3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! - Reignited.

The second Spyro game is loved by pretty much everyone apparently. I looked up a few “best of Spyro” lists out of curiosity, and there’s a good amount of people that consider this game to be the best out of the entire series and I can’t help but ask why? Not that I dislike the game or anything, but Riptos Rage feels like the most “take it or leave it” title for a collectathon I’ve played in a while. Collectathon sequels from this era usually went like this: the same game but bigger worlds with expanded mechanics. A lot of games similar in nature managed to do this well like the Sly Cooper games, but the more limited variety of Riptos Rage compared to the original kind of felt like a step backward. Instead of there being 6 worlds, there’s 3, those three being a lot denser than the original game, but still lacking. The individual levels of Riptos Rage have significantly more character than the original. There’s entire sub mini games scattered throughout almost all of them, some of which you could pass entirely if you aren’t exploring. There’s this one ice level that comes to mind where it ends in a random tower, but if you continue past it there’s a completely playable hockey rink just sitting there that could be entirely missed if you decided to just go back to the hub. There’s so many little things like this that reward the player more than the first game did. One of my biggest complaints about the original was for the combat and level design. A lot of Spyro 1 was plagued with needless empty space and Riptos Rage finally made that empty space of certain levels make sense, with newly added side quests in this areas that usually give you bonuses. The combat is almost identical gameplay wise, but mechanically ties in a lot better with collecting because of the new soul feature. Every time you kill an enemy, you take their soul; reaching a certain amount of souls unlocks different abilities that help you access more areas of the map. It’s a little thing that doesn’t seem like it would change a whole lot, but it definitely makes combat serve more of a purpose. Riptos Rage is a fine game, I even spent most of this review talking about how it improves on things from the previous game, but for some reason it just wasn’t nearly as fun to play as the original. At first I just thought I was burnt out from going directly into the second game after finishing the first, but after playing most of Year of the Dragon already before writing this, I just didn’t have as much fun with Riptos Rage as I’d hoped. But even if it’s the weakest of the trilogy, it’s still a good game in its own right.