Spyro Reignited Trilogy (2018)

Let me preface this by saying I’ve always been a Crash Bandicoot man at heart. I’ve always generally liked Spyro, but I never really got hooked growing up.

These remasters are glorious, but I do feel they have justified my feeling that Crash was the superior platformer. I’ll start with the positives, all three games are visually gorgeous. The level design is creatively varied and I really enjoyed running through these meticulously rebuilt maps. The music and sound design is also top notch. Especially on a good sound system, these games are really pleasant to listen to.

My gripes are as follows. All three games are generally too easy. This complaint sticks the most for the first one, which has few difficulty spikes at all. The second game is also generally a cakewalk, but, extremely frustratingly, it has a few random difficulty spikes that are not in any way fair when compared to how cruisey everything else is. In particular I’m looking at the second boss fight.

That of course brings me to the third game, which gave me the most headaches. I did appreciate and respect the efforts to create variety and keep the game fresh by introducing a plethora of mini-games and activities that are required to complete the levels. However!! A jack of all trades is a master of none. And a platformer that forces me to play a simplified (and less satisfying) Tony Hawk segment over and over, or try to grapple with terribly wonky vehicle controls for spaceships and submarines...well that’s a game that’s pushing it’s luck. When the mini games work they can actually be pretty fun; but there is way too much slow-paced slog in the mix and it kinda put a damper on the trilogy for me. Not to mention, and I’m genuinely sorry to be calling out Toys For Bob specifically, but even on my brand new PS4 Pro, the third game was laggy and dropping frames constantly throughout the last quarter of levels. For a PSOne remake, that’s downright unacceptable.

I may be complaining a lot but I did actually really enjoy revisiting this franchise, for the most part. Spyro was a good taste of what Insomniac could do (before they were knocking it out of the park with Ratchet and Clank). Good fun, but I probably won’t be revisiting again soon.