The Legend of Spyro

Spyro is the Cherry 7-Up of the games world. Bubbly, rosy-hued, off-beat and lovingly manufactured, he hovers at the fringe of celebrity status without ever making the impact he promised when he first appeared on the PlayStation.

Fittingly, this latest mobile episode chronicles Spyro's early moments as a videogame protagonist (much as Batman Begins is the story of Bruce Wayne's formative years.) After a single screen of indifferent backstory, you take control of the young dragon as he sets out to repel the forces of his reptilian nemesis, Cynder.

The campaign is divided into four missions, each of which comprises three parts: a collect-'em-up flying level, a boss stage, and a platform level.

By far the biggest part of the game, platform stages involve belching colour-coded fireballs at switches to open doors and activate elevators. Whilst not especially original, this quasi-puzzle dynamic slightly enlivens Spyro's ageing platform formula.

In the best tradition of platform games, every level contains treasure-filled chambers just out of reach and mysterious passageways concealed behind locked doors. Every time you reach the end of a mission you gain a power-up – a new colour of fireball that will enable you not only to complete the next level, but return to previous levels to remove these barriers and explore further.

Exploration and progress in a game like Mario, say, is fun, but so is simply getting around. In a great platform game, gravity impinges upon the avatar. You don't just stop and start – you slow and accelerate, skidding over a ledge if you misjudge a trajectory, jumping onto an invincible baddie if you don't take enough of a run up.

Movement in Spyro though is purely functional. Whilst Spyro himself is smoothly animated and moves at a good pace, releasing the directional button brings him to an abrupt and unnatural halt.

Judging jumps meanwhile entails simply standing in the right place and pressing '1' or '3'. Once airborne, you can influence the line of Spyro's arc a little, and even sustain your flight for a while with a second press, but when Spyro returns to the ground he lands with a binary thud.

The movement of the baddies is similarly disappointing. Aside from one insectoid species that curls into a ball and hurls itself at you, the baddies slide up and down straight invisible rails, and because they're evidently indifferent to your presence you can despatch them with all unruffled ease, like so many cows in a field.

But why are these failings 'disappointing', rather than simply 'rubbish'? Well, because Spyro is a cheerful and otherwise competent game, sufficiently likeable for it to come as a relief that every technical weakness is matched by a contrasting strength.

For instance, while the baddies do patrol in a drearily pedestrian fashion, the graphics and the character design are pitch-perfect. Each type – from the spindly insects to the pulsating fictitious cephalopods – represents the best kind of fantasy, drawn from the imaginative space between pure imagination and real-life.

Moreover the hidden chambers, inaccessible the first time around, may be a lazy way of extending play by making you traipse through the game a second time, but they're also a genuine source of curiosity. To play through once, Spyro is a very short game, but the fireball feature adds to its longevity. After investigating every hidden chamber and treading every secret passage till the whole edifice is laid bare, it's merely short.

The music, meanwhile, is jauntily accomplished during the menu sequence and absent for the rest of the game, epitomising in yet another way Spyro's frustrating inability to strike a high note without following it with a duffer.

In the final analysis, Spyro is well worth a look. It's not perfect, but it's sparkling, sweet, and boasts just about enough care and attention to mask its shortcomings. Rather like many a youngster, then.