It’s a collectathon, yes, and MacGuffins are this time split between dragon eggs and Light Gems, as well as destroying Dark Gems to allow progress. There are still sections where you hand off to Spyro’s friends (Byrd plays quite like the old speedways, Hunter and Blink the mole have-yawn-3D action platformer bits, and Sparx has boring on-rail shooter bits, not to mention turret shooting and hamster ball segments), and again they universally made me glad to return to Spyro. The writing in general has regular moments of meta-humour, and ranges between chuckleworthy and trying too hard.īut what about playing the game? Spyro still charges, flies, and breathes elements (this time it’s fire, electricity, water, and ice I used electric 90% of the time), but each has had its function tweaked. Since Moneybags’ shop pads are everywhere his clips become annoyingly overplayed, but the only really insulting one was Hunter, who has gone from goofy to an unwelcome ‘tude. All former voice actors have been booted in fact, not that it’s a huge deal to me. Speaking of Moneybags, he has an outrageous, almost Watto-from-Phantom-Menace-style voice. SL’s shop is even a direct evolution of Moneybags’ travelling, teleporting bazaar here.

This game also fundamentally changes the gem system from a collectible to an economy, which I suppose gave permission for the continuous gem drops and shop systems of the aforementioned games. For example, a lot of redesigns for characters and objects that I observed in Fusion and Shadow Legacy originated here, and many of AHT’s NPCs carry over to SL. It’s still good but it marks the beginning of the era where the series began drifting away from its roots.Ĭonsidering I’ve played a lot of the series out of order, I found A Hero’s Tail illuminating for the context of later games.

A lot of the formula remains but there are tweaks that seem small but change the whole experience. Eurocom saw fit to shake things up slightly with their take on Spyro.

Spyro hero's tail