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Spyro’s latest adventure aims to please and largely succeeds in capturing the younger audience.
Dawn of the Dragon lets you play as both Spyro and Cynder allowing you switch between them with the press of a button. Two-player co-op is supported in the game and you’ll find various objectives that are designed for two players. Spyro and Cynder have different special attacks, with Spyro retaining his main elemental moves and Cynder taking on different ones like Shadow and Poison. You can upgrade these moves by collecting gems scattered around the world. Similarly, the game allows you to use armor for your dragons and you can even combine different armors to get their joint effects.
The gameplay in Dawn of the Dragon is standard Spyro fair. Your main goal is to collect gems that you’ll encounter throughout the game worlds. These gems can be used to buy upgrades (blue gems), recharge your health (red gems) or recharge your mana (green gems). You’ll get them by defeating enemies, finding crystal clusters, and breaking pots in the game’s worlds. Combat in the game is actually fairly involved and includes light and heavy attacks, grabs, pounds and air attacks, all of which come together in a number of combos. New to the game is the ability for the dragons to fly (they could only glide previously) which does open the game up to numerous air-based attacks. However, flying can also be a touch frustrating since invisible walls sometimes limit where you can go.
Visually, Dawn of the Dragon is a pretty, vibrant and gorgeous game—most of the time. The character models are all fairly detailed and the animation is fluid and graceful, especially for Spyro and Cynder. The environments are all quite pretty thanks to lush, full colors and fancy lighting effects that make the game look quite great. Unfortunately, the game does suffer from some technical problems including frame rate issues and pop-in (both of which show up more often when you’re flying), as well as the invisible walls mentioned earlier.
The game’s audio is a highlight. There isn’t much voice acting during the actual gameplay but the cutscenes feature terrific voice acting from big-time celebrities including Elijah Wood (Spyro), Christina Ricci (Cynder), and Wayne Brady (Sparx). Gary Oldman and Mark Hamill, as well as Blair Underwood, round up the cast. The rest of the audio is great, too. The sound effects let you hear the impacts of your actions while the orchestrated soundtrack fits the game well.
Ultimately, The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon is a well put-together platformer, especially for younger gamers. The game is kept from greatness because of some the technical issues (such as the visual issues mentioned above and the occasionally wonky air-combat system) but younger gamers should still have a blast with the game thanks to solid gameplay and a (generally) strong presentation. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 31, 2008
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