Spyro: Season of Ice

"It Looks and Sounds like the Playstation Versions, but the Rest of the Game is Quite Boring"

Spyro the Dragon, as many gamers know, was an awesome character with an equally impressive game that busted out in the mid to early days of the original Playstation. Combining a solid 3D engine and great gameplay, this title when on to sell millions. Needless to say, the Spyro series expanded and received two sequels on the Playstation, Ripto’s Rage and Year of the Dragon respectively. Both were solid games themselves. Unfortunately, on the Game Boy Advance Spyro has not had the same success…

Fast forward to 2001. The Game Boy Advance is in its fledgling year and any big name franchise would surely be a hit. So, Universal decided to release a version of the popular series onto the GBA and try to mimic the Playstation original as closely as possible. I’d say they succeeded it surely sounds like Spyro, and it looks like it sort of besides the use of 2D instead of 3D. However, what was missing was the solid gameplay and well fun. This game ended up being pretty monotonous and not exactly fun. This average platformer is not deserving of the Spyro name.

What makes it so boring? I’d say the lack of a solid storyline first. It’s basically a continuation of the storyline from Year of the Dragon. Grendor the Wizard captured all the fairies, again. However the wizard got two heads from wrongfully enchanting a spell, which causes him to get constant headaches. Upon casting the spell, though, he got all of the fairies in the fairy world frozen, hence the subtitle Season of Ice. Pretty strange for sure, and as you can tell it’s quite trite and boring.

Gameplay-wise, the game is just like all the other Spyro games, except the collectables are all fairies and gems. Yep, nothing else (well there are things in every level that you can flame up, but you do that to gain a fairy…). The lack of interesting things to collect is not it. The levels are just plain crappy. You get your lava world, market world, bug world, beach world and just about every other “world” possible. In the other Spyro games on the Playstation, the great levels you could visit was one its strongest points.

The platforming itself stays true to the other games, with the exception of any big flights. You remember how many times you could fly across a level in the other Spyro games? Well I could not find a single place in the game where you could do that. All the times that you fly are to close platforms or across a barrier like lava or water.

Fortunately, there are a few diversions to the typical gameplay that are quite fun. The levels that feature Sparx the Dragonfly are especially fun. It’s in a top down perspective and Sparx can fly around and shoot. Yep, it’s basically like a top down shooter in those levels, which are quite fun. It was a great idea from the developers to add this and they should have made the main gameplay equally entertaining. The other small diversion are the flight levels, which are nothing like the ones featured in the other games, but they are in a 3D perspective and offer nice shooting action a la Star Fox.

The control is equally pedestrian. You try to utilize all of the commands and moves that Spyro uses in the console iterations, but because of the isometric 2D perspective and the need of a D-Pad, they get a little wonky sometimes. To charge, for instance, you use the right shoulder button which is fine in my opinion. However, once you get going it’s hard to control. If you rotate your thumb around the pad to move, your character doesn’t exactly go where you’d expect them to. He’ll end up circling around in circles and turning at strange oblique angles. This is extremely infuriating when chasing those annoying laughing guys that hold fairies. Crashing into walls will be commonplace which is not exactly a good thing to be happening.

For replaying value, well it’s has just about none. You’ll have hard time wanting to finish the game, let alone play it again.

One thing I actually like about the game is the graphical quality. They are two dimensional, but are definitely akin to the three dimensional Spyro games. The locales are bright and shiny, but unfortunately can get cluttered especially in the one bee stage. Spyro, your helper characters, and the enemies themselves are all polygons and incredibly animated. There are some very high quality cut-scenes in the game featuring 3D characters as well. I liked the graphics and I think the developers did a great job on them.

For sound, the music sounds just like the music in Spyro 2, which is a good thing. While not brimming with great beats they get the job done. I don’t like how all the songs sound similar, though, as they could have added more variety to the soundtrack. For the sound effects, they are also the same as the ones for the Playstation iterations. The breaking of bottles and the sound of fire and just about everything else sound great. Great sound here.

Overall, I can’t say I particularly enjoyed Season of Ice. If you’re a great fan of the series it may be fun to play on the go, but if you aren’t a terribly big fan than I suggest you skip this one. I hear its other Game Boy sequel is much improved, so you might want to try that one out.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/23/03