Spyro: Year of the Dragon Review — Insomniac’s Farewell Is the Trilogy’s High Point

Spyro: Year of the Dragon is the last Spyro game Insomniac Games ever made, and it is the best one. The third installment in the series arrived on the original PlayStation in 2000, published by Sony Computer Entertainment, and it takes everything the first two games built and pushes it as far as the hardware will allow. The result is a platformer with 37 levels, a cast of playable side characters, and a structure that respects the player’s time in a way few games of its era did.

Bianca and the 150 stolen eggs

The setup is simple and it wastes no time. Spyro and his kin are celebrating the Year of the Dragon, an event that happens every twelve years when new dragon eggs are brought to the realm. During the celebration, the Sorceress’ apprentice, Bianca, invades the Dragon Realms with an army of rhino-based creatures called Rhynocs and steals all 150 eggs. The Sorceress scatters them across several worlds. Spyro, Sparx, and Spyro’s friend Hunter are sent down a hole to find the thieves and recover the eggs.

Spyro emerges in the Forgotten Realms, lands once inhabited by the dragons where magic has gradually been disappearing. These worlds sit under the iron-fisted reign of the Sorceress and her Rhynoc army. The game does not pretend this is a grander story than it is, but it gives the quest a real spine. The Sorceress banished the dragons without realizing they were the source of magic, and she wants the baby dragons’ wings to concoct a spell that grants her immortality. That detail lands harder than most platformer villains’ motivations, and it reframes the whole journey.

Sheila, Sergeant Byrd, Bentley, and Agent 9

Year of the Dragon introduces four playable characters beyond Spyro, and each one changes how the game feels. Sheila the Kangaroo, Sergeant Byrd the Penguin, Bentley the Yeti, and Agent 9 the Monkey all help Spyro on his quest, and each gets dedicated levels built around their own moves. Sheila jumps high. Byrd flies and shoots. Bentley is slow and strong. Agent 9 uses a blaster.

1. Sheila the Kangaroo — vertical levels built around jumping and kicking.
2. Sergeant Byrd the Penguin — flight and projectile sections.
3. Bentley the Yeti — heavy combat and block-pushing puzzles.
4. Agent 9 the Monkey — shooter stages with a targeting reticle.

The variety is the point. Where the previous games leaned on Spyro’s own moveset, Year of the Dragon breaks the campaign into distinct textures. It is the rare platformer that trusts its own side content enough to make it mandatory, and the pacing holds because no single style overstays its welcome.

Moneybags, gems, and the atlas

Spyro’s health is measured by his companion Sparx, a dragonfly who changes color and then disappears after taking damage. If the player does not have Sparx, the next hit costs a life and restarts at the last saved checkpoint. Consuming small wildlife known as fodder regenerates Sparx. It is a clean, readable system, and it does the work that a health bar would do without cluttering the screen.

Gems are scattered across the worlds, hidden in crates and jars. These gems are used to bribe a bear named Moneybags to release captured characters and activate things that help Spyro progress. Gems, along with the number of eggs collected, count toward the total completion percentage. An atlas lets players track completion and see remaining unfilled objectives.

Moneybags is the game’s most interesting design decision. He turns currency into a gate, which means the player has to actually engage with the levels rather than sprint past them. It is not a perfect system, and the bribe prices can sting on a first run, but it gives the collectibles a purpose beyond a percentage counter.

The Forgotten Realms and the Sorceress

The Forgotten Realms are the game’s best asset. These are worlds where magic has been fading, and the art direction sells that decline without ever saying it out loud. The homeworlds, or hubs, link the levels together, and each hub contains gateways to many other levels. To reach the next hub, the player must complete five worlds, gather a certain number of eggs, and defeat a boss.

Players do not need every egg to finish the main portion of the game or unlock new levels. Certain eggs can only be found by returning to a world later. That structure is generous. It lets a player push forward when stuck and come back when they are better, and it is a big reason the game never stalls.

The plot resolves with Bianca turning against the Sorceress once she learns the immortality plan, then helping Spyro defeat her. After the credits, the player can keep hunting eggs and gems to unlock the true ending, defeating the Sorceress once more for the final dragon egg. Spyro returns all of the baby dragons to the Dragon Realms. Hunter falls in love with Bianca along the way, and they begin a relationship, with Spyro and Sparx looking on in dismay. That last beat is a small joke, but it is the kind of small joke the series earned.

A running order through the hubs

That table is not a speedrun route. It is the shape of the game, and it shows how deliberately Insomniac paced the escalation. Each hub adds a new tool and a new demand, and by the final stretch the player is fluent in four different characters without ever sitting through a tutorial that feels like one.

Why Year of the Dragon still holds

Year of the Dragon received critical acclaim, with reviewers noting how the game successfully built upon the formula of its predecessors. It sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. It was the last Spyro title released for the original PlayStation, and the last developed by Insomniac Games, due to Universal Interactive Studios and Sony’s souring relationship. It was followed by the multiplatform Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly in 2002, and was later remade as part of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy in 2018.

The souring relationship is the part worth sitting with. Insomniac left the series at its commercial and creative peak, and the games that followed did not match it. Enter the Dragonfly is remembered as a step down, and the Reignited Trilogy exists partly because the original three still hold up. Year of the Dragon is the strongest of them.

What makes it the strongest is not the egg count or the side characters. It is the confidence. The game knows exactly how much it can ask of a player and exactly when to hand them a new toy. The 37 levels are dense without being punishing, the minigames are varied without feeling like filler, and the improved graphics and music give the Forgotten Realms a sense of place that the earlier games only hinted at.

The platformer genre in 2000 was crowded, and Year of the Dragon did not reinvent it. It refined it. Every system in the game — Sparx as health, gems as currency, eggs as progress, the atlas as a map of what is left — feeds the next. Nothing is decorative.

There are quibbles. Some of the vehicle sections, including tanks, submarines, and speedboats, control more loosely than the on-foot levels, and the difficulty curve spikes in a few late stages. But these are small complaints against a game that otherwise runs clean from the opening celebration to the final egg.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon is the high point of the original trilogy and the best argument for why Insomniac’s departure mattered. It is a platformer that treats its players as capable, its world as worth exploring, and its own mechanics as worth mastering. Twenty-five years on, it still plays like a game that knew what it was.

Insomniac Games · Platformer · PS1 platformer · retro game review · Spyro Reignited Trilogy · Spyro Year of the Dragon