Spyro: Year of the Dragon Review

The third game is an expansion of the second's philosophy rather than a rethink, and it is the largest of the three by a wide margin. The new idea is the guest cast: a kangaroo who boxes, a monkey with a slingshot, a penguin in a submarine and a yeti who fights, each unlocked by paying off Moneybags and each with levels built for their verbs. It works more often than it fails, and the Sheila and Sgt Byrd sections in particular hold up, though the submarine stages are a chore.

Spyro himself plays exactly as he did in the sequel, which is fine because the sequel got it right. The soundtrack is the best of the trilogy and the sunrise spring aesthetic is the prettiest thing on the hardware. Its notoriety comes from anti piracy code that quietly degraded a cracked copy until it deleted your save, which is a better story than anything in the plot. Enormous, cheerful and slightly overlong.