Preston Ward Condra Ranks All 101 Spyro 1-3 Levels

by Preston Ward Condra

A project I made when I was 15 years old, during my sophomore year in High School in September 2009. I critiqued and ranked every single level from Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage and Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon in, one consolidated project from worst to best. It doesn't matter if you agree with my opinion or not. All that matters, is that this ended up getting finished.

9. 94: Canyon Speedway

We move on to yet another Flight / Speedway based level in the countdown but, this time it's not from Spyro 1 with Canyon Speedway being from Spyro 2 and when compared to the rest of the main speedway and flight based levels left to rank on the countdown, there is something about Canyon Speedway that I find missing and bland from. It may be due to the fact that I am not a fan of the country hillbilly based nature the speedway personality has or I am not fully sure.

If there is one thing about Canyon Speedway I did not like compared to the rest of the remaining flight / speedway based levels left to rank on the countdown, is that I found the secret based Hunter orb mini-game to be way too linear and bland to care about in for such as these are the only things that help bring out more gameplay design and personality to Spyro 1 and 2 since these were really the only types of gameplay elements you could do aside from the main based trial gameplay the speedways are known for.

As for the main secret orb mini-game in Canyon Speedway compared to the rest of the secret based mini-games in the speedways from Spyro 2 and Spyro 3, it's easy to find the game to be easy on the player to get boring and forgettable on. You control Spyro in a hovercraft simply aiming and shooting down the air balloon and blimp based targets in the air in a very linear fashion with the main camera view during the main course of the mini-game giving you a fair amount of time to time shots well in aiming down the main targets in the mini-game down with no real learning curve and level of hard to it.

During my play tests at times through the Canyon Speedway mini-game, I easily just aim holding down the circle button to no end with no real strategy to plan out on unlike so for other based orb mini-games in the rest of the speedway levels left to rank on the countdown. Yawn.

Overall much like Crystal and Night Flight from Spyro 1, not the most entertaining level out there and disappointing compared to some of the other above average flight / speedway levels to play through from the Spyro PS1 Trilogy. With that it's easy to rank highly of how bland and forgettable Canyon Speedway is and I hope other people that are fans of the series can understand why from.