GENRE
	Platformer
	DEVELOPER
	Check Six Games
	PUBLISHER
	Universal Interactive
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1
	CONNECTIVITY
	no
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The latest edition to the Spyro series, Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly, pits our purple hero against the villainous Rypto once more. In his latest evil plot, Rypto barges in on the dragonfly ceremony of the dragon kingdom. This is when young dragons are matched up with their dragonfly companions, one of the most important events in a dragon's life. Rypto, on the other hand, has his own agenda and crashes the party to steal all the dragonflies! Without the dragonflies to aid and protect them, the dragons will be unable to stop him. However, when he tries to steal them all with a magic spell, the spell winds up scattering the young dragonflies all across the kingdoms. Undeterred, Rypto flees stating that they'll never be able to catch all the dragonflies again while his cronies cause havoc in the land.

Dragonflies gone, Rynoks everywhere... what's a dragon to do?! Why get Spyro to save the day once again, of course! It's up to him and his pals to save the day and gather up all the scattered dragonflies.

visuals

The game offers very lovely backgrounds and scenery filled with bright colors, however, it still lacks the depth and detail that the GameCube has to offer. Spyro does looks much better than he did in his first three titles, but the other characters have been only slightly improved and still remain quite disappointing. There are some nice lighting effects that play with Spyro's textures, sometimes making his trademark purple skin turn blue.

The water effects are just awful. The rippling of water in shallow depths is very unappealing and there seems to be no effects at all in deep water. You can’t see what's in the water, and when you dive in, you can't see out of the water. And during the several flying mini-games, the water is plagued by horrible pixelation. The craziest thing is: these effects were much more impressive and far better looking in Year of the Dragon, the prequel to this game.

The frame rate is enough to give you a headache. While charging, the game seems to lag and never quite catch up with you. Equally frustrating is the horrible camera, which takes much too long to center its view on Spyro, especially in active mode. Most of the time I had to just sit and wait so everything could catch up with me.

audio

The overall sound is close in quality to past Spyro titles. The buzz-talk of Sparks is fairly entertaining, and if you get tired of hearing him or anyone else talk, you can always push the A button to just read the text. While the voices can be entertaining, there is one thing that I found extremely annoying: each time Spyro charges and hits his head on a wall, he yells "ow!” While this may not seem like much, the collision detection is awful. So while you're frustrated with having to wait until Spyro adjusts himself to start running again, you have to listen to him yell "ow!" for the 258th time. Also, the sound of the magic performed by the various dragons and people within the game is very grating on the ears. Not very mystical sounding to me, I have to say.

Possibly the best aspect about Enter the Dragonfly is the music. Composed by former drummer of The Police, Stewart Copeland, the music in this game is very unique and whimsical. While it suits the game's environment, it's still very nice to listen to.

gameplay

The game mechanics in Enter the Dragonfly are very frustrating. The controls aren’t nearly as convenient nor as comfortable as Spyro’s earlier incarnations on the Playstation were. In previous games you could simply press the jump button to first jump, then glide, and then again to hover, whereas now you must press the Y button to hover. I can't say how many times I found myself breathing fire or charging while trying to hover onto a far platform.

Switching through the different breath weapons is very inconvenient as well. To be forced to flame a bad guy or melt free a dragon master, and then trying to switch to bubble breath to catch a pesky dragonfly before he flies away just takes too long! Yes, it's a nice addition to the game having new breath weapons, but they seem “tacked on.” Yet, we need bubble breath to catch dragonflies. Why? Shouldn't they want to come home? Why no: Bianca tells us that they might fly away because they're "shy." Well... if they're so darned shy then why are they flying around laughing at me? Something doesn't make sense. Nevertheless, trying to blow bubbles at them is extremely frustrating due to bad gameplay mechanics and a shotty camera.

Loading times were very long, especially considering this on GameCube, and surprisingly confusing. It would tell you it was loading, and then just leave you with the picture of Spyro flying for a while. No "loading" pictured on the screen, no bars and no meters. So you just sit and twiddle your thumbs until a simple black screen appears saying it's loading the next level, and then you're finally in the level. As if loading times weren’t bad enough as it is, when you are forced to endure a sloppy effort like this one, it turns a loading time into a very disorienting chore.

There are many minor bugs in the game that can be very annoying. For example: while the camera is in passive mode, I happened to be standing next to a wall and all of a sudden the camera was locked in an overhead position and I couldn't move the camera around until I moved. This happened all too frequently during my game time, and the result was being thwacked by Rynoks.

multiplayer

N/A

overall

I'm a big fan of the Spyro series -- I love playing as the heroic little purple dragon that saves everyone from the evil baddies. Each new installment was usually a big delight for me because it involved new stories, new characters, and much-improved graphics. Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly however, is definitely the most disappointing entry in the series to date. Everything from the graphics, sound and the frame rate should have been a whole lot better, not to mention the confusing and burdensome control scheme. If you enjoy Spyro games I would strongly suggest skipping Enter the Dragonfly and waiting for the next installment instead.

4.7/10