Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon with Spryo the Dragon

Don't mess with the dragon...

I’d never even have thought about buying Spyro the Dragon back when it was released on the PS1, and frankly I wouldn’t have thought to buy it now. However, last year my partner Kirsty bought the Spyro: Reignited Trilogy on the PS4, which I played when I wanted a game I could play around my young daughter.

It turned out to be really good! It is a 3D platforming game where you control a little dragon called Spyro on a quest to free the other dragons of the world from a spell put on them my Gnasty Gnorc that caused them to turn into jade statues. You run around the various stages, defeating enemies by charging in to them or burning them, and collecting treasure in the form of differently-coloured gems, before setting off on a hot air balloon to the next one. And having now not only played through the game but completed it 100%, I can honestly say that I don’t play enough of this type of game!

It's not looking good for that chicken...

Back when Spryo was first released, around the middle of the 5^th console generation, 3D platforming was still in its infancy, and while there had been some notable successes, (Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie etc) they were often poorly presented and didn’t handle very well. With Spyro, the rulebook had been thrown out of the window. The whimsical, fun design of the game wasn’t usual for Playstation games, (at least, not without being overly silly,) but opened the doors for a wider audience. The level design – bang on point, for the most part – had to compensate for the fact that Spyro can glide huge distances, so they are more explorative in nature. Different enemy types responded to different attacks; some were vulnerable to charging, and some to fire. And while the game’s enemies rarely present much of a challenge, finding all the collectables and rescuing all the dragons was a large part of the experience. But the best thing about the game is the support from the dual analogue sticks, which allowed you to control Spyro’s pace as well as the position of the camera. All of this makes the game fluid and an absolute joy to play. The flying levels in particular, while little more than showing off, are a great change of pace and offer a different kind of challenge to the rest of the game.

The graphics and sound are very good; the art style works well on modern consoles and will still look good in years to come. The music was composed by Stuart Copeland, and while not particularly memorable after the fact, supports the game very well. The voice acting was good as well; it knows that it’s camp, silly and fantastic, and makes no pretence to the contrary.

It was actually harder to get the trophy for making
Gnasty run around the level five times than it
was to beat him...

I probably could have blitzed through the game in a single afternoon if all I wanted was get to the end, but I found that the real fun of Spyro is exploring the levels for the treasures, hunting around for those last few gems, and figuring out the secrets. For the most part this works well; it’s always good to have the answer to the problem lie somewhere in the level design, and the skills and move set you start the game with. The only slight clanger are those sections where the solution is based on the charge jump: By the time you’ve done the first one, you’re moving far too fast to plan your move; it’s going to cost you a few lives as you veer off the edges and plummet to your doom. I admit to having to look up some guides to find out what to do – if I’m looking to 100% a game I don’t want to get bogged down – but none of this is required to beat the game and is thankfully rare.

Spyro the Dragon is a great little game that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with. It’s competently designed and great fun. It’s not for everyone – hardcore gamers will find the presented challenge too easy, and even completionists may be expecting a little bit more – but for most people who enjoy playing games, you’ll have a great time with Spyro.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Last Week's Games: Dragon Quest, Spyro and Legions

At one point in the week I found myself with quite a significant gap between one engagement and the next, and decided to fill the time with a couple of hours of Dragon Quest, which was released on the Nintendo Switch recently. It’s a relatively early form of JRPG (Japanese Role-Playing Game) and the start of a long-running series of games. I’ve spoken quite a lot over the last few years about playing the first iterations of games to see their core mechanics; they rarely provide as deep an experience as their later games but it’s always interesting to see. Dragon Quest plays like an early Final Fantasy, or Phantasty Star game, where you’re set on a quest to find the Ball of Light and rescue the Princess from the Dragon Lord. This doesn’t sound particularly inspired, but sometimes the simplest plot lines are the most effective!

Stay off the purple patch until you can handle it...

This game doesn’t have the depth and options of games that followed, either to its sequels or to the vast amount of games it inspired. The turn-based combat is entirely menu-driven, the magic system is very basic, there’s no party, no visible customisation and no crafting. With that being said, I’m pleasantly surprised about how much fun I’m having with it. It’s challenging, but well-balanced. Admittedly, the first fight I got in to was with a monster that was too high-level for me and I died straight away, but this is actually quite a rare occurrence and the difficulty of the monsters scale up quite well. You have a choice of where to go in order to complete your objective, but not too much choice. The world map looks big but doesn’t look like it will take too much time to see the significant areas. There is a certain amount of grind required to get through the game – you’re relying on your equipment to a certain extent, and treasure is not dropped at a rate where you have more money than you can spend, so it will be a while before you get enough gold together to buy the best gear – but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The result is a standard but enjoyable experience that I’ve had a good time with so far, and I hope to be able to pick it up again soon!

I’ve also been playing Spyro the Dragon, and this time I managed to complete the game 100%! I’ll do a blog about that at some stage, so I won’t say anything more about it here other than what a delightful experience it was, and hopefully I’ll get some time to play the other two games on the disc!

At this point I'm just recycling pictures of Legions
I've used before and seeing how long it takes
people to notice.

Finally, I was putting a lot more time than I expected into The Horus Heresy: Legions. I got caught up in the politics of the Warrior Lodge I am a part of – it takes itself a bit more seriously than my last one, and there is an expectation that we will get a certain amount of points before the end of the bi-weekly events or we will be kicked out. I came to within about a day of this happening, so I stepped my game up and actually ended up doing quite well, which at least partly resulted in the lodge getting the second highest reward crate available. They’ll never do any better by my intervention, as I refuse to spend any money on tickets, but they’ll have what help there is in me!

I also found myself enjoying the cards in the new event, as for once I’ve read the material it’s based on: Macgragge’s Honour, a graphic novel. Also, Ouon Hommed – my preferred choice of warlord for this – has a very powerful card-drawing ability that I suspect will get reduced for balance purposes in later iterations. However, I managed an eight-win run with him, which is my best run yet, and won the achievement for doing so which is a positive thing! I’m going to try a few more runs with Hommed to see if I can get him up to twelve wins – the maximum you can get off one ticket – before his abilities are modified, as for once I might have a hope of managing it!

Last Week's Games: Rayman, Call of Duty and Spyro

I haven’t been very well this week, mainly with a cold but it nonetheless drags you down! So, with a very busy week, and in a state of almost constant exhaustion, my time for playing games was limited for the first half, and heavy for most of Monday where I refused to do anything else. Because of that, I managed to beat two of them. They were: Rayman Legends on my Switch and Call of Duty: Classic on the Xbox 360.

This level took a few goes!

I’ve talked about Rayman Legends on this blog enough times for you to know I’ve been enjoying it, and I’d rather reserve any additional remarks I have on the matter for the review. I will, however, say that it is nice to still be having fun with a game with the post-game content, and in games like this, getting to the end is only half the battle! It’s one of the few games I have a hope of achieving 100% completion on, and if I’m still having fun on the journey, one wonders why not.

Seen one bombed-out ruin, seen them all...

Call of Duty: Classic was a different matter. I bought this game in 2013, I think. (It was somewhere within the bracket of buying the Xbox 360 in 2012 and making a habit of keeping track of what games I was buying, which was 2014-2015.) I’d probably thought at some point that if everybody else was playing Call of Duty by then, I might as well play it too, and given that I almost obsessively had to play games in sequence at that point in my life (still do, though I’m less finnicky about it now!) I was always going to start from the first one and work my way up. Never mind that, at the time I bought it, Black Ops 2 was out, Ghosts wasn’t far away and the part of the game that everybody liked – the multiplayer – dies as the yearly sequel spawns; I wanted to play through those campaigns! If I’d have known at the time it would take me over six years to get through even one of them, I might not have bothered. Nonetheless I managed to get to the end of the first Call of Duty game. It was OK. It’s showing its age now, obviously. It’s playable enough, but brutally hard in places and some of it feels quite cheap. However, I’m rather smug to be able to say that I got through the second half of the game without using the Lean function even once. This was because I only remembered it existed when I checked a Wiki to find out how in the world you are supposed to get all the achievement points by beating the game on its hardest difficulty setting – apparently this is a key skill for most of it, though it won’t help in certain “turret” situations, and “that” level in Russia where you somehow have to hold a building for four minutes. I was also surprised to learn that it was originally a PC game, and not, as I had previously thought, a port of Call of Duty: Finest Hour, which I owned for the Xbox at one point but traded in.

There's a secret room behind him...

Earlier in the week I carried on with Spyro the Dragon, beating the Beastmakers levels – not without some help from a guide for those last few gems; I’m not looking to get bogged down – and did the first level of the Dream Weavers, which I found quite colourful and endearing! I haven’t got much further than that though as my attention drifted over to Call of Duty, which sounds bad but let me explain: Kirsty’s PS4 is in our living room, my Xbox 360 is in our bedroom. Noticing I wasn’t well, Kirsty convinced me to come to bed where it was warmer and play some games there. The original plan was to play some co-op games but when all the Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve been saving for co-op turned out to need a separate profile in order to play them in co-op mode, I moved swiftly on! Kirsty didn’t seem to mind watching me getting killed in CoD over and over again, so no harm done.

Last Week's Games: Spyro, Rayman Legends and Horus Heresy: Legions

This week, I’ve mainly been playing Spyro the Dragon on the PS4. I mentioned last week that I’d put it on mainly to play a game I didn’t mind my daughter watching, but she really enjoyed playing it as well. But I’m having a fine time playing it; the levels are easy enough to get through and I rarely die through losing to the enemies (falling in to water is much more common,) but the real challenge of the game lies in obtaining all the collectibles and looking around the level for those, while a little off-pace at times, is a lot of fun.

I'm up to the Beast makers level at the moment...

It’s nice to be able to play Spyro now because I wouldn’t have touched a game like this back when I owned a PlayStation. I was more interested in the fighting games, military shooters and extreme sports titles were just coming in then as well; those were the games I tended to play back then. It turns out I missed out on quite a lot, because games like Spyro and Crash Bandicoot are very competently-designed games that had a much to offer and have aged – or at least have been re-mastered – a lot better. I doubt going back and playing the games that were cutting edge at the time would be the same experience now!

One remark I find myself making a lot about games I get to the end of is that nothing beats good level design and a solid core gameplay loop, and Spyro certainly has that. It doesn’t necessarily have a lot of progression in it – there’s no rewards in the game that develop the character, and such rewards as there are come in the form of collectable art – but far from enjoying Spyro in spite the static character, I enjoy it because of him. The fact is, “How do I get past this level?”, “How do I reach those gems?”, and “How do I complete this part 100%?” become very different questions when the answer lies in the abilities you start the game with. If charging an enemy doesn’t work, try a different attack. If you can’t find all the gems, look around again – they’re somewhere, and you can reach them if you look in the right place. After twenty years of levelling up and buying skill points, it is a refreshing change of pace – one that was there all along in the vast majority of the games I was playing prior to that!

Pigs might fly...

The same is true for the other game I managed to get some time with this week – Rayman Legends. As a puzzle platformer it has a similar divide: A platforming game that you can get all the way through, and a puzzle game for those who want to find all the collectables. I’m nearly at the end of the main campaign; I’m up to the last boss, which I probably would have beaten but I had to go back to work. After that, there’s plenty of post-game content; there’s a whole lot of additional levels I’ve unlocked, and some of the Teensies got missed along the way so there’s some levels I’ll have to do again. I couldn’t have picked a better game to do it with really – Rayman’s probably the best game I’ve got right now for a pick-up-and-play mentality, and with it being on the Switch of all consoles, I can dip in and out whenever I want without having to worry too much about plot continuity or any of it.

New faction: Orphans of War.

Finally, I had a go at Horus Heresy – Legions. It’s a little odd with this game now because while I feel no great desire to be playing it at the moment, I need to play it now and again to remain in my warrior lodge; there’s an expectation that we gain at least 30-50 points per week or we get kicked out. It’s fair enough; you don’t want a lodge full of dead accounts, but it does mean I’m only barely engaged.

The other games have taken a back seat for now; I find myself tied up in work and family commitments including my first musical performance in a while. We’ll see about next week!

Last Week's Games: Arena, Fire Pro Wrestling World, Spyro the Dragon

Larger than it looks...

I carried on playing Arena and X-COM: UFO Defense, but the problem with both is that they were developed during a time before games were paced and balanced at the level we expect them to be today, and I found them to be frustrating more than anything else. Arena is looking like it’s going to be a long slog indeed. I had forgotten that the first major area where there is a plot-related quest – Fang Lair – is in Hammerfell, and because I am a Wood Elf and therefore started the game in Valenwood, I need to travel across both continents before I find what I’m looking for. On the one hand, you can fast-travel from the very start. On the other, if you try to travel further away than the next town, you’ll be killed before you get there and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. The result is that I’ve got a long way to go before I can move the plot along and will likely never get there without a substantial amount of scum-saving. The fact that having more save files appears to increase the likelihood of the game crashing is doing nothing to improve this! I’m having fun, but I’m not likely to see it through until the end.

Strewth, a triple threat cage match!

I carried on with Fire Pro Wrestling World, which I’m finding addictive and a lot of fun. I’m still working my way through the Mission Mode, which is a good way to learn the key mechanics of the game but some of the match stipulations are rather odd, and I’ve had to go online to find out how to do it as the game doesn’t explain it to you. The one I remember is where you must win a Cage match having done a diving attack from the top of a steel cage. Even getting to the top of the cage without being interrupted takes a fair amount of work, and then you have to know where to do it and what button makes the attack – you only get one shot, and if you miss, you’ll be helpless on the floor as your opponent climbs the cage uninterrupted! The match I’m stuck on now is the one where you must let your tag team partner win the match. This is quite difficult to do as your partner doesn’t appear to be able to hold his own against your opponents, so you must do most of the work in beating them – but they’re pretty tough!

Dragoooon!

I had a go with Spyro the Dragon on the PlayStation 4. Kirsty bought this game roughly a year ago and hasn’t had a huge amount of time to play it. I played it because I wanted to be playing a game that I didn’t mind my daughter seeing when she woke up after her nap. But I really enjoyed it. It’s easy enough to play without getting stuck, (although apparently it gets tough later – I’m only at the second world!) and the bulk of the challenge is provided by collectables, which is where I’ve spent most of my time with it so far. I also liked Spyro, with his Sonic the Hedgehog-style ‘90s ‘tude. Having grown up in a time where pop culture was the domain of larger-than-life cartoon characters, it left me in a nostalgic haze, and was a refreshing change from the super-serious RPG characters or shooters. Speaking of my daughter, when she eventually woke up, she wanted to play, and even though she doesn’t have the dexterity to handle 3D controls yet, the game isn’t particularly challenging in the early stages and she had a fine time running around opening treasure chests.

With my hobby games, I spent some time in Phoenix Games while having my car fixed and started painting my Chaos Raptors in Black Legion colours, I’ll show you all when I’ve finished! I’ve also developed what I hope are some horror-based adventures for Dungeons and Dragons; short ones that will fit in to one or two gaming sessions but are paced well enough to give an interesting game to players wanting something a little different. I hope I get to run them at some point!