As we find out through a dramatic cutscene, a temple where all unhatched dragon eggs rest falls under attack by the minions of the evil dragon, Dark Master. Ignitus, one of the guardians of the temple, quickly grabs a purple egg and sends it floating down a stream, in the hope that the baby inside will remain safe and eventually hatch while he goes into hiding. In a happy place, untouched by evil, two dragonflies discover the purple egg all alone in the wilderness and decide to look after it until it hatches. To their amazement, a purple dragon hatches and they decide to adopt the creature and name it Spyro. Eventually, Spyro learns to breathe fire after rescuing his stepbrother, Sparx, from the hands of a baboon. His dragonfly parents then tell him he is a dragon and so Spyro sets off, searching for his kind. Upon discovering Ignitus, Spyro soon learns that a black dragon named Cynder plans to release Dark Master from his prison, and so our hero’s adventure begins.
Zap!
In our recent interview with Krome Studios, Krome commented on how they would be turning A New Beginning into a more combat-based game. And they were dead right; you’ll find there are a whole host of ground and air-based melee attacks. Like most games, a standard attack isn’t too effective when facing more than one opponent, so during short training sessions, Ignitus encourages you to use combo moves. There are a nice variety of combos to perform, such as flipping your enemy in the air then knocking it back into other enemies, causing them to fall over and leave themselves open to attack. Not your style? Instead, you can opt to flip your enemies into the air and perform a series of tail whips before sending them crashing to the floor. Depending on your settings, when performing combos the camera will also go into bullet time (Matrix style) highlighting Spyro as he lays waste to enemies. While this feature does work to a certain degree, we found it had a tendency to slow down the action and quickly turned it off in the menu.
Unfortunately, [/i]A New Beginning[/i] is just a little too combat-based. Generally, all that's required is to walk through a level defeating wave after wave of enemies until you reach the boss and rescue a dragon guardian. To make matters worse, you will face similar enemies in each level with minor appearance changes. Various sized baboons, giant bat-like creatures and rock people will soon become a common sight, so much so that the game actually becomes a little repetitive. That being said,, Krome has implemented a few puzzles here and there, and even a few flying missions where Spyro dodges incoming fire from enemies and swoops through hazardous landscapes to give players a break from combat. Sadly, these are few and far between and should have been used more often to vary the gameplay.
Throughout his journey, Spyro will learn new (and by new, we mean old) fire breath attacks based on the elements of electricity, ice and earth. Each breath will have different effects on enemies, such as freezing them or stunning them. Spyro also has the ability to shoot fireballs at enemies with different results depending on the element you’re using. The fire element for example, will set groups of enemies on fire with a mighty explosion, while the earth breath will create a tornado that enemies are sucked into. Different breaths can also be upgraded by collecting blue crystals. These act like experience points, and you get to pick which breath the crystals are used on.
It tastes like burning.
As an added bonus, there are a few unlockables you can obtain after completing the game. These include an interview with Elijah Wood (Frodo from the Lord of the Rings film), who talks about doing the voice of Spyro and taking Spyro back to the beginning. We couldn’t help but feel though that they were added in to make up for the short lifespan of the game. It took us only 6 hours to get the credits rolling.
Visually, A New Beginning is mixed. While it has more than impressive FMVs, it falls short in delivering the same visuals during gameplay. Instead, most environments look average and aren’t pushing the console to its limits. In the temple’s training room, we even noticed that mushrooms wouldn’t appear on the mouldy walls until we went closer towards their position.
We’re unsure if it was because the game was about dragons, or if it was because Elijah Wood lent it the voice of Spyro, but the soundtrack is epic and feels almost like Lord of the Rings. Mind you, there wasn’t any dramatically fast-paced music during boss battles. Apart from Elijah Wood, Garry Oldman (Ignitus) and David Spade (Sparx) also lend their voices to the game. All were great choices as they suited Ignitus’ mentor image and Sparx’s joke-cracking, aloof personality. The only issue we had was the screechy baboons. Because you fight so many of them, their cries start to get annoying very quickly, so much so that we don’t want to set foot in a zoo for at least a week.
Isn't it one the cutest things you've ever seen?
The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning is by no means a perfect game as it has a few issues concerning repetitive gameplay, average-looking graphics and screechy baboon noises. However, it still manages to be a nice little action title that fans of the series, as well as newcomers, will enjoy.
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