Good fucking lord.

My expectations were not high, A new beginning, while mediocre, showed a lot of promise, It had a decent story and good world building while looking great and sounding fine. Combat showed some potential as well.

But my god does Eternal night throw most of the decent foundation down the drain, it became one of the most miserable, insufferable beat em ups I have ever had the displeasure of playing.

I’ll get the good out of the way first, Eternal night looks fantastic, with detailed textures that have a lot of depth, excellent looking god rays, detailed particle effects, strong gameplay animations, and expressive faces during cutscenes to make up for stiff models. If you are insistent on playing this, play the Wii version, as it has extra particle effects and a much more stable frame rate.

The art direction is still stellar, with heavy uses of purple and dark blue (sans the awful pirate section) conveying the dark atmosphere well. The high European fantasy look of the first game is maintained well.

That’s where the praise ends.

The plot in Eternal night is the epitome of a rushed mess.

Despite the game setting up from the beginning that the Dark Dragon Malefor will return, there is zero urgency from anyone to either stop it from happening or prepare for when it happens.

Spyro is more concerned with saving Cynder, until he isn’t, then he’s casually trying to find an ancient tree spirit (all the while Spyro gains the ability to slow down time that he never uses during cutscenes, more on that in a bit), then he gets kidnapped by pirates and shows no urgency in escaping, then he casually searches for a map to an island (when he could have just asked the person who told him to go there where it was) while during all this Cynder was kidnapped, but he doesn’t seem shaken up at all. And shows zero anger or even annoyance when his time is wasted by the Chronicler telling him to just stay on the island. His non concerned and aloof attitude reaches the boiling point of hilarity when he finally confronts Gaul and casually taunts him, you would think someone meeting the person responsible for nearly exterminating their race would be a bit more abrasive, but Spyro has not a care in the world and seems to be doing this simply because he was told to.

The majority of the other characters are either much blander and more plot deviceish, or in Sparx’s case, insufferable.

Cynder shows little to no signs of trauma despite the game explaining how she was enslaved by Gaul since birth, and has the same causal attitude to the world being on the brink that Spyro does. With all but one scene in the beginning when she runs away equating to “ok let’s do what we should now”.

The Dragon elders were a highlight of new beginning, and rescuing them felt a little rewarding due to their fun personalities, here, you only interact with them for around five minutes, then they fuck off for the rest of the game, apparently preparing for the invasion, yet we get zero updates or clues as to what they are doing.

Sparx is even more insufferable this time around. His constant quips and jokes even annoying Spyro on many occasions. Every two lines during cutscenes you’ll have his peanut gallery comments about how he really doesn’t want to do what ever Spyro has to, how he hates being in danger, “well that happened” tier quips when something breaks or falls over, or making certain convos about himself when he really should just shut up.

You’re introduced to a new character named the chronicler, and while he has potential to contribute to the world building, he serves as little more than a plot device, randomly pulling Spyro into tutorials to restore his powers that he lost from the last game. And later wasting Spyro’s time by pulling him to his island to wait out Malefor’s return. When Spyro says he won’t wait it out and will save Cynder and stop Gual, the chronicler shows zero resistance in helping him, despite stressing that it’s imperative that Spyro waits with him seconds earlier.

Earlier in the game he tells Spryo he should only use dragon time when he really needs to, but Spyro never thinks to ever use it in cutscenes, he could have easily used it to save Cynder from being kidnapped, or to get his map then leave with out getting caught, but this never crosses his mind.

Despite the game showing that the apes are now the main antagonists with Gaul at the helm, none of them show any personality or eagerness to wipe out the dragon race sans the initial attack on the temple. There is no indication that they are trying to find and kill the elders, nor does Spyro act angered when he learns of what they did to his kind. Gaul is also an incredibly shallow antagonist who is purely a plot device to waste time till Malefor returns, Ironically Spyro does a much better job of that, as stated above.

After Gual’s defeat, Spyro encases himself in amber and the player is supposed to feel some sort of defeatism due to being unable to prevent Malefor’s return. Of course as I mentioned several times already, Spyro’s lack of urgency makes this demand moot and unearned. And brings the games hollow, rushed, trash fire of a story to a merciful end.

Eternal night’s music isn’t very memorable, but for what it’s worth, it’s at least inoffensively bland. You’ll hear mostly dark orchestral tracks, with some heavy of use of strings to try and convey a dark atmosphere, but given you dick around on a pirate ship for half of the games length, this falls on its ass.

The voice acting isn’t very good this time, ranging from ok to awful, Elijah Wood phones in his lines heavily, sounding bored out of his skull, Billy West’s performance as Sparx is simply Fry but very annoying, Gary Oldman sounds like he’s about to doze off, and Cynders VA has no emotion beyond mild annoyance. Gaul’s va does an ok job, but the growly tone makes him hard to take seriously. Martin Jarvis is clearly phoning it in as the chronicler, but his general smooth normal speaking voice does make up for the shallow writing his character was built around for what that’s worth.

A new beginning had pretty bad combat and basic level design, but you could tell there was potential for better there. Eternal Night is not that example of better. Not even close.

Having played the Wii version for this review, I tried both controller options. The Wii mote and Nunchuk map most of the functions to regular buttons, but they also double up some with motions, like flicking the Wii mote up to launch when you can hold B or waggling for melee when you could simply press B. There was zero attempt to do anything substantial here with this control scheme, nor is there any sort unique exclusive mechanics to the Wii version that would have made the gameplay at least more admirable from an effort standpoint. You’re better off using the classic controller. Unfortunately there’s also no Gamecube controller support, despite the mapping on the CC being the same as New beginning.

The melee combat went from annoying to barely functioning this time around. Enemy attack animations are now faster and deal twice as much damage, this is to account for Spyro’s new dragon time ability, but said ability also slows Spyro down too, to an unreasonable degree. I understand doing this for balance reasons, but when enemies hit so hard and so fast as a way to cheaply pad out the difficulty, it feels as if just like the story, the combat is trying to waste the players time as much as possible.

Your breaths do have different functions this time instead of just being a short spray. Though the only one worth using is Earth breath, as it’s a gigantic flail like weapon with insanely fast start up. Using the hold and aerial version offers good crowd control as well. Relying on the other breaths is suicide as their slow startups are not worth it due to the extremely powerful attacks from mooks. Your general combat loop before and after you get earth breath will be relying on air combos, then holding down or mashing Y till a dead enemy refills your magic with dropped green gems. It’s astounding that they made this worse than it already was.

It doesn’t help that the input reading can be outright random at times, several times when I was doing a ground combo, Spyro would use his launcher instead, this happens semi frequently and is infuriating.

Enemies still drop generous amounts of gems after defeat, so the combat saves itself from being insufferable to being monotonous instead, given how often you’ll be killed from either unfair ganks or off screen projectiles.

The game incentivizes air combos even more this time, as every hit will give you a gem. This is clearly a band aid solution to the unfair amount of damage enemies deal out, since even if you refill your health by doing an air combo, you’ll still fall straight down or slightly away and get wailed on regardless.

Your heavy attacks for your breaths have slightly more variety this time, but you have the choice of a shitty fire dash with no i-frames, a stronger, broken version of your launcher, a slower version of that, and an invincible electric tornado to melt HP bars. Much like the breaths, only earth, and in some situations electric is useful. Meaning for 98% of the time, you’ll hit X to do double damage and fire out an air combo, get refilled with generous green gem drops, and repeat.

The screen nuke furies from the last game return, and they interrupt the flow even more this time due to a lame slow mo charge up and slow spin cam every damn time you use them. These are completely unskippable and they make the combat even more boring than it already is.

Eternal night does make the effort to have more to its level design than straight hallways, but the horrible platforming quashes any potential good will from the player for this effort. Spyro’s jump arc and momentum are completely random. You can never tell how high he’ll jump or how far his double jump will move him forward. Half of the time the game misreads your second B press as a hold input and Spyro will glide instead. Leading to dozens upon dozens of infuriating deaths, most of which place you back at the start of a combat encounter due to the manual save feature not working and the autosave cheaply placing you at loaded up mobs.

Sometimes you may need to use Dragon time to slow down moving platforms, but this does nothing to fix the fucked momentum and jump height, so you’ll still die constantly.

There are collectables this time around, with feathers unlocking concept art and green and orange relics increasing health and magic respectively, but the latter two are pointless to collect as mooks drop enough red and green gems to make the upgrades pointless. And actually going for them means you’ll have to suffer the awful platforming and risk possibly falling to your death and reloading at an enemy mob. So the incentive is not worth suffering the terrible mechanics.


Like the last game, each area has a hidden gem cap that is reached after you’ve gathered enough after dying and retrying enough times. This is the only way to get enough gems to upgrade your breaths to not do chip damage at the end game, as trying to play the game naturally will fuck you over. Ideally, if the player is severely under powered, the game should compensate the player enough blue gems (A reasonable amount) to get through the section, but no effort is made for that here, so if for some reason you want to play this, be prepared to intentionally die over and over again to farm blue gems so the game doesn’t become hell later.

All but two of Eternal night’s true bosses (will be explained later) are reskins of New beginning’s. You’ll simply wait for them to open them selves, activate dragon time, then wail on them with earth breath and ground combos. Waiting for an opening in a boss fight is standard game design yes, but the attacks here are poorly telegraphed and even after getting an opportunity it’s highly likely the boss will get in a cheap shot due to dragon time expiring and them having insanely fast start up. Bosses suffer from the same inflated damage values as regular enemies so you’ll be getting 2-3 shotted from cheap hits constantly.

The telegraphing on boss moves is as mentioned rather poor, since the animations aren’t detailed enough to judge what kind of attack is coming, and audio cues will often be random, making the fight much more frustrating.

Hilariously, after you defeat Gual’s second form, the game is supposed to present a prompt to you to finish him off, thing is, that prompt never shows up on screen, (It’s ZR/R2) so it’s likely the player will fail this and have to start over. It’s a hilarious and sad stamp on what a rushed, horribly designed mess the game is.


Eternal night also features some god awful gimmicky strafe boss fights against ape pilots. You’ll be spending half the fight trying to figure out how long to charge your fire ball, other wise it will hit the ground or soar over the pilots head. Add to the fact that you have to constantly interrupt your rhythm with activating dragon time to dodge incredibly fast fire balls, and you have a trash fire of a gimmick that wears out its welcome fast, and oh god does it ever do that, as the first three boss fights are strafe fights.

There is absolutely zero reason to play The Legend of Spyro the Eternal Night. It’s story is a hackneyed, overly contrived and poorly written mess with dumb characters, the music is bland, and the combat and platforming are straight up broken. It’s a shame the strong fidelity had to be tied to a game as bad as this, but much more obviously, it’s embarrassing that Spyro, an icon of the platforming genre, had been reduced to this try hard trash fire.

3/10.