Once you get past the games cheap and often unfair tricks it becomes quite enjoyable
The story goes that the two celestial moons are going to eclipse and cause the night of Eternal Darkness. On this night, spirits can leave the Well of Souls. The evil Ape King wishes to resurrect the Dark Master from the well. And Spyro has to search for Cynder who was being used for evil by the Ape King. Some of the cutscenes are genuinely quite funny, I'll be honest. And the plot is pretty well executed being mysterious and entertaining.
The game play is a combat heavy platformer Spyro will learn many abilities as you progress through the game. There are four elemental breaths; fire, ice, earth and electric. Each have two attacks such as an Ice Bomb, blaze comet charge, electric tornado, earth flail wrecking ball etc. You can upgrade these to get more powerful attacks. Spyro also has "Dragon Time" which slows everything down for a limited period of time. While Spyro himself moves slow, he is actually faster than the surroundings in this state. You also have a fury bar which unleashes a powerful attack which pretty much destroys everything on screen
The game forces you into combat a lot. You can use ground and aerial meelee attacks as well as your elemantal powers. Overall this is very satisfying, however the game has many cheap tricks which you will need to avoid to enjoy these sections. When Spyro takes a hit, he falls down, but he can still be attacked whilst getting up and this consequently leads to unfair and unnecessary deaths. Enemies can also easily knock you off cliffs and you can get attacked from behind whilst chaining together a combo. Using Dragon Time will be a great help, I suggest taking out small nimble enemies such as those wolves first to minimize having your combos interrupted. But once you learn to fight in a way which avoids the cheap shots, the combat becomes genuinely enjoyable.
There are also a fair amount of platform sections. For some reason Spyro's double jump only works at the very top of his jump, normally this isn't an issue for me. It is made out to be a big issue, but it wasn't that bad for me. You will be required to use Dragon Time in some sections to slow down speeding platforms
Overall, the gameplay becomes very enjoyable quite quickly once you forgive the games cheap tricks.
As for graphics, there are some pretty cool effects present and the fury attacks are cool to watch. The environments look pretty drab because pretty much the whole game is spent in dark places.
The music is actually pretty good. A lot of tracks are recycled from A New Beginning. It's the sort of music which really compliments the game play and adds an atmosphere enhancing the overall experience. Infact it's actually the absolutely depressing ending theme "This Broken Soul" which made me decide to give the game another chance. (good song, but somewhat sad)
The Legend of Spyro 2: The Eternal Night is a good game overall. You may not like it straight away, so I suggest borrowing it first. Those willing to get over the games faults will find a pretty cool game hidden in the shadows of Eternal Night. The story is genuinely entertaining and the game play becomes fun and quite addictive. Try it, you may find you like it.
Milesprower2k9 Original Reviews