When Spyro the Dragon: Reignited Trilogy was released last year on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, a lot of gamers wanted to know where the Switch and PC versions were and with around 9 months of silence, the consensus was that the collection was not coming, but at E3 2019, it was announced that it was coming and soon, with the release just around the corner, Activision invited me to go hands on with the Switch release.

Having already given it a go at E3, and was impressed, but that was only a short amount of time with the game. In fact, it was so rushed, it was standing in a hallway of a one-bedroom hotel suite, while people were interviewing in one room and playing Crash Team Racing in another. But it did wet the whistle for what was to come, but it had problems and given how beautiful the game was on PlayStation 4, it needed to get up to speed on Switch, if it was going to convince people to get it there and from my hands on with it now, it seems to be the case.

The build that I was given had me starting from scratch and as someone who recalls the first game more than the follow ups, I jumped in there and started to play. The first thing that I noticed over the E3 build is that the games load times are minuscule in comparison and while I can’t say for certain they are shorter or longer than the other platforms yet, they are short enough for Switch. With the game loaded, it was time to run around the first hub world, which of course is full of things to do, enemies to toast and gems to collect and portals to other worlds; I was able to see it all and more importantly, not encounter any issues with the performance, or visuals.

No matter the level I entered, the game was able to maintain a visual flair that was honestly quite surprising, I even took the time to stand still, just to rotate the camera and check out the shadow. There have been quite the number of games on Switch, which have presented a stunning visual at first, but when you take a closer look, things start to break down, but the shadow that was cast by Spyro was amazing, no matter the direction I had him positioned in. But it was not just Spyro, enemies, trees and more, all managed to produce shadows that were quite detailed and of course, when you combine that with the stellar art, you get one amazing looking game. Now there is a thing to consider, I only explored the first world of the first game and the same of the second, there could be stages further in those games, or the third, which look horrible on Switch, but given how well the early stages look, I am hopeful for the rest.

Performance is also something that was impressive across the board, in fact the only real time I noticed lag was when the game was loading and that is to be expected, but even in those cases, it only happened when I was spurting flames out at the time. Swapping out from one game to another was fast as well, there was no massive amount of time between quitting out and going to a different game, in fact menu navigation was just as smooth, though as I said before, that could change later on, but I don’t believe it will. As the build was a pre-release one, there was a weird little bug, which made me laugh, in the second game, Ripto’s Rage, I was asked if I wanted to attempt to score 5 goals on the ice and I thought why not. The catch was I had only 2 minutes to do it, what happened was when the timer hit one second, it stopped and I was able to spend many more minutes attempting to complete the challenge and when I scored the final goal, the game reacted as if I had managed to do it in the allocated time, not my much longer session.

Spyro the Dragon was never a Nintendo character, if you ask people what platform you would link to the little purple dragon, even with Skylanders, most people will say PlayStation, but with this release that might change, as he feels at home on Switch.

If you want to order the game for yourself, you can do it on the Nintendo eShop, or via your prefered retailer.