The Features

The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning caught me a little by surprise, I am a big fan of the Spyro games, and the move into 3D seems to have treated our little Dragon well. A New Beginning marks just that, not only a new quest, but a much darker Spyro adventure. Whether this will appeal to the fan base that loves the Spyro titles it remains to see, but my girlfriend certainly hasn’t enjoyed this title half as much as the others.

Story:

The Legend of Spyro: A New beginning, become a living, breathing weapon of explosive destruction! Experience the true power of the purple dragon as you unleash devastating fury attacks, upgradeable breaths & ground to aerial melee combos in a frenzied battle with hordes of menacing enemies and bone-chilling bosses. In this epic adventure with non-stop action combat, the future of the world rests on Spyro`s wings and you must help him become the hero.

Features:

• Upgrade Your Powers - increase the power and variety of moves and attacks.
• Non-Stop, Explosive Action Combat.
• Bone-Chilling Boss Battles.
• Epic adventure with AAA voice talent.

The first thing you will notice is just how much darker the game is compared to the previous games, there is more emphasis on action rather than crystal collection too which won’t go down too well with the older fans of the game.

But let’s put the older games aside and concentrate on this one. As we mentioned earlier, this is a new beginning for Spyro, he has just been born and has to start to learn all of his new moves from the start, attacks, flying and fire breathing are all here and the game does start off in a good little tutorial mode for gamers to get used to the buttons and controls.

Spyro was brought up by a group of very friendly fireflies during the start of the game and he is then raised as one of them, but everything changes in Spyro’s world when they reveal to him that he is actually a dragon and can breathe fire! This leads him on a quest to find out where he came from, as always Spyro is accompanied by his good friend and funny sidekick, Sparx.

The game begins well and it shows that the game has finally got some very good voice talent behind it, as you may have already heard the game feature Elijah Wood as Spyro, David Spade as Sparx who does an excellent job and finally Gary Oldman as Ignitus. Both David and Gary do excellent jobs as their characters, but Elijah Wood, while not doing anything wrong – doesn’t add anything special to Spyro.

Spyro starts the game with his basic attacks and Fire breathing. Later on he can learn Electricity, Ice and Earth breaths as the game moves on. Each breath has its own basic action as well as a more advanced move, but press the buttons right and you can do a super attack that can kill off everything on the screen.  Once again killing enemies will drop crystals; Red orbs restore health, blue restores magic, purple restores fury power and green crystals allow you to upgrade Spyro's elemental powers. It is up to you to decide which breath should be upgraded, so if you don’t like one breath in particular you can upgrade another and use that more often

This Spyro adventure also adds a few basic puzzles into the gameplay. They are very basic though, but some children may find them annoying as they can be fiddly at times, an example of this is where you have to roll giant snowballs into a catapults to fire it at a gate that is blocked, its not as easy as it could be to roll them around and adjusting the games camera at the same time isn’t the easiest either.

Graphically this Spyro title is a good step up once again, especially if you play it upscaled on an Xbox 360. The early forest levels, while dark, are full of foliage and items that can be destroyed. Later levels such as snowy areas are very good too, there are a lot of very cool special effects used in the game that just help to show how well the Xbox is still doing in this time of Next Generation consoles.

The game can be completed by most players in around 8-10 hours, but for those much younger than me you can at least double it. Difficulty levels in Spryo are not too hard, although sometimes when there are a lot of enemies on screen it can become a little confusing at times, especially as the camera is never that forgiving.

Final Comments

There are no really outstanding problems with Spyro, it’s just that most of its older fans loved the simple side of collecting crystals; the game has far more action now than it ever did and it is certainly a lot darker which may once more put some fans of the series against it. Personally though I quite enjoyed it, my little niece liked it, although didn’t like the fighting and my girlfriend thought it was great at first until it became too dark and everything revolved around fighting.

Return To The Xbox Section