Welcome to Modojo, 
Spyro the Dragon Review
Written by Justin Davis on Monday, June 19, 2006
Fairly lengthy. Decent replay value
Spyro moves soooo sloooow
Spyro the Dragon's bright, colorful design and simplistic gameplay makes it a good mobile experience for younger gamers, but the slow pace of the platforming will most likely turn off most gamers old enough to have a high-end phone of their own.
The first thing I noticed when I booted up the game was how fantastic it looks, just like the rest of VUG Mobile's line-up. Spyro's sprite is large, and animated well. Enemies are represented with high-quality spritework, and the backgrounds are also full of more detail than I'm accustomed to.
It's a shame that the speed of the gameplay isn't aligned more closely with the high-quality visuals. Spyro the Dragon is sloooow. Spyro runs slowly, jumps slowly, and attacks slowly. The controls aren't very responsive either, further compounding the problem. It becomes necessary to press the attack button when an enemy is still out of range, because by the time Spyro actually performs the attack the baddie will have moved within striking distance. At times it gets pretty ridiculous.
The gameplay itself is (by design) fairly simplistic. An "evil sorcerer" has captured all the dragons, and its up to Spyro to free them from what seems to me to be some sort of shadow world. Left and right move Spyro, up jumps, and the center button attacks. 1 and 3 can also be used to automatically perform a left or right jump, as well. As Spyro progresses through the levels he encounters portals into this mirror dark world, and is then able to rescue the imprisoned dragons, which are generally hiding in plain sight. Once all dragons have been rescued its on to the next level.
Over time new enemy types are introduced and new level backgrounds are introduced, but all the levels feel about the same. All enemies more or less rove from left to right, and all levels focus around shifting back and forth between the normal and shadow worlds. There's nothing really expressly bad with the experience, but it certainly isn't very exciting either. The entire game was pretty boring for me, as a longtime gamer.
That being said, Spyro would be easier to recommend to today's younger gamers, who weren't raised on Mario, Sonic, & Co. The controls are simple, as are the world-switching "puzzles." The entire experience could have been a lot better, but it isn't downright bad like so many other licensed mobile platformers.
