Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon again with Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

 I’ve been playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as part of the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Details of how I came to own this are detailed in my original review of Spyro the Dragon, and the same basic details apply, so let’s jump right into it:

Do you know what he is?

The plot of Spyro 2, such as it is, picks up from where the previous game left off. Spyro is looking to go on vacation with Sparx to Dragon Shores, but instead gets summoned to a fantasy realm called Avalar. There, he meets with Elora the Faun, Hunter the Cheeta and Professor the, er, Professor, who tell him that they’ve summoned him there to help to defeat Ripto, a diminutive but malevolent… I don’t know what to call him. Warlock, apparently. Anyway, he’s taken over Avalar with the help of his much larger minions Crush and Gulp, and since he comes from a world of Dragons who keep him in check, Spyro has been summoned to try to beat him. With the help of his new friends, Spyro chases Ripto across the Summer Forest, Autumn Planes and Winter Tundra, hoping to defeat the evil warlock and bring peace to Avalar.

The underwater sections added a
new dimension to the levels.

The gameplay is much the same as the original Spyro the Dragon, but the game was so good that this hardly matters. Spyro still has his old moves; he can charge, breathe fire and glide over long distances. In addition, he can hold projectiles in his mouth and manually aim them to spit them out again, and gain a quick hight boost while gliding. Later in the game, Spyro learns to swim, climb and even perform an overhead smash. It’s everything a sequel should be – everything that made the original game great, with enough new mechanics added to open the level design and vary the challenges.

The levels in Spyro 2 usually have an overarching objective – usually get to a certain point on the level, by which time you’ll have defeated the enemies that form the main antagonists for that level. There are also some orbs you must collect in order to open up certain sections of the game, and these are attached to your side quests. Some of these are quite mundane, such as killing a certain number and type of enemy, and most of them are fairly easy, but some of them are actually quite challenging, and apart from a couple of clangers where the solution is deliberately obtuse, they’re pretty good fun. The highlight for me was the Ice Hockey mini game early on! The flying levels make a welcome re-appearance as optional changes of pace, and they have time trials attached to them as well to make sure you’re bringing your A-game!

Gulp proves a significant challenge
when aiming for completion...

I also managed to complete the game 100%. This isn’t too hard to do, since there are no trophies tied up in multiplayer modes and the tasks are, with a few exceptions, quite easy – a fine game to play if you’re a completionist looking for something you can breeze few in a few hours. Just keep in mind that, unlike the first Spyro game, some of the areas are locked behind mid-game abilities so some backtracking is necessary.

The presentation is great too. The voice acting is spot on, the graphics show significant improvement from the original PS1 games with the Re-ignited trilogy and are absolutely gorgeous, and Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack is a great augment to an already fantastic game. The developers really hit their stride with the level design; a little more linear than the previous game but still with a sense of openness that put them ahead of their contemporaries. There are a couple of aspects that niggle – I’m not sure why, when returning to a level, you have to watch the cutscenes and in some cases do the main quest again; this feels like something that could have quite easily been left out.

All in all, Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage is a great game that anyone should be able to pick up and have a decent amount of fun with. It is not a hard-core experience, but it knows what it is, tells the story it wants to tell and is the game it wants to be.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Spyro 2 and Get Bit

 Last week I finally reached the end of Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. The review is coming out on Friday and I’ve covered most of the salient points there, but I want to talk to you today about the boss battle that really shaved my onions: Gulp.

Gulp - he's got a big mouth.

The fight itself isn’t that hard. Gulp is a huge monster who has energy shooters on his back, and charges at you. You can’t harm him directly for most of the game; at regular intervals, pterodactyls fly into the arena and drop various items you can use to damage him: Exploding barrels, bombs and rockets. Gulp can eat these items as well and if he does, he does an attack based around it. He has ten hit points, take them all and you’re done. Easy.

The hard part is getting the achievement trophy for it, and the skill point that’s tied up into the game, and I thought I was going to have to settle for just beating this iteration of Spyro when I got stuck. For the trophy you must beat Gulp without harming any of the fodder – the pterodactyls drop chickens for you to flame and recover some hit points if you get injured. Easy enough to ignore – except that Gulp eats them as well, and if he does, he recovers his it points, prolonging an already gruelling battle. To get the skill point, you must beat Gulp without taking any damage at all, which is very difficult. I might have been prepared just to get the trophy, which would at least platinum the game – but the problem is that the pterodactyls only drop fodder if you’re injured, which means from the moment Gulp hits you even once, he has a potentially unlimited supply of healing items you can’t touch.

I’m sure there was a way to do it… but I took the easy route in the end. I completed everything else – took all the treasure, collected all the orbs – which provides access to the Permanent Superflame, allowing you to shoot fireballs at the boss. After that it was just a case of shooting Glup, which stun-locks him in place so he can’t attack. I did this for Ripto as well, and 100%ed the game.

An odd little game,
but she seemed to like it!

Elsewhere, I tried a board game with Jessie: Get Bit. Now that she’s got the idea of numbers, and some numbers being higher than others, this seemed like an ideal game for her to try. The idea, if you missed the last time I talked about it (it was a while ago!) is you’re in possession of one or more robots trying to swim away from a freaking shark, alright. To do this, each player must play a card numbered 1-7. The player with the highest number moves to the front, the player with the lowest number moves to the back and has one of their limbs bitten off, and the other players are arranged sequentially in between depending on the number they played. But if two or more players play the same number, none of them move – the players who played individual numbers move ahead of them, and whoever is at the back of the duplicate cards at that point loses one of their limbs. When a player loses all four limbs, they are eliminated from the game, and whoever is in front when two players remain is the winner.

Of course, this being a game I was playing with Jessie, I had to simplify it to begin with. For a start, she can’t hold cards in a fan yet, so she had no way of concealing her move. Also, while I’m generally against letting her win, I was aware of the advantage I had with numbers – so the first couple of times we tried, I just played my top card while allowing her to choose. Once she’d got an idea of the mechanics of the game, she was choosing the cards she thought she needed! Once we’d got Kirsty involved it became a lot more fun, since there was the potential for one of us to get ahead of two others who had duplicate cards! So, a very enjoyable game we’ll probably come back to.

Last Week's Games: Painting Backlog, Necromunda, Spyro 2

The biggest thing that happened to me this week gaming-wise was completing the painting of my Space Hulk boxed set. I tend to keep anything I want to say about painting separate these days, so I’ve written a blog for them that you can read here. I’m mentioning it in this post because it inspired me to think about painting my models, how many of them I still have to do, and whether ever actually doing it is a realistic option for me.

Painted, and ready to play...

I’ve run into the same problem that every wargamer / hobby gamer runs in to at some point: The backlog. I’ve bought a lot of models from hobby shops in the past, most of them Games Workshop, some of them not, and for one reason or another never got around to painting them. The reason for this is mainly because I give priority to whatever army I’m currently working on, as there is a certain expectation that they will be painted should I ever wish to use them in a shop game. At least, that’s the case with Games Workshop, or Warhammer as the shops are called now. Other, independent stores may be a little more lenient about it but having all my models painted is a standard I set for myself during my time as staff. The box games that I’ve been buying have therefore taken a back seat. This changed during lockdown, where I had more than the usual amount of free time (though not much!) and once I’d painted all the models from the Black Legion force I was working on, I made a start on the Space Hulk set. You’d think, with not even 40 models in the set, it would have taken me a little less than eight months, but somehow that’s where we are. I paint intermittently; always have, always will. But that means that my backlog of models is taking a long time to get through.

So, what does that mean? Is clearing my backlog a realistic goal for lockdown? Possibly; it’s been going on for longer than I originally anticipated, and with the UK Conservative Government changing its strategy about as often as most people change their clothes, it could go on for a great deal longer before we’re finally clear of Covid-19. It’s not likely, though. I’ve got quite a few sets to get through! However, it may be possible to make a large dent in it. And that will be fine too.

Close Combat doesn't happen often,
but when it does, it's brutal!

With video games, there’s not much new happening this week. I’ve been playing Necromunda: Underhive Wars, reaching the part in the story campaign where the three factions make an uneasy alliance to reach their goal. I’ve got a fairly shrewd idea on how that’s going to work out for them, given that their alliance is about as stable as, well, the UK Conservative Government. It will be interesting to see how the story ends, I’m not too far away from it now – but as the missions take anything up to an hour and a half to beat, and that’s if you manage it first time, I need to make sure I’m giving myself enough time when I sit down to play. Even after all that, I’ve still got to go through the warband mode, which is the next step!

Struggled to find a screenshot of the
underwater levels from the PS4 version...

Time management is an easier task with Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. I’m about halfway through the game now, having 100%ed at least half the levels on the Autumn Plains. It’s an absolutely beautiful game and is always a joy to play, and I’m enjoying the gimmicks and minigames that occur on almost every level which break up the gameplay quite nicely. I’m aiming for 100% completion for this one – none of the achievement trophies are tied up in multiplayer modes, so I could potentially manage it – so I feel absolutely no shame whatsoever in looking up how to do certain of the puzzles, which isn’t always obvious. Plus, it’s a great game to play when Kirsty and Jessie are around. Jessie likes the fact that Spyro can swim in this iteration of the game and loves playing around in the water on the Summer Forest level!

Last Week's Games: The Sexy Brutale, Necromunda, Spyro 2, Crash Bandicoot 2, Warhammer Quest, Camel Up

 I missed last week, sorry about that – certain things going on at home meant that writing blogs was the last thing I felt like doing! I’ve been playing quite a few games in the intervening time though, so here they are:

You can get this for the Switch too, apparently...

The Sexy Brutale is a heavily stylised and utterly brilliant puzzle-adventure game for the PC, whereby you play a priest (I think) at a masked ball where all the guests get murdered. You must figure out not who murdered the guests, but how – and put the mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening. It’s a brilliant idea and a good game, but the fact that I’ve had to look up a guide to get through certain parts makes me wonder whether I have the stomach for this sort of game anymore.

The Zip line provides some much-needed
mobility into the game...

I went back to Necromunda on the PS4. I wasn’t so keen on this when I first bought the game, but it’s grown on me a little bit now that I’ve figured out the key differences between this and Mordheim. It’s a lot less reliant on random number generation – it is there but it’s also a lot easier to set up high percent hit chances. In its stead, the game is a lot more about action economy; the winner of the battle will come down to who can do the most things per turn, so it’s worth getting a few kills in the isolated gangers as soon as possible.

Moneybags will teach you to swim -
for a price...

I’ve also started playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Regular readers will remember that I enjoyed Spyro the Dragon hugely last year, and it is a pleasure to play this one. I’ve been playing it quite a lot lately and I’m not even 20% of the way through the game yet. I’ve noticed that some of the collectables – the real challenge of the Spryo games – are tied up in abilities acquired later in the game, so there’ll be some backtracking this time around. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it’s nice to see the character progress, but it’s also nice to have all your abilities unlocked at the start of the game. We’ll see how it goes!

Watch out for that plant; it'll eat you.

On those occasions where the N-Sane trilogy has been in the PS4 disc drive, I’ve been playing Crash Bandicoot 2 as well. As with Spyro, it is a game I can play when my daughter’s around, and an experience I can share with my girlfriend who likes games but isn’t interested in war! It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure; the frustration at missing daft 3D platforming sections (which kill you far more than any enemy in the game, I think I can almost guarantee that!) has to be there for the payoff, but once you do beat it, there’s an immense feeling of satisfaction.

Can you flatten them all with an Area of
Effect spell before the fight even starts?

I continued to play Warhammer Quest on the PC. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those times where I love the game because it’s Warhammer, but I’m going to have to concede that the game itself isn’t that great. It feels a lot like a Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler game, where you have characters and abilities to use, dungeons to explore, treasure to acquire and monsters to slay – all of which becomes  easy once your characters get to a certain level! But sometimes that’s all I want out of a game, so I’ll keep playing!

Yes, there's a new edition out.
But I kind of prefer this box art...

Kirsty and I also had a go at Camel Up last week, a board game about betting on racing camels. I remember playing this at the UK Games Expo in 2015 and I enjoyed it a lot more this time around when I could take the time to figure out the mechanics of the game, and what we were supposed to be doing. As a one on one game, it’s great because each of us were constantly reacting to what the other was doing. With multiple players, it would be a very different beast as there’s a higher chance that our ideal actions would go before our turn came around.

I suspect most of what I say next week will be a continuation of this, if a little more focussed! See you then.

Last Week's Games: Gears of War 2, Warhammer Quest, Spyro 2, Juju

I’ve got a few new games to talk about this week. I discovered a better way of counting my games on the spreadsheet I have for them, and found that I had more than I thought I had bringing me up to over 1000 games now, and the number of games I have yet to play is astonishingly high so I thought I’d better play some of them.

Dom's sad story brings a tear to the eye...

I played Gears of War 2 on the Xbox 360 a lot last week. I beat it as well, so most of what I’m going to say about the game will be in the review I’m going to post up about it next week. However, I will say this: It’s among the first games I ever bought for the 360, and I didn’t play it for the longest time mainly because I wanted to get everything I could possibly get out of the original Gears of War before I moved on to its sequel. Of course, that didn’t happen, and probably never will, but I found myself thinking about the almost obsessive attitude I’ve taken towards completing games over the last eight years, and how I’m making the necessary adjustment to accommodate it.

First, I needed to break out of the need to play through games sequentially. I usually do this if I can, but it means a few things that are detrimental to clearing my backlog. For one thing, many of the games I’ve bought over the years are series; I’ve bought many sequels to a base game before I’ve even played it. I bought the first three Gears games at the same time, for example, but I’d never have dreamed of playing any but the first game first. Also, there are many game series out there whose first iterations are on consoles I no longer own, or computers I don’t have access to and never will. Finally, the quality of games tends to improve with sequels, so I’m potentially missing out on the best the series has to offer by playing them all in order first!

Secondly, I need to not worry so much about the achievement points and trophies. They’re nice to have, but difficult to justify why it’s so important to me when, say, I’m playing a game where many of the achievements are tied up in online multiplayer modes with dead servers. Gears of War is one such game, and I won’t be throwing away the opportunity to play a well-designed game with a fun story because I haven’t completed its previous iteration any longer!

Danger threatens in the dungeon...

I’ve also been playing Warhammer Quest on my laptop. I first saw this covered by TotalBiscuit, and while he didn’t think much of it, I can usually find some fun in Warhammer-related games. It’s a turn-based dungeon basher, with some basic role-playing game elements to it. There’s not a lot to it, and the skill involved with the game is almost nullified by the random number generation that permeates the game, but sometimes a simple dungeon crawler is all I want to be playing, and Warhammer Quest appears to be a game I can dip in and out of if I happen to have an hour to spare in the afternoon.

This is Ripto, in case you were wondering.

Finally, I’ve been playing a couple of games that are very much aimed at children: Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage on the PS4, and Juju on the Xbox 360. I’ve said it before but not for nothing: my daughter Jessie is around a lot of the time now, and while she’s maturing at a rapid rate, it would be very irresponsible of me to play graphically violent or intense games when she’s around. So, when she’s with me, I stick to either racing, sports or child-friendly action games. Regular readers may remember I was talking about Spyro the Dragon a lot last year, and what I’ve seen so far is everything a sequel should be: more of the same, but with extra moves, more things to do, and an overall better experience. Juju is a charming little platformer where you make your way through an exotic forest jumping on things; I’m sure I’ll be playing more of this in weeks to come!