Graphics: It’s clear Krome had a trade off to make when designing the graphics for Eternal Night. The game employs an almost completely maneuverable 360 degree camera system, allowing you to move through the action at various angles. While this is a fantastic feature, the resolution of the graphics suffered greatly as a result. Spyro himself looks lifeless and a little robotic when viewed up close.

Despite clunky gameplay, the visuals are smooth. When Spyro shoots his fire breath, torching his enemies, you’ll discover seamless and fluid animation. The game never lags or stalls, regardless of the amount of action on the screen. When the action does slow down during cut sequences, you’ll be treated to the best use of graphics in the game, such as endless skies dancing with purple and blue. In the end, though, the low-polygonal rendering, while employing a nice color pallette at times, is a step backwards from what we know the Wii is capable of.

Interface: What little interface there is in Eternal Night offers more confusion than assistance. During gameplay, your health meter, magic meter and Dragon Time meter are so small I felt as though I needed to pull out opera glasses to see them. I had a hard time knowing how much life I had left, and this was always compounded by a delay in the time between when you actually gain or lose life and when it registers graphically on the screen. On a separate pause menu, you can upgrade their powers after you’ve collected a certain amount crystals. This screen, however, is not intuitive at all, and it took me too long to figure out how far away I was from an upgrade, when I was eligible for one and how to activate it.

Gameplay: The gameplay of Eternal Night is just lazy. I was excited to be thrust into this world of dragons with a whole bevy of powers at my disposal, but its repetitiveness quickly diminished that, and I was left bored and frustrated. The game just throws wave after wave of bad guys at you, and they almost always look same, with little to no artistic differences between them. I found it amusing that every enemy had its own unique name, but it didn’t change the fact that when Ape Drone Hollyfield Trung attacked me, it was identical to when Ape Drone Jysona Welldark attacked me.

While I tried to discover if there were tricks or weaknesses to defeating the different iterations, I found that button-mashing was the best tactic, and this only made me more frustrated. There seemed to be very little thinking required to move through the game, and even the simple puzzles I found drove me batty due to the fact that there’s no signal or sound to indicate they’ve been solved. For example, I was trying to find my way past a locked door. I eventually realized that I had to light a certain number of torches in order to do so. So I lit all the torches I could find in an adjacent room, but nothing happened, so I continued my search for more things to light. It was only by accident that I later backtracked and found the once locked door had been opened.

The rest of the navigation through the world feels like a rehashing of the same environments over and over. While I realize the title is Eternal Night, the game is so dark and dreary, it borders on depressing. For a character as light and bubbly as the violet colored Spyro, letting him roam around in caves and dark woods for hours on end seems like a waste.

Sound FX: I found many of the sound effects in Eternal Night to be either grating or absent. When Spyro runs around, the nails on his little dragon claws make a repetitive clicking sound. It’s a loud, echoing sound, and while it’s probably realistic, it’s gets annoying. The other problem I had was that many of the villains in the game seem to have a super silent stealth mode they employ when running at you full steam. There were many times when I was bludgeoned from behind by an enemy who would make plenty of noise after he got his initial first hit in. A warning would’ve been nice. Spyro is voiced by Elijah Wood, and the former hobbit does a good job of bringing the tiny dragon to life. Billy West lends his vocals to the sarcastic dragonfly Sparx, who provides most of the game’s comic relief.

Music: The music in Eternal Night takes a back seat to the action. There’s nothing memorable about the score, but unlike the gameplay, it’s also not repetitive or intrusive. The music simply flutters in the background, setting just enough atmosphere, but not allowing itself to detract from the events on the screen.

Intelligence: Most of the baddies in Eternal Night are drones needing to be button-mashed into oblivion, but this is fine for the audience for which the game was intended; kids will enjoy using a bevy of colorful attacks to take down foes. The enemies never really hunt you down, and even winning the boss battles is only a matter of discovering the right attack pattern. For example, at the end of the first world, you must take out an evil dragon on top of a tower. To defeat him, you must simply dodge and return fire at the appropriate times.

Difficulty: While the enemies may be dumb as rocks, they are relentless. Spyro gets a little dazed whenever he’s hit, and during this time, the computer keeps wailing on the poor little dragon. In many instances, you could find yourself backed into a corner with no real chance of making it out, no matter what you do. On the whole, Eternal Night seems unnecessarily hard. While there are no lives in the game and meeting your demise simply means replaying certain sections of the stage, this happens so frequently, it borders on maddening. It doesn’t help matters that the jump, double jump and glide controls are shaky at best in a world riddled with bottomless pits. I became all too familiar with the sound of my dragon falling into oblivion.

Overall: Spyro desperately wants to be a great platforming franchise, but this installment falls painfully short of the mark. Eternal Night is too dark and difficult for younger audiences and too bland for experienced gamers. Only very dedicated players will have the patience to push through the somewhat interesting storyline, but sadly, even that doesn’t have much pay off when compared to the game’s faults. There are many better offerings out there right now for the Wii.