The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night is the third outing on the DS for our purple friend, while the other two versions went for the 2D style of platforming, this version takes the game back to it’s original roots in the form of a 3D style adventure, but does the switch do the game justice, well…
The story picks up after the events of the previous game, The Dark Master who is trapped inside Convexity, is seeking to be resurrected and Spyro who has been having nightmares about the imminent danger decides he is going to search for an ancient dragon called The Chronicler who he feels can help him to save the day. It’s a fairly good story and is told quite well on the DS, which ops for still pictures accompanied by voiceovers to guide you through.
As you work your way through the different levels you will collect various gems, Red (Health), Purple (Fury) and Blue (Spirit), these provide Spyro with the various types of energy you will need to get your through the game, each type of energy is represented by a bar on the screen display, meaning you can keep an eye on whether you are close to full health or not. Another useful feature on the screen display is the enemy portrait, this is displayed when you lock onto a target and allows you to keep an eye on your enemies health, which is always useful.
The games controls are fairly simple to pick up, which makes this an easy game to get to grips with, the face buttons are used for jumping, melee attacks and the breath attack while the control pad enables you to move as is usually the case, elsewhere you can use the R button (combined with A) to look around and the L button to change the elements which Spyro uses (Fire, Ice, Electricity and Earth) in his breath attacks.
Graphically the game is quite disappointing, there just seems to be a lack of detail on the screen at anyone time not to mention the draw distance which is also fairly disappointing, the camera also seems to wander off in different directions and although you can reset it using the R button, this is a action that really shouldn’t be necessary.
Thankfully the actual gameplay almost makes up for the graphics and is actually a lot of fun, there are plenty of platforms to jump up and glide from and also quite a few enemies to try out your breath attacks on, not forgetting your melee moves.
Unfortunately it wont be long before you encounter the touch screen elements of the game though, these come in the shape of flicking enemies up in the air and swiping the screen while following the on-screen arrows, this really is a odd addition and doesn’t really work that well. Other touch screen elements to the game are included in the various puzzles you will encounter but none of them really add that much to the gameplay and only serve to slow it down.
The strongest point to any game is usually the boss battles and Spyro is a bit of a mixed bag here, while the bosses are fairly impressive, they can also be extremely difficult to defeat, sometime there just doesn’t seem to be a pattern to their attacks and considering that this has always been the way in other games of this type, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be the case with this one.
The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night is certainly not a very bad game, as I mentioned, some of the gameplay elements are actually quite fun, it’s just that in places it doesn’t feel finished, the camera is disappointing at times and some of the detail in the levels could have been better. There are so many games of this type on the DS that it would be hard for me to say, buy this now, perhaps fans of the series would enjoy it though.
