The Legend of Spyro - A New Beginning

Someone at Vivendi looked at a purple cartoon dragon in 2006 and decided the answer was Gary Oldman. He voices Ignitus, the mentor figure; Elijah Wood plays Spyro; David Spade returns to something like the Sparx role he had in the original trilogy. That casting tells you everything about the pitch. The Insomniac games were bright, breezy collect-a-thons built around gliding and gem counts. This one wanted portent, a prophecy, a villain called Cynder, and a young dragon told he is the last of his kind.

Krome Studios, better known for Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, rebuilt the thing as a combat game. Spyro learns four elemental breaths across the campaign, and each has a charged variant plus a screen-clearing fury attack that fills as you take and deal damage. Fire is the brawler. Electricity stuns crowds. Ice locks enemies in place so you can shatter them with a melee follow-up. Earth is the heavy option. Killing enemies drops crystals that feed into upgrades for health, breath capacity and fury, which gives the levels a light progression spine they would otherwise lack.

The trouble is that a dragon who cannot fly is a strange protagonist. Spyro glides and hovers briefly, and a handful of sequences put him on rails through open air, but the levels are corridors and arenas that gate you until every enemy is dead. The camera fights you in tight spaces, which matters more than usual when three-quarters of the combat is about positioning against groups. Lock-on helps and then abruptly does not, usually when something is behind you.

What survives is the presentation. The art direction is genuinely committed to its gloomy fantasy register, the score is orchestral and takes itself seriously, and the cutscenes are voiced by people who clearly showed up and did the work rather than phoning in a licensed cash-in. Boss encounters against Cynder's lieutenants are readable and reasonably staged. It is short, maybe six hours, and it ends on a hook for the sequel that Krome duly built.

As a Spyro game it is a repudiation of everything the character was, and plenty of people who grew up on the PS1 trilogy never forgave it. Taken on its own, it is a competent mid-budget action game with better voice acting than it needed and a camera worse than it could afford. The reboot bet that a darker tone would age better than charm did. It bet wrong.