Recent reviews by Dsfyu

8

8

Run. Escape. Flee while you still can. RunEscape.

First off, I need to say that this port is a steaming pile. This isn’t a good port. This isn’t a bad port. This is a horrible port with a shiny new set of graphics. Even at the $20 steam sale price, I’m regretting this purchase a bit.

First off, several game mechanics are tied to the game framerate. The height Spyro can jump is slightly affected by this, making many glides much, much harder than they ever were on the PS1 or even the emulated version on the PS3. Even worse, at least one level is *impossible* to complete at 60 FPS. Hard stop. Once you reach a certain point in the level you *must* set your framerate to 30 FPS for the level to allow you to proceed. I encountered this at the 3 hour mark, making it too late to refund.
Second, the controls aren’t great. I don’t mean that the Spyro controls are bad, but the way they were implemented in this port stinks. It doesn’t play quite like the original, and the rotating the camera is a hassle. Even worse, all three games use the same control system based off Spyro 1. This might not seem like an issue, but of the three games, Spyro 1 had the worst control scheme.
Third, the FOV is wrong for this type of game. The camera is too close to Spyro for comfort and it really shows. While the original game camera was set equally close to Spyro in the original game, other issues with the controls in the port make it far worse than it ever was.
Fourth, the level construction is half baked. There are visible places where buildings and walls are supposed to meet, leaving small gaps where you can see out of the level. This is sloppy work, and really is a glaring issue.
Fifth, letterboxing. While this might not an issue for most people, the game is arbitrarily letterboxed. If you have anything wider than a 16:9 aspect ratio on your monitor, have fun with the black bars on either side of the game. That’s not to say I don’t understand why a game developer might do this, but this port was done in the Unreal engine, which natively supports ultrawide displays. The game shows ultrawide display resolutions as an option and lets you select them, but doesn’t actually display the game at these resolutions. Yes, there are mods that let you disable the letterboxing, but I shouldn’t need to mod a game just to reenable a feature natively supported by the game engine.
Sixth, the game defaults to starting on the wrong monitor, with no option to select which monitor it should run on within the game. I have never seen a game pick a monitor other than the primary one as the default monitor until now. Ultimately you either have the option of dealing with it, using Win+Shift+arrow keys to move it to a different monitor every time the game starts, or using steam launch commands to change what monitor it starts on.
This game plays worse than what I would expect from a free unlicensed fan port. Sure, the graphics may look much better than the original, but the improvements stop there. Otherwise, I fail to see any real improvements over the original game. As far as I can see, most of the hype over this game is pure nostalgia rather than because this port is well made.
I still plan to keep playing for nostalgia reasons, but I wouldn’t be comfortable recommending anybody purchase this game if they already had copies of the original trilogy. I’ll try to update it as I keep playing, but I don’t expect anything to change aside from the list of issues growing longer.

Two gold fish are sitting in a tank. One gold fish looks at the other and says: "How do you drive this thing?" The second responds: "HOLY CRAP A TALKING FISH!"

I have no idea what to say. Five minutes in and I think I was killed by the Annoying Orange. There I was, a man in his underwear running around barefoot in the jungle. I ran around using a stick to cut down trees while zombies chased me. I moved to run awawy and pressed shift to start running. Instantly, my character charged forward at the horde of zombies when I tried to run backwards. What do?

HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE PONY HORSE HORSE HORSE EUNUCHORN HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE HORSE POTATO

YOUR SMALL HORSE: COMRADERY IS SPELLBINDING HORSE