Spyro: Season of Ice

"Bad, compared to its Playstation cousins"

I have to admit it now; I am a huge Spyro fan. And when I got this game, I was way to excited to play it. Spyro 1,2, and 3 were the best games I've played on the PlayStation ever, so oh course I was looking forward to Spyro: Season of Ice. The first thing that came to my mind was, wow, Spyro is finally portable. In fact this was game was the reason I purchased Gameboy Advanced to begin with.

But much to my surprise, Spyro: Season of Ice has not lived up to its Playstation opponents.

The Gameplay is up to the normal Spyro standards, which gave this game one of its good points. But to go along with that gameplay, the controls are very bad.

As an example of the bad controls in this game, is how hard it is to glide right in this game. In the Playstation games that came before Season of Ice, control was great. You could always get anywhere you wanted. But in the Gameboy Advance version, it is always a struggle, to do even the simplest tasks. Gliding for example is very hard in this game, which makes so of the tasks necessary to complete this game extremely hard. And that gets quite annoying after a while.

The graphics in this game are done quite well to 32-bit standards. You can see almost everything in detail, which is very good when you are going on some of the quests in this game.

Sound though can be very annoying. It is very repetitive, which is a trait to most Spyro games. But then again, in all adventure games, repetitive music is a feature one must get used to, as I have found in my over 10 years of gaming, and love for adventure games such as Super Mario brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The plotline in this game is also very unoriginal. Like other Spyro games, in involves finding things, this time you need to help Spyro find all the fairies so he can get to Dragon Shores. The plotline is almost the same as it was in Spyro 2 for Playstation except now you have to find fairies instead of orbs. How unoriginal especially since in all Spyro games you must collect things in order to move on to different levels. You would think the creators of these games would come up with an original plotline after 4 games.

There is some replay value in this game, if you even beat it. I would have to say when I bought this game; I thought this was going to be another easy Spyro game that would take me no time at all to beat. Boy was I wrong. This is in my opinion the hardest Spyro game to date. I would credit its difficulty to the faulty controls though. Where as it took me about a week to defeat the 3 previous Spyro games, it honestly took me about 3 weeks to complete this games because some of the simple controls such as gliding took a very long time to complete. But if you ever do complete this game, it has excellent replay value due to the many levels and hard tasks you must complete.

Now whether to buy or rent this game is completely up to you. I personally would highly recommend that if you aren’t a very big Spyro fan, or you do not enjoy adventure/platform games, DO NOT buy this game. This game can be very frustrating after a while, especially if you have no patience. Believe me, I cannot stress this enough it is not like other Spyro games. It is far harder.

***Pros to Spyro: Season of Ice***
-Nice Replay value if you can beat it
-The Graphics are done well for GameBoy Advance
-It’s on a portable platform

***Cons to Spyro: Season of Ice***
-The Game play is not up to par
-The controls are faulty
-The sound is repetitive and lacks originality
-The plotline is not original

The Bottom Line is that if you enjoy Spyro games you will love this game especially since it is on a portable platform. But if you are not a fan of Adventure games, this isn’t the game for you.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/25/02, Updated 02/25/02