This is one of those uniquely bad games where I both hate it but also feel like more people should experience it. It's just such a weird fit for this franchise that also kinda flies under the radar when people talk Spyro. I mean, look at the box art. Look at Spyro's superhero pose and the muted painterly style combined with his 90's era platformer hero design. The whole game's like that.
Shadow Legacy tries so hard to be a love letter to all the previous Spyro games with constant reminders to earlier games while also throwing the charm and story tone of the previous games away in favor of more muted color palettes and a darker story with spiky tentacles and void monsters.
In some ways, you can call this game the bridge between the Classic Spyro era and The Legend of Spyro era, which is why the game feels like an awkward mishmash of two different flavors that just don't taste great together. All of your loved ones are pulled into an alternate shadow dimension and drained of their life force in this game where you also help an armadillo dressed as a cowboy find true love, which would sound interesting if done right but instead both of these scenarios have the most boring by-the-numbers writing and lack any charm that never revels in any of the absurdity. Red, the main bad guy from Spyro: A Hero's Tail, gets a redemption arc in this game and not a single Spyro fan cares because the script is as muddy and dull as these muted purples I'm constantly being bombarded with as I play this game.
As for the gameplay, it's bad. You need to draw a triangle on the touch screen to open the map. The X button is used for opening doors, activating portals, and attacking enemies, which will backfire on you multiple times. Combat is mindless. The perspective issues of the GBA games are even worse here.
And yet...I feel like this game needs to be seen by more people. This is crap but every Spyro fan needs to see the awkward attempts at new Spyro lore like "Hunter's father is losing his eyesight from The Darkness" and "Moneybags has a wife and four sons, and his four sons might be a reference to DuckTales". Bad game, gets a higher score than it deserves for being this bizarre mix of dull and fascinating.
Shadow Legacy tries so hard to be a love letter to all the previous Spyro games with constant reminders to earlier games while also throwing the charm and story tone of the previous games away in favor of more muted color palettes and a darker story with spiky tentacles and void monsters.
In some ways, you can call this game the bridge between the Classic Spyro era and The Legend of Spyro era, which is why the game feels like an awkward mishmash of two different flavors that just don't taste great together. All of your loved ones are pulled into an alternate shadow dimension and drained of their life force in this game where you also help an armadillo dressed as a cowboy find true love, which would sound interesting if done right but instead both of these scenarios have the most boring by-the-numbers writing and lack any charm that never revels in any of the absurdity. Red, the main bad guy from Spyro: A Hero's Tail, gets a redemption arc in this game and not a single Spyro fan cares because the script is as muddy and dull as these muted purples I'm constantly being bombarded with as I play this game.
As for the gameplay, it's bad. You need to draw a triangle on the touch screen to open the map. The X button is used for opening doors, activating portals, and attacking enemies, which will backfire on you multiple times. Combat is mindless. The perspective issues of the GBA games are even worse here.
And yet...I feel like this game needs to be seen by more people. This is crap but every Spyro fan needs to see the awkward attempts at new Spyro lore like "Hunter's father is losing his eyesight from The Darkness" and "Moneybags has a wife and four sons, and his four sons might be a reference to DuckTales". Bad game, gets a higher score than it deserves for being this bizarre mix of dull and fascinating.