1997 was hyped up as "The Year of Spawn" by Image Entertainment. It marked his first animated series on HBO, his first live action movie from New Line Cinema and his first foray into 3D gaming on the PlayStation. While the HBO series was met with universal acclaim and awards and the movie has since found a growing cult following, Spawn: The Eternal remains the unloved black sheep of the trio. Is it as bad as its reputation has made it out to be?

Well, right off the bat, I can say that the graphics definitely get a bad wrap. By original PlayStation standards, I think they do a great job capturing the mix of Gothic Fantasy and Urban Horror that the comics were so grounded in, and if you're a big fan of the 90s Spawn comics like I am, you might find the visuals here really cool. Hell looks properly disgusting and I love how the gateway into Earth is through a subway track. I wonder if Little Nicky stole that concept from this game. As you progress through the game, there's also a solid variety of environments to engage in that Spawn comic fans should be familiar with. You have the inner cities that Spawn calls home, a Medieval kingdom, a Prehistoric wasteland and, finally, Hell itself.

The game is mostly a platformer, but will actually switch to a Tekken style fighter any time combat is engaged. While the combat is actually pretty satisfying, with great sound design, brutal finishers and a surprising amount of strategy involved to take down enemies, the platforming is where the game severely suffers. Spawn himself relies on tank controls to move, which I don't necessarily mind, since Spawn himself has always been more of a tanky character, but jumping never seems to go as far as you want too. Even when you carefully plan out your jumps, there are a lot of poorly designed pitfalls in the game that you'll only get through on dumb luck. While fun, the levels are very repetitive. You collect orbs, fight a couple henchmen, collect more orbs and move onto a boss.

There also isn't much of a story, beyond awkward and jarring cutscenes with painfully distorted audio (which is very odd, given how solid the sound design in the actual game is), which is a major disappointment. I suppose it's better to have minimal story than a bad one, as we got with Spawn: Armageddon, but with the repetitive design of the levels, there's little reason to push through unless you're really a hardcore Spawn fan, other than the decent variety of world designs and surprisingly satisfying variety of boss fights.

Contrary to what a lot of people may claim, Spawn: The Eternal isn't the worst PlayStation game. It's not even the worst Spawn game. And if you're a huge fan of the Spawn comics with a soft spot for early polyganal PlayStation games, like I am, you might find the game pretty cool. It's got a solid combat system, some eerie sound design and an authentic visual aesthetic taken straight from the comics and properly translated within the limitations of the PlayStation's graphics. I won't die on a hill defending this game like I will the movie, but I still have a lot of fun with it despite its flaws.

This was my first ps1 game. At the time i loved it, and despite my rating, i still sort of do. It blew me away at the time as it was the first game i ever played that featured a full 3D character that you guided through 3D environments, it also had a fighting game element which played to my Tekken love.

However. This game is easily one of the worst out there. It looks very bad, features many reused enemy models, spawn doesn't look right, environments are difficult to discern and show many visual bugs.
The gameplay is a mix of tomb-raider platforming and tekken-ish combat, both are awful. Spawn handles like a car, you have to sort of steer and brake as he moves. The combat is broken, despite simple special move inputs, you find yourself struggling to use them.
It features a jumping section in one of the medieval areas that is so frustrating that i haven't seen footage online of anyone completing it, they all cheat. It took my about 30 minutes to do that jump.
The story is non existent.
The music is pretty good.