Spyro Reignited Trilogy (Nintendo Switch) Review

There are many people in the world now who are unable to remember the late 1990s when the console wars were heated between large manufacturers and their individual leaders were platforming mascots— each of which had exclusivity to one platform. Sony was on the backfoot in capturing the younger audience, after-all the Nintendo 64 had Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie, and SEGA were on the verge of releasing a super powered 128 bit future cult classic in Sonic Adventure. Meanwhile, Sony had Spyro, a purple dragon with a cheeky attitude. Spyro, like many 3D platformers of its time, relied on large sandbox themed areas that had several items to collect and an overarching objective. In no essence was Spyro breaking any new ground for 3D platformers, but what it did do was bring a new child friendly franchise to the PlayStation. Fast forward 20 years and Spyro has had a somewhat downward spiral, fading away almost into obscurity. Luckily, a recent resurgence for 3D platformers and 1990's nostalgia has seen Toys For Bob resurrect, or reignite, a franchise that definitely deserves a lot more praise than it gets.

In a nutshell, not much has changed since the Xbox One and PS4 release of Spyro Reignited Trilogy from 2018. The collection includes the original Spyro The Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage and Spyro: Year of the Dragon, of which there is very little difference to tell between the three titles other than some subtle game play tweaks throughout the progression of the latter games. In the original Spyro, the main antagonist, Gnasty Gnorc, has turned the realm's dragons into statues. Albeit provoked, Spyro nonetheless sets on his adventure to free dragons and collect a boatload of gems.

Nothing really strays far from view and is rarely hard to get to, unlike other 3D platformers of its day where treasures, secrets, and loot were hidden away. Spyro has the ability to charge at enemies and breathe fire on them, some enemies are impervious to one of these attacks so it is best to use the other, but that is hardly rocket science. Each hub world feels like an extension of the other and doesn't feel too dissimilar from the previous one. Despite the face-lift, the first Spyro feels quite repetitive with platforming sections and combat that are far too simplistic and easy to master in 2019.

On the flip side, it could be argued that Spyro is the ideal entry point for younger gamers looking to tackle 3D platformers as Spyro's pace is slower, progression is straightforward, and the difficulty is easy. Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage takes the training wheels off ever so slightly, not in terms of difficulty, but by adding more to the mix including additional collectables and even more gems which in turn are traded to access new areas or used to upgrade Spyro's arsenal of moves including swimming, something that Spyro was evidently allergic to in the original title.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon predictably follows the same premise of collecting and trashing enemies to progress but somewhat makes the largest change to the gameplay by introducing new playable characters into the fray. Comparable to the Sonic Adventure series, Spyro introduces new playable characters into the mix for particular levels, and while these characters are not offensive it doesn't really add anything desirable to the mix, if anything it leaves the player wanting to just resume control of Spyro.

Considering the hardware it was on, Spyro was a marvellous achievement, at least graphically on the PS1. They are quite rough to look today, but fortunately Toys For Bob have done an excellent job of sprucing up the visuals for the current generation of consoles, turning those murky green and greyish shades into a full palette of vibrant colours. The NPCs , which looked fairly generic before, now have a sense of individuality and identity. All three games share the same visual identity, just like the originals did back on the PlayStation and if anything because of the brevity of each title it could be looked at as three episodes of the same adventure.

The elephant in the room is the fact that a mandatory download size of up to 10gb is necessary to play. The digital copy stands at 15gb, so be sure to free up space on the system memory if this is the preferred choice of play. There is no escaping some lengthy load times, something which also plagued the PS4 and Xbox One versions, especially in the first Spyro where going from one hub world to the next could take over 30 seconds to load. This is somewhat understandable on the original PlayStation or even with larger open world adventures on the Nintendo Switch such as The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, but the sandbox environments in Spyro are not as wide sprawling or complex.