Format: Advance
Genre: Platformer
Developer: Vicarious Visions, Inc.
Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games, Inc.

My first Spyro game. This one is apparently a crossover with the crash bandicoot series, as crash and others from his series appear in multiple levels and storyline. I'm fairly confident that Cortex villain was also from Crash Bandicoot. This is an action platformer with "minigames" scattered all over the world that need to be completed in order to advance the game. As far as a platformer goes, it does it's job fairly well. As a small purple dragon, I can't help but wonder if I missed some action commands, as I was not able to tear the flesh and meat off the sheep in the game. As the platformer side of the game, it's decent... not too big, not too small. Provides an adequate challenge and storyline(?). The minigames however are easily more than half the game. For starters, you need to complete 1 set of each minigame in each world to open the world portal to the next world. That means 5 minigames to advance. here's the kicker, when you get to the final world portal, Mr. asshole scientist guy tells you that you need to GO BACK and DO ALL THE MINIGAMES 3x TO OPEN THE FINAL PORTAL!!!!! Yup... it pulled one of those. The music is a bit above generic, the controls can be a bit unresponsive at times, but the game itself holds up. The major drawback of this game is easily that little left-swing to open the final portal. There are also secrets in the game and a trading card system... not too sure what that's about but I got quite a pocket full of em. If you're wondering, the minigames range from Arkanoid Clones to 'A button mashing' so there is some variety. The double set of "get to the exit" minigames makes it a bit tedious though. Art design was decent, I'm not too picky.

Hot Tips: Beat EVERY minigame 3x. Save yourself the pain of having to go back.

All in All, Spyro transitioned pretty well in this GBA title and earned a solid 8.0 score. The major drawbacks are clear in the repetitive minigame natures and surprise requirements to get the last level which easily doubled the gametime and did not add any extra value to it.