. It might look like you've caught it, but you won't get credit for it, the dragonfly will just fly off and make you upset. Finding these dragonflies isn't too easy, nor too hard. Some are out in the open, some are less easy to see.

The second way to catch these dragonflies is with level challenges. Around the level there will be random challenges to complete. They will all be to do something to a certain number of objects. These ones are always easy enough to do. Finding the objects isn't hard. Knowing which objects you're looking for, though, can be. You may have no clue what you have to do for a dragonfly. There are also timed challenges. These also involve doing something to a certain number of objects. The problem is, you don't know where these objects are, and once the time runs out, you have to restart the challenge. It is very annoying when you don't know where to look.

The last way to collect dragonflies is, perhaps, the best. By entering portals you start a small mini-game. There are some flying mini-games, racing mini-games, puzzle mini-games, and sliding mini-games. One of the more inventive ones has you climbing a tower while avoiding enemies. These are easily the most fun the game has to offer.

The worlds are fairly populated with enemies and health in the form of animals. Enemies are extremely easy to beat. Just hit them with breath once and they'll disappear. Some enemies will only be damaged by one type of breath. Other than that enemies are pushovers. You have four pieces of health, and even if an enemy does hit you, he goes into a victory celebration, so being hit twice is next to impossible. As well, health heavily populates the level and regenerates, unlike the enemies. Dying because of a loss of health almost never happened. On the other hand, dying because of falling off cliffs did happen. Reasons for these deaths were sometimes my fault, but more often it was for other factors. The first reason is a faulty camera. It swings all over the place and doesn't give a good view while you're running around, trying to chase that annoying dragonfly. Other times when I pressed jump I got a limited jump. And at one checkpoint I got pushed off when I started over each time.

There are also gems to collect. Each level has at least 700 gems in it. That makes for a lot of gem hunting. Finding these gems are usually easy. They're almost all along the beaten path. Next to no searching is necessary. The good thing about gem collecting is Sparx, Spyro's dragonfly. He follows Spyro around, and when he sees a diamond he'll fly off and collect it for you. This system should make collecting easier, but there is one main flaw. Sparx won't always recognise gems. More often than not I had to go right next to the gem before Sparx flew off to get it, and occasionally I would run right past a gem without Sparx moving. This makes gem collecting a pain.

Gems can be used to pay off Moneybags, who will open up new parts of levels. Moneybags, however, only shows up once in the entire game, in the first world. It appears that the development team didn't have enough time to implement moneybags, but still put him in once. This makes gems all but useless. There are other friendly NPC's to talk to. Talking should be implemented with a simple tap of Y. Unfortunately, it won't do it usually, and when it does occasionally Spyro gets stuck on level geometry when he moves to speak to them. Other controls are similarly annoying. The A button is used to jump and glide. Then to hover you have to press Y. The problem is that sometimes you want to hover and forget to glide. Then pressing Y will cause a head stomp causing you to fall to your death instead of safely making it to the platform. The X button controls breath. However much like everything else, there is a problem. Collision detection is faulty. You have to be very close before the breath is recognised. B is used for ramming opponents. It unfortunately also gets used for run, instead of run just being on the analogue stick. Spyro will also keep ramming after you release the button for another second.

Collecting dragonflies and gems is all there is to this game. There is no multi-player mode and no added features once you finish the game. At least, there should be extra dragonflies and gems to come back to. Like I iterated before, though, collecting gems is straightforward so you won't miss many. As for dragonflies, you have to collect all of them before you can meet the final boss, so there are none to come back for. This leaves for a 10 hour adventure at most, with no reason to come back. It can easily be beaten in a weekend. The title is perhaps best suited for kids, but even they may have problems with the straightforwardness of the game.

The look of the game is simple and bright. The colour palette is very high on the cartoon scale, but the textures just aren't there. The game isn't anything special to look at. Nothing will make you go wow. Some things may even make you look on in disgust. The cutscenes, as well, are nothing special. They look just like in game and are fairly bland. The worst part of the game is the framerate and the camera. The framerate constantly is falling, occasionally hampering your play. The camera doesn't do near a good enough job. You'll be running around, trying to chase something and you can't see what you want.

The sound is better. The music, while nothing special, gets the job done. It doesn't get on the nerves, and doesn't get in the way. The voice acting can get on your nerves. Some of the voices are well done, but most of them are annoying. Spyro tries to be funny but doesn't succeed. Sparx speaks in a buzzing voice. During the voices the words also pop up on screen, so you can choose to read as well. For kids who can't read, though, the most important parts aren't vocal. Instructions on what to do in vehicle and Sparx telling you what to do have to be read. This makes the whole experience harder. Other voices are decent.

This game gets an N-Philes score of F.

With all the other platformers available on the Gamecube, Spyro fails to impress. The generic collecting coupled with all the general problems lead to a bad game. There was one point where I once went to a part of a level, and it was missing. The level wasn't there at all. I was floating in mid air. Eventually it re-appeared but this shouldn't happen. Stick with one of the multitude of better platformers out there.

Posted in: Reviews

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