The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon attempts to revitalize the series with more ambitious aerial combat and a two-character co-op system. While the expanded scope and beautiful environments are promising, the gameplay feels unpolished. Combat becomes repetitive, flight feels imprecise, and frustrating platforming sections abound. The story lacks the charm of its predecessors, and the star-studded voice cast can't compensate for its shortcomings. Dawn of the Dragon has interesting ideas, but the execution ultimately stumbles.

It's insane how similar this is to God of War. The combat, the upgrades, the bosses with QTEs at the end... Being able to fly around freely whenever is pretty unique, I'll give it that. It doesn't even break the levels in half like you'd expect it to. The final boss is fucking terrible though – the amount of blinding effects on the screen is comical. Half the time you genuinely can't see shit. Even some of the QTE prompts get covered by purple lightning vomit somehow??

The story is some melodramatic garbage but honestly, would you really even expect it to be good? No idea how fun this is in single player but co-op is a decent enough time.

Ça doit être un de mes premiers pas dans la Dark-Fantasy que j'affectionne tant.
Également la première fois de ma vie que j'ai voulu jouer la femme dans le couple 😏

Très cool jeu en coop.
Le duo de personnages marche très bien, les compétences respectives bien sympas.

What the fuck is this? Seriously, what happened? I understand it was made by a different developer, but the decisions made here are absolutely baffling. The story is somehow more of a mess than it already was, retconning things just so it fits a few gameplay elements that were added. I don't mind the idea of aging up the characters to better relate to older kids and to allow them to fly freely, but the ending to Eternal Night was kinda interesting and it's all dropped. That would also be ok, if the new features were fun, but they aren't.

The co-op mechanic that was added is half-baked at best. I only played one level with my brother before he tapped out due to the character's overly restrictive tether. Old LEGO games had more freedom than this. The other big new gameplay feature is free flight. Spyro can now fly rather than glide, but the feature is limited to the point where it is somehow more restrictive than gliding. You can only fly straight, so your jump height is also your ceiling for flying. It's not handled very well.

Playing this on the 360 was awful. The frame rate is uncapped for some reason so the game is constantly chugging. I heard the PS2/Wii version is better, so one day I will try that version out to see if that helps.

I hate this game for many reasons, the biggest one being the wasted potential. It's so poorly mishandled that it's hard to see, but there is the base for a relatively compelling narrative here. A grand, mature adventure with edgy Elijah Wood Spyro would have been pretty cool, but what we got was a game so messy that it makes Enter the Dragonfly look like a hyper-polished AAA effort from Insomniac themselves.

Back in the day, I had this game on my Wii, and I desperately wanted to play it in coop with my older brother. Unfortunately he never wanted to, and as a result I never played the game... (I didn't want to play it in singleplayer at the time.)
I was so frustrated about it for so long, and I promised myself to play through it one day, even if it has to be in solo. And this day has finally come! Mind you, it doesn't mean my expectations for this game were really high.
Oh and btw I haven't played any other game in the PS2 trilogy. So I don't have any prior knowledge of the events that happened in A New Beginning & The Eternal Night.
The only other Spyro games I've played are the ones on the PS1.

As it's often the case with those PS2 games, the camera is janky and systematically decides to reposition itself without asking me. So it makes the overall camera movement unbearable.
It's a nightmare during combat. You'll always find yourself running in circles to try and get a better angle of the enemies.
And don't get me started on the enclosed/underground areas where the game doesn't allow you to move the camera freely, but always gives you the most horrendous camera angles.

It's a shame because the combat system is quite fun. It's a Beat'em up where you fight with 2 characters, Spyro & Cynder.
And you can switch between the two whenever you want.
Each of them has 4 different elements that you can upgrade throughout your adventure, and some enemies are only vulnerable to specific elements, which means you'll have to choose your spells adequately.
So the combat can be enjoyable, but it's spoiled by this one very annoying issue with the camera.

I was pleasantly surprised with the area themes and the environment aesthetics. Twilight Falls and Valley of Avalar have that mystical vibe that was really appealing to me. And the music always hit right.

I'm not a fan of the chara designs, whether it's Spyro, Sparx, or all the cheetahs. The only one I liked was Cynder's, she looks so stylish. She was the only cool character in the game to be honest.
The voice acting is really goofy at times, and Sparx is one of the most insufferable characters I've ever seen. All his lines are attempts to be funny, but it fails miserably everytime. I wish he was silent like in the PS1 games..

Flying was so-so. They did a decent job with the controls, but the invisible walls and the fact that you can't change your altitude made flying very clumsy. It's also very slow whenever you try to land, which was quite irritating.
There are some platforming segments that were really unintuitive aswell. Using the boulder spell mid-air to destroy those walls in Ruins of Warfang was so annoying.

The game had a lot of interesting puzzles with enjoyable game design. I liked the ones where you need to get one of the protagonists on a platform, and then pull it with the other dragon, thank to the chain that is shackling Spyro & Cynder together.
There's also that puzzle in Ruins of Warfang where you need to swing yourself with the chain to light the flames around the wheel. Pretty clever!
More over, the game expects you to experiment & figure out some mechanics by yourself. For example, you can get through iron gates using Cynder's shadow spell. It was satisfying to find this out without help!

If I had to summarize this game in one sentence: It's sprinkled with good ideas but bad execution.
The game is usually well paced, except on some occasions when the beat'em up parts drag on for too long (whether because there are too many enemies to defeat in a row, or because an enemy is too tanky).
The part on the Destroyer was a cool idea, when you need to break all the crystals one by one, and then go inside the beast to destroy its core crystals and escape before it implodes. But since flying is so inconvenient & clumsy, it makes this part a bit tedious, which is quite unfortunate.

The game ended on a bright note, with the Final Boss fight being very fun.
The story was really cliché but it didn't bother me. Like I said earlier, what bothered me were the cheap voice acting & bad chara designs. It looks like the Elder Dragons are ALWAYS smiling in any situation. It's kinda eerie.
And if I could throw Sparx in the volcano myself, I would do it without hesitation.

Anyway, flawed game but I had a good time nonetheless. I'm glad I finally played it!

----------Playtime & Completion----------

[Started on December 30th & finished on December 31st 2023]
Playtime: 13 hours
Main story complete.

This game is nowhere near perfect but it's one of my favourite if not my all-time favourite game! It's the only game I ever speedrun, with my record currently sitting at 3 and a half hours. (Nowhere near the world record but I just like to have fun)

I have so many hours on this game and 100%'d it so many times.

Is it short? Yes. Rushed? Also yes. But is it full of heart, made by a super passionate team and just so fun?? (ESPECIALLY with a friend) YES!

I will forever love this game even though I can play it with my eyes closed these days :')
Easily the best game in this trilogy.

(Oh also the DS version sucks)