The fact that there are two dragons to control open up potentially cool design ideas, but the differences between them aren't as wildly varying as you'd expect them to be. The game has all the elements of a successful and challenging action experience, but there are too many little issues dragging the fun down. Again, these portions look pretty slick, but then you get into the boss battles and the flaws start bubbling to the surface: attacks are completely unfair when they nail you even if you're obviously a good distance away from being hit.
To give the game a bit more spice, the developers add some very Star Fox-like flight challenges, putting players on a forced rail system through 3D environments as the player moves with the D-pad and shoots with the stylus. Mostly platforming with a little flying in between. Luckily this is only an occasional instance, but it happens more often the deeper you get into the adventure. The engine used in the DS game looks solid and offers a decent framerate, but that flow tanks a bit when the screen gets cluttered with more than two enemies at any given time. Instead of sprite-based imagery, Tantalus worked 3D visuals for the character and environments, and, at first look, the game appears rather impressive. So for Dawn of the Dragon, it seems to borrow a bit of what Amaze did in the impressive Game Boy Advance version of The Eternal Night: lots of scrolling platform jumping with a huge focus on brawler, combo-heavy combat. But after last year's mess of a development attempting the 3D platformer on the DS, it's not surprising that the new team's trying something a little more friendly to the system capabilities. For The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, Spyro shares the spotlight with Cynder in a character-swapping side-scrolling platformer that sort of strays from the classic 3D platformer of expected Spyro adventures.
Good thing, too, because that "excessively cute but bad-ass" persona was starting to get a little overused. It looks like Spyro's bits have finally dropped – the youngling purple dragon is finally filling out into a "mature" dragon.
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