Damn, this was some trippy shit. People have made comparisons to Twin Peaks or The X-Files (I can only vouch for the latter currently). Despite this, I was still very engrossed in the story. Jesse is one of my favorite female protagonists in recent years. All the abilities you learn really add to the exploration and combat. I've always been a sucker for psychokinesis, and getting to pick up and destroy everything around you is so satisfying. I couldn't help thinking of Luigi's Mansion 3 in a way (though, it's arguably more impressive there since the Switch is less powerful). It's also extremely gorgeous to look at. It makes me hate that Sony removed Facebook functionality. I have a lot of pictures saved.

As you can tell by the rating, it's not perfect. The difficulty can be very cheap at times. Certain enemies can take out huge chunks of your health and you'll have little time to recover. You could just want to explore, then a barrage of them will spawn in a room. One boss fight was so annoying, I ended up turning on immortality. The final moments feel pretty anti-climactic compared to what came before, but it leave things open-ended for a possible sequel (plus, I still got the DLC to play). There are notable framerate issues either from all the action onscreen or simply un-pausing the game. I figured it was just on consoles, but even the PC version does it. I didn't think that was possible.

And my biggest gripe, the map sucks ASS!!! Sure, it will highlight your next location, but it doesn't take into account whether there's a locked door or some kind of debris in the way. I had to look up walkthroughs on occasion because of it. Metroid got it right in 1994, so what's the excuse here? Regardless, I really enjoyed this one. I look forward to more from Remedy. Praying that the next game is Alan Wake 2.

As entertaining as its gameplay loop of digging, looting and upgrading can be, especially since the experience gradually evolves with a nice variety of power-ups and increasingly complex threats, it's not enough to salvage Steamworld Dig from a general sense of monotony due to a lack of diversity within its core structure. Furthermore, the setting's intriguing narrative potential is squandered by an inconsequential plot devoid of anything substantial, becoming nothing more than a frame with a charming artstyle.

Bullet point thoughts:

- Very nearly great. but ultimately it's a step down from Aria in terms of level-design and story, brought down even further by some annoying mechanics.

- The touch-screen use is an unfortunate relic of the early DS era, and while I'm aware fan-made mods can remove this, until an official version is released without this feature it will have to factor into my assessment.

-The Souls system is still very enjoyable, however requiring some randomly dropped Souls at certain points in the game still feels like the wrong move.

- The requirements for the true ending are far more reasonable this time. I figured it out by myself for the first time since SotN.

- Music and visuals are lovely as always.

- Weapon animations are a big improvement over Aria, which had rather bad ones for large swords.

- Some boss designs are inspired.

- Overall Dawn of Sorrow is a very strong explorative Castlevania title, albeit one that is less strong than its predecessor. I'm very much looking forward to continuing with the DS games now I have a laptop capable of DS emulation.

Fifth time's the stumble.

For the first time since Symphony of the Night's release, the newest Castlevania entry could not just approximate, but surpass the technical standards set by the PlayStation game back in 1997. Even from the opening set of rooms, low-poly 3D elements and vivid parallax backgrounds establish the setting and sense of adventure with a degree of fidelity that the GBA titles just were not able to display. The areas that compose Dracula's titular castle are both striking and visually distinct, and it cannot be overemphasized how the ever-present map helps making sense making sense of the castle as a building. The sense of exploring a logically planned space is at the strongest it has ever been, and even somewhat sloppy background work in a specific mid-to-late level is not enough to break this illusion.

Beyond presentation, however, the main issues arise from a nasty bug present in the shipped version of the game, and how it affects the Tactical Soul System. Increasing Soma's luck stat does not make a meaningful difference in whether enemies drop their powers for him to use. Couple that with souls having drop rates as low as 2%, and chances are most players will never see the vast majority of abilities in the game unless they dedicate half their playtime to grinding. Among these optional abilities, attacks and mobility upgrades far more interesting and versatile than those obtainable through normal progression can be found. Annoyingly, there is a roadblock in one area that can only be removed by gathering three specific souls with drop rates of 24%, 16%, and 8%, so grinding is somewhat mandatory if luck is not on one's side.

While the impact of this programming error might seem fairly minimal for non-completionists, it also limits a player's kit on a regular playthrough severely. Having access to fewer souls means having access to fewer builds and strategies, and the game becomes more monotonous than its immediate predecessor as a result. Fewer souls also means fewer and weaker weapons, since specific souls need to be infused into specific weapons to transmute them into more powerful ones. In cases in which a weapon can be infused with more than one soul, upgrade paths turn into upgrade trees, which only adds to the tedium for those who like to explore different combat options. Rewarding players with souls more liberally would not only diversify builds, but would also allow players to engage with the elemental weakness system by crafting specific weapons to use against specific foes.

The tension in the game's systems caused by this bug builds up steadily until the final third of the game, in which the snowball effect can be felt in the final boss encounters. Due to the limited combat options, lateral thinking is disincentivized in favor of attack pattern recognition, oddly more in line with traditional Classicvania fights of old. Chances are this is near the top of the Igavanias in terms of difficulty, which is not necessarily something to lament, but it is a shame that it happened unintentionally and at the cost of other systems.

A prettier, more rigid version of what came before, in dire need of some oil for it to run smoothly.

From a financial standpoint, reboots make perfect sense when your IP keeps giving diminishing returns. Spyro was the epitome of this in the 2000s, plagued by a sizable chunk of mediocre to terrible games. Enter The Legend of Spyro: A new beginning, A darker, more serious take on the franchise with obvious Lord of the Rings and Avatar the last airbender influences. While ambitious, it falls short where it matters.


Before playing this, I read up on some interviews with developers from Krome Studios about any potential ideas they had to cut and compromises they had to make. One of them mentioned that they wanted gameplay to be more inline with the classic games. With some metroid/zelda esque exploration thrown in, and I can only assume here, better combat.

When you play A new beginning you find out quickly none of those gameplay mechanics were implemented. Instead you get a padded, linear beat em up that is an absolute bore to play.

Combat in this game mostly consists of one constant loop of punch x3, launcher, air combo, horn dive. Spyro only has one ground and aerial combo that you will be using nonstop. Other issues plague this however, your attack animation speed is generally just a little bit slower than the mooks you will be mowing down, and since you almost always fight mobs, you will constantly have your combos interrupted. You would think this would make the game unfairly difficult, but that couldn’t be more false. Enemies will always drop red health gems after death, making any damage you take inconsequential.

For what ever reason, the devs decided to include a slow motion effect when performing an air combo. This gets old fast so I recommend turning it off in the pause menu. Why this was included is bizarre, as it constantly disrupts combat flow when it’s on. I can only assume it was included to look cool to the target audience of young kids, but I can’t imagine anyone over the age of eight finding this cool after doing it once.

Dying to enemy mobs also holds zero consequence, as the game will simply plop you right back where you left off with your health and magic fully restored.

If there was punishment for you dying, the games dodge mechanics certainly would not help you in preventing it. You lock on to enemies with the left trigger, but your dodge covers such little ground it is completely worthless. Add to the fact that the lock on only hyper focuses on one enemy when you almost always fight mobs, and you wonder why such a useless mechanic was included.

Launching into an air combo is almost always unsafe because you will have at least 3 enemies waiting under you to smack you when you land. You can try and horn dive to a safe spot, but sometimes you’ll auto lock onto the nearest enemy instead, leaving you open for a hit regardless.

Given this is a Spyro game, you have access to fire breath, as well as electric, ice and earth breaths. Each breath also has their version of a grenade (sans ice) you can fire with the Y button.


Fire’s breath is only useful for interrupting enemy attacks and for partial crowd control because sometimes they still get super armour at random and hit you through it. It’d make more sense if certain enemies could super armour through it, as in the classic games armour enemies were immune to fire breath, but here it just feels useless.

Fire Grenades are a different story, they have a massive AOE and are the absolute best tool to kill bosses with. You will always be given green energy gems after killing enemies that restore your magic, so there is zero risk in spamming grenades if you wish. Further driving home how lazily designed the combat is.

Lighting breath is completely broken, by simply standing still and holding X near cliffs or 20 foot ledges, you can simply throw enemies off for an instant kill. You gain the same amount of gems regardless of how you kill an enemy, so there is zero incentive to play well. Simply spam your most powerful tools so you can refill on guaranteed green gems that will always drop.

Electric grenades will launch an enemy into the air for a guaranteed air combo, when upgraded it can even do continuous damage, so if you don’t want to bother with getting hit a little more than usual, simply press Y and begin the boring air combo loop earlier.


Ice breath is borderline useless, it takes far to long to freeze one enemy and you’ll always get hit before you can fully freeze one when fighting more than one mook, if you do manage to freeze an enemy, You can smash them for an instakill, but the method to achieve that is way more trouble than it is worth.

Ice is the only element with no grenade, instead you have darts, Spyro fires these like an assault rifle. It functions the exact same as the ice breath, with the same extremely slow method of freezing for an instakill, only this one drains your magic faster, making it even more useless.

Earth breath is as broken as Lightning breath is, but in a different way. When fully upgraded. It functions like a fully automatic shotgun. With an extremely high rate of fire and damage equivalent of a fire grenade, you’ll breeze through the final two levels with minimal issue, as if this game wasn’t brain dead easy enough.

Earth grenades are a more accurate, less powerful version of lightning grenades. Though unlike lightning grenades, they can stunlock a (in this case final, since you get them so late in the game) boss. And since you can refill your energy from crystals in that first phase, it makes said final boss even more of a joke than she already is.

Each breath has a Fury attack that is a basic screen nuke, all furies function the exact same and you never have to worry about using them sparingly as the game will always give you purple gems to replenish your meter, killing around ten enemies fills it and each encounter has you fighting at minimum eight mooks each. Fully upgrading an elements breath and grenade makes your furies even stronger, if you want another OP feather in this games broken cap.

On paper, the melee combat and breaths could be fun, with the added benefit of being able to switch the latter on the fly with the dpad, the combo potential could be immense, given the right amount of time and effort. There is none of that care here, the player is simply gift wrapped OP tools to deal with the nonstop mobs they’ll be facing for hours on end. You’ll be spamming Y and mashing B with none of that resulting in one iota of satisfaction.


While the bosses in classic Spyro were never mind blowing from a gameplay perspective, they served their purpose and were polished and fun fights. This is not the case in A new beginning, every single boss, including the final one, can be killed by simply spamming fire grenades. You can imagine just how riveting this high octane gameplay must be, causally running up to a boss and mashing Y nonstop, your screen glowing bright orange and your frame rate tanking to the high teens. Each boss has multiple stages, but this is moot, each of them have crystals clusters strewn about that you can smash for red, green, purple, and blue gems. Making these bosses simply pathetic from a gameplay standpoint. This is hammered in even more when you realize that even if you die, you keep all of the blue and purple gems you collected, and your health and magic are refilled, while the game reloads you to the beginning of the bosses current phase. It’s again, absolutely pathetic that a player can simply keep dying to stock up on blue gems to upgrade themselves, or purple gems for a free screen nuke. Some bosses, like ice king, throw projectiles that break open to gift the player even more gems. It’s absolutely disgusting that this is what passed for boss design.


When it comes to level design, A new beginning is also pathetic in that regard. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to make a linear game, the bare minimum is on display here. 99% of the game is running down hallways, fighting mobs, then repeating, you’ll have the occasional moment of pulling a lever, hitting a button to raise a platform, or gliding ten feet, but wailing on B and Y in monster closets will be the norm. Spyro’s iconic charge is only used twice the entire game, and the only areas where you’ll actually have room to use the mechanic are long narrow bridges in Tall Mountain. Since the hallways are so narrow it makes using it pointless.


After you complete an area and rescue a Dragon Elder, you’ll be railroaded into a tutorial on your new breath you found in the previous level, it’s the exact same tutorial tasks each time, but to the games credit, they do vary up how you do each task by teaching you the breaths properties. It makes sense from a story perspective, so I didn’t mind them, they serve their purpose, though some more variety in lessons would be welcome. You also don’t unlock your breaths grenades until you do the training sessions, so I appreciate that at least one area of the game had some attempt at balance.

You would think that with nonstop enemy mobs, blue gems for upgrades would be plentiful. The answer to this is both yes and no. If you play the game naturally, you won’t have enough gems to upgrade even three of your breaths to the fullest, but, there is a hidden cap in each level the player can hit, provided they know where to farm. Remember when I said bosses had respawning crystal clusters? A player can exploit this for several minutes to an hour by simply breaking all of them then dying, reloading the crystal clusters until they reach the blue gem cap. The ice fortress is the only exception to this, as you’ll instead have to exploit a tower that keeps sending skeletons at you until you choose to destroy it. Unless the player uses this exploit, they will not be able to max out their breaths, making the game artificially harder if played naturally.

A new beginning is seriously lacking in enemy variety. 85% of the enemies you face will be small, medium and large apes. Reskinned for each level. Even when you fight other foes, the strategy never changes, either ground combo then launch and wail in the air, or abuse your OP lightning or earth breaths.
A new beginning does feature some on rails flight sections, and they aren’t very good, simply holding the right trigger and avoiding over telegraphed cannon fire is enough, killing enemies is pointless during these segments, as you get no blue gems. There is also a train chase setpiece late game, but again, all you do is hold something, in this case forward on the stick, and mash Y when needed. The sections are a nice idea, but end up as pointless fluff.

Visually, A new beginning looks incredible. Textures pop with incredible depth, god rays pepper environments with high detail in shifting light shafts, particle effects like Sparx’s sparks, volcanic sparks, snow and pollen all fall constantly during gameplay and add great atmosphere to the stunning fidelity. There are some corners cut during cutscenes, characters animate with stiff, recycled limb animations, but for a game that looks this good, it’s a fine compromise, this is made up for with some excellent eye and mouth movements, showing dozens of different expressions.

Animations during gameplay look great as well, spyro has a different color trail depending on which breath you have selected, the game also helps these attack animations feel very weighty and powerful with some generous hit stun.

The overall artstyle of the game captures the European fairly tale aesthetic quite well, with some aspects of Tibetan and Scandinavian imagery as well. The starting forest has comforting feeling of safety and isolation with its towering mushrooms, the snow fortress gives the vibe of a war torn tragedy haunted by dead soldiers, Tall mountain has a great spiritual aesthetic etc.

As for the character designs, everyone but Spyro and Sparx look great. The dragon elders are faithful in appearance to the ones from the classic series, with some cool elemental themed spikes on their tails, like a flame tipped spike for Ignitus, or a rocky flail for Terrador. The ape army all fit within the story book style the game is going for and each areas unique enemies fit the theme, like rock golems in tall mountain. Bosses are all massive and convey a good sense of scale.

As I just said, Spyro and Sparx do not look great artistically, Spyro is incredibly ugly. While his over all look is mostly faithful to his classic appearance, it all goes downhill when you see his face. Spyro’s face was meant to resemble an alligator, but instead he ends up looking like a meth addict. He has a disturbingly human shaped skull dome, gigantic bulbous eyes and a creepy mouth that extends all the way back. Sparx meanwhile looks both like some furry’s OC and bootleg art you would see on action replay box art at the same time. His massive forehead, long gangly arms, and disturbingly human teeth look completely out of place.

Par for the course for 6th gen multiplats, the Xbox version offers the best performance and visuals, the PS2 version suffers from more frequent frame drops and is missing some particle effects and god rays, and the GC version, while visually on par with the Xbox version, has more frequent frame drops to the low 20s. The Xbox version only has frame drops during grenade spamming during boss fights, as mentioned a few paragraphs ago.


The music in A new beginning is more immersive than memorable, but I enjoyed every track featured. Krome nailed the lord of the rings vibe they were aiming for, with many songs featuring chanting and heavy use of strings. You’ll be in for a soothing, calming vibe for most of the run time and some epic orchestral pieces during boss fights.
The quality of the voice acting is quite high. High profile hollywood talent was brought in for the voice work, with Elijah Wood giving a great performance as Spyro, accurately portraying a brave hero on a journey bigger than himself. Gary Oldman is a highlight as Ignitus, playing the role of a grizzled veteran well. David Spade does a fine job as Sparx, even though most of the jokes and humour he was given is painfully unfunny at times, he did the best with what he had.


A new beginning’s plot has obvious lord of the rings and avatar the last airbender influences, with spyro being both a chosen one having to master 4 elements and having to wage war against a god like malevolent being that has pushed the once dominant peaceful race back to four islands. It’s the sole reason one would tolerate the terrible gameplay in the first place.

It was clever of the writers to convey that the apes pushed the last 4 dragon elders back to the four islands to hide the lack of towns or settlements. Each level shows that the apes are either in the process of creating a settlement, or using it as a work site. It makes the player think that if this small part of the world has been found and is just beginning the process of colonization after the dragon genocide, that the rest of the world must be even worse.

Cynder establishes herself as a threat early and your objective in each level to rescue a dragon elder sells this even further. She’s always one step ahead of you and lets each elder live after draining enough of their magic, giving you a feeling of helplessness as you keep scoring hollow victories. The ending also follows this pattern, as even after Spyro accomplishes what he has to, it’s to little to late.

Everyone in a new beginning is enjoyable to bland, with the exception Sparx. Sparx constantly ruins almost every scene he is in with lame jokes, riffing on what ever is happening with annoying sarcastic comments, and generally unfunny wink wink nudge nudge tv writer tier humour. Every time Sparx opened his mouth I wanted to slap him with a fly swatter.

Some of classic Spyro’s personality does shine through from time to time, such as when a hostage he saves is rude to him and he snaps back with “Sorry, you were clearly going to spring into action”. Otherwise he’s an enjoyable new interpretation of the character, being an enjoyable heroic adventurer who stands up to danger. The dragon elders are all memorable too, with them all having one dominant personality trait to make them feel distinct, Ignitus is calm and observant, Volteer is verbose, Cyrill is pretentious etc.

If you can tolerate sparx, you’ll get something out of the story here, the world building is excellent and the story proper is well paced and structured.

A new beginning would have been far better suited as a cartoon than a game, it has incredible atmosphere, solid world building and plot, enjoyable characters sans Sparx, high fidelity, stunning art direction, great voice work, and immersive music. But video games are an interactive medium, and the gameplay here has bare minimum level design, bland boring combat, terrible boss fights, and a poorly balanced upgrade system that demands exploiting it.

You’d be better off watching an LP if you’re really curious, no amount of other talents on display here make this even remotely worth playing.

5/10.