Spyro can now bore you

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Storyline
Its birthday time for all the baby dragons. Well unfortunately you have an unwanted visitor. Ripto is back and he attempts to steal all the dragonflies with his cheap wand. He manages to mess that up. So he leaves with his Riptocs in order to find the dragonflies.

Ripto doesn't really go out after any dragonflies himself. He sends his dino friends as usual. You as Spyro must travel through different areas in order to collect the gems the bad guys dropped and the missing dragonflies. You got a new dragonfly friend named Sparx that makes absolutely no sense, but is supposedly there to help you. He picks up most of the gems and its a good thing because movement in the game is horrible. I'll get to that later.

Game-Play
The game-play is pretty simple. For each board you must complete you will need to find all of the dragonflies and all of the gems. Sounds easy enough right? It gets a bit boring when you realize that the gems can be anywhere, including in monsters or hard to see areas. You don't have to do everything in a given area right away, but in order to move on to other boards in the game you must find the dragonflies.
Finding the dragonflies will get boring after a while because its the same thing for every board in the game. You either find them sitting all alone and will give no resistance, or they will give chase and be a pain in the behind to catch. Other times you will have do small missions or races to get them. It is the same for every board. There are about 3 chests where you will have to find keys in order to open.

There are about 10 different boards, each within a different setting. You could be in an ice area, dessert, or any other place. The characters are based on different nationalities stereotypical traits. Kind of bogus if you ask me and doesn't need to be in a game.

Combat
This time around they were a bit creative. You get different types of breath that will help in different areas. Ice breath for freezing, fire breath for burning, lightning breath for electrocution, and water breath for capturing dragonflies. You also can either run and ram an opponent or stomp on them from doing a downward stomp. None of it is visually appealing.

Fighting enemies is easy as long as you don't get hit. Once you get hit you are frozen for about 3 seconds allowing your opponent to continue to attack. Its not all bad until you reach the final battle where you will likely want to break the game once you're done.
You will almost never have to fight more than 2 monsters at a time. This makes the game easy to breeze through until you reach the end. Also for each board there is no boss. A major no-no in my opinion. Having no boss in a level makes the board pointless and easy.

Movement & Graphics
I know for a while people may be wondering why I often comment on movement in a game. Well movement is a key part to your gaming experience. In this review I include Graphics with Movement because they both shared the same role.

In order to see different destinations you will have to move around or use the very poor camera view to attempt to see different places. Now here is where completing a level becomes a problem. Many times you will miss areas because you didn't move into a good spot to where the image frames will load accurately.
It is like playing those old frame by frame wannabe 3D PC games made in the late 80s and early 90s that looked like many polygons slapped together to form a terrain that was supposed to look good. The graphics in this game was not that horrible, but not too far from it.
The way graphics are loaded makes it obvious there are different frames loading with the items and the textures/animations are repetitive. If a frame loads poorly then you might see into an area that you think is there, but is really blocked off by a wall. Many times I just dove right into nothing, because I thought I saw an opening. Other times I saw a wall and I could walk right through it to find the gems I needed.

The animations for this game are probably more flawed than the actual movement. The movement is not precise at all. You will run at full speed around a corner and run smack into nothing just because you are somewhat near a wall. Other times you will try to stop and you will just keep going and you will know there is a problem because the animation will freeze in one of the middle frames of Spyro's running animation.

Gliding allows you to drift in air, but it has the same annoyances. If you go near a wall you will crash and fall. Hovering doesn't make any sense. By hovering you are supposed to gain some extra leverage that helps you get to a ledge that you may just miss.

Scenery
The scenery was nice. There are areas that was very nicely done even though the majority of levels was ugly and very hard to see. The trend throughout the game was there was dark areas and blotched areas and in the middle was nicely designed platforms.
The game was probably rushed or the individuals in charge of level design was lazy. There was enough good graphics there to make nice levels, but I don't understand why each level was filled with so much slop for graphics.

Sound Effects
Not too many points can be made here. The sound effects are plain and there isn't much variety.

- The music is about the same for each level with some minor differences.
- The sfx to show an action or expression are all simple and very plain.
- Voice characters are back. Saves you reading, or not. If you read and listen to the voice you will realize sometimes there is more text than words, and other times more words than text.