I’m on optimist by nature, and always have hope for things. Hope that my children will graduate from college and get great jobs, find wonderful mates, and give me lots of grandchildren. Hope that our finances will allow us to retire early. Hope that I find really fun games for everyone at Christmas and that we have time to play them.

I had hopes for Spyro. Ever since he came to the GameCube from the PlayStation, I’ve liked the little purple dragon. Our favorite Spyro game was A Hero’s Tail, which while not the best designed game in the world, was cute and a lot of fun for young players. My kids still play it now and then after having it for four years. However, the Spyro games since then have been mediocre and not very enjoyable. Spyro Dawn of the Dragon is the third in a trilogy, The Legend of Spyro, beginning with A New Beginning, following with The Eternal Night and now concluding with Dawn of the Dragon. I had hoped that this last entry in the series would be a great game, but my hopes have not been realized.

Dawn of the Dragon takes up the story from The Eternal Night, with Cynder and Spyro trapped in stasis for several years. A large troll-like creature with an army of smaller monsters breaks them out, but then places a collar on each of the dragons. These collars have some type of force that links the dragons to each other, and also prevents them from leaving their area. Spyro and Cynder manage to break free of the holding area, battle an even larger demonic character and escape, but they are still attached to each other by these collars. Malefor is behind this plot, and Spyro and Cynder join forces (as they are “forced to” by the collars) to defeat him.

The introduction is fast-paced and exciting. It plays like an interactive movie, and players will split their time between watching passively and interacting with the events. It is intense and involving. The parts where players have to commit some type of action are set-up like tutorials and demonstrate basic controls. Once out of the opening sequence, the real tutorial level begins. Players will learn how to use basic fighting moves, how to fly and jump, and how to collect crystals.

The first part of the game is somewhat exciting, too, as players spend some time flying the dragons around, fighting enemies and figuring out the controls. However, as players spend more time in the game, the game becomes less exciting, a bit aggravating and then just boring.

It’s not the fault of the basic gameplay components of fighting or collecting, or a lack of visual gratification and background music. Both the graphics and music are the best things going for Spryo here, and I have to say this is some of the best music I’ve heard in a Wii game.

The graphics are truly beautiful at times, and are as good as possible to have on a Wii. They really add to the overall sensation of flying. The fighting is about average as compared to other platform games of this type, not too easy and not too difficult (except for the Elites, which are largely irrelevant) and the collecting is the same as in every other average platform game. Just beat everything in sight to death and collect the stuff that falls out.

Spyro and Cynder each possess special fighting abilities, like poison (Cynder) and ice (Spyro). These are just a few of their abilities; they have many more and they can be upgraded, as well. These abilities are entertaining at first, but most of the battles won’t require them.

Many battles involve fighting multiple enemies in tight packs, and it’s hard to take the time to keep switching between abilities and then to use them. It’s easier and quicker to just keep hitting the “B” button on the Wii-Mote for the basic attack while moving the dragon of choice with the control stick on the nunchuk. There are also some cool defensive moves, but again, these take a little time to implement. The fighting doesn’t pause while players are hitting many buttons or thinking about whether to hold their controls vertically upright or to shake them wildly.

What ultimately killed this game for us were the bad camera controls and the flying. Yes, I said the flying was cool, but that it is at first, before it becomes apparent that the flying is severely restricted in scope. The dragons can only fly so high and no higher. It’s like extended soaring, in other words. It’s also impossible to fly freely, due to unseen barriers. It’s a given that any platform game has walls and barriers that players can’t cross, to contain the gameplay, but when players walk into a wall, or corner, or even a line of trees, they can accept the physical limitations due to the similarity to the physical constraints these things would cause in real life. In Dawn of the Dragon, though, players won’t know a wall is there until they are stopped suddenly in the air. It’s also impossible to get up to some high places by flying, so many times Spyro and Cynder will still have to hop from platform to platform to get to somewhere important.

The camera view bothered me more than it bothered anyone else in my family, although they found it a little annoying. In some levels, the camera can be rotated freely in any direction, and I found these to be my favorite levels. In other levels, though, the camera can only be moved right and left by a few inches. In these levels, the action is often in front of the dragons as they toward the screen instead of away. I want to see where I am going, and this bothered me tremendously. Many times in the levels with fixed camera views, it was confusing to know where to go next, as players can’t see all around the location. Who knows if those next steps or jumps will result in falling off something, or lead to another room?

This was the mildly frustrating aspect. The ultimately boring gameplay sets in when players begin to realize they are endlessly flying around without any idea of what to do next, or where to go to do it. The task list will display informative sentences like “find the hermit”.

Oh, ok. After several hours of flying around aimlessly (there isn’t a map), we looked in the forums online. We ended up discovering the whereabouts of the hermit by watching a YouTube movie of all things. We did find out something useful in the forums, though, and that is that fighting Elites is not necessary for game advancement. As these enemies are extremely difficult to overcome, this was welcomed news. This fact is not mentioned in the manual.

These Elites are so hard to beat because players won’t know until dying many times just what special attack ability from the dragons will be the most effective. It appears from our experience with this game that it’s usually just one attack from a possible list of many. There are no hints or pointers to what that ability may be. Using it and succeeding is the only method of discovery. This brings us back to the frustrating aspect, at least until we found out the whole Elite thing wasn’t mandatory.

It is obvious that the designers took a lot of time designing an attractive game with great music, and wanted players to have fun with flying. The large variety and amount of different attack abilities to use against enemies and objects is pretty cool, but it’s really not necessary to use all these different attacks against the enemies, especially as they are so bunched up together it’s often easier to just pick a basic fighting move and use that over and over again until they are all dead.

However, it’s almost as if once the main outward packaging of the design was accomplished, the rest of the inner design wasn’t given the same importance. No matter how wonderful a game looks or sounds, if actually playing it isn’t all that fun, there is no point. It’s just not a whole lot of fun playing Dawn of the Dragon, due to bad camera controls, limited flying and an all-around lack of things to do in each level besides fight groups of enemies now and then, smash up things and search around for a long time to find the one thing that will allow the game to advance. Frankly, we’re having a whole lot more fun playing MySims Kingdom right now.

The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon is a wholly average platform game, and is best for people who are really into finishing the trilogy. If not a big Spyro fan, don’t bother.

Gameplay: 6.0
A game that had potential, but just couldn’t get it together. The individual features such as the ability to fly, the varied and upgradable attack modes and the stunning music and visuals, are all worthy in their own right. However, either by problems in the execution of these abilities, or the lack of things to do besides experience these features, brings down the overall gameplay. The camera view didn’t help, either.

Graphics: 8.5
The game is beautiful and looks great on the Wii.

Sound: 9.0
I absolutely loved the music, which is orchestral and majestic.

Difficulty: Medium
The overall level of play is not too difficult, but some of the gameplay aspects are a bit hard. The lack of direction can mean many hours of wandering around with no clue as to what to do next, and players won’t know that fighting the Elites is not necessary for game advancement. This may be especially frustrating for younger players.

Concept: 6.0
There is nothing new here except flying, and that is not executed as well as it could be.

Multiplayer: 7.0
There is a co-op mode which allows for cooperative play with two players who each control a dragon. This is a good idea and helps relieve some of the frustration of the endless searching around the levels, but we really didn’t use this mode that much, except for testing purposes. I guess we’re just solitary minded people in my house, competitive rather than cooperative, or both.

Overall: 6.0
This game is just not much fun. Spyro Dawn of the Dragon could have been a great game, but the game as a whole isn’t an engaging experience on the Wii. There are worthy qualities present, but they don’t succeed in raising this game above mediocrity. It’s hard to recommend this game to anyone except a die-hard Spyro fan.