Games worth discovering

The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon | Android

895 View2024-03-25

Spyro & Cynder must stop the evil dragon Malefor and the Dark Master

📖 Storyline: Spyro and Cynder (his former enemy Dragoness), after three years of hibernation, are freed from their ice prison by sensei Hunter. They soon discover that the Master of Shadows, a dragon named Malefor, draws his power from the twelve gems. They decide to collaborate in finding and destroying these stones, but they discover that one of them is actually the heart of their enemy!

🎮 Gameplay: It was Spyro's eighth adventure with a port from the PS2, ps3, xbox360 and Nintendo Wii in 3D to the old Nokia phones in 2D; the same side scroller title was also present on the Nintendo DS. Described by some as Devil May Cry meets Astro Boy. The graphic style was more detailed than all the previous ones, with structured polygons everywhere and a more realistic and dark tone and with all new and all ugly enemies. Replaying it, after so many years, on Android I was literally impressed by the indie aspect especially in the flying sections! The levels, especially at the beginning with a short dynamic tutorial, are quite open in design and require a certain exploration which will give them abilities and power-ups for prolonging health or breathing with the possibility of fighting as many enemies as possible to gain experience in a way by makes one of your four breaths, referring to the four elements, even more powerful: Fire, Electricity, Ice and Earth. Furthermore, by collecting different types of gems and other objects: with red gems Spyro will regenerate his life, with green ones he will restore the magic useful for using powerful attacks, thanks to purple ones he will be able to unleash Fury and blue ones will be used to strengthen the little dragon's attacks. In this chapter it is also possible to control Cynder's movements: this second playable character, constantly at Spyro's side, also allows you to play in collaborative two-player mode. The levels are divided into flying sections and finally battles with the Fire bosses. However, what struck me was the pace which has nothing to envy of current 16bit titles where Spyro and Cynder move in a rather snappy way, which is an important thing that I had missed so far: running, gliding, jumping on the wall, fight, etc. It's something I can't explain to you, but I'm a child again.

🕹️ Controls: Actively maneuvering the dragons, in the Nokia era, on a physical keyboard was quite complicated with just one hand while for the Android version, thanks to the touchscreen, it will be less complicated as there will be an underlying screen with the virtual numeric pad/directional arrows just press 4 & 6 to move while with the directional arrows jump and by pressing 8 twice to descend or glide, instead, to fire the breaths 5. The two dragons can be exchanged, and here it is actually more vital to do so since Spyro and Cynder run out the "breath" that fuels their attacks quickly, and can recharge it more quickly when one of them rests while the other fights. Most characters and environments look sharp thanks to good texture work, and the dragons themselves manage to convey an adequate level of personality through their animations compared to the Nintendo DS version.

By AlessiaBNERD