Swooping, gliding and falling frequently, Spyro wings his way onto your PS2 for the second installment in the Legend of Spyro trilogy. While navigating the path of this platforming adventure relies on your dragon powers, The Eternal Night brings a whole new meaning to the term morning breath. Your ability to command the elements through breath attacks bring a fun addition to your standard melee and jump combos. It's also interesting to mix and match different breath styles to get a rise out of your baddies. Fire, ice, electricity and earth are all commanded by the little purple dragon, and are upgradeable, God of War style.

While the title sounds good, the game's mechanics and sloppy controls keep it from being play worthy. Sluggish response times equal untimely deaths when jumping from moving platform to moving platform, and while there is a free camera, the angles sometimes skip over the exact view you want, which results in death.

The combat could use some fine-tuning, as enemies mob you from the beginning of the game, all of which manage to have some sort of unfair advantage over you. Certain enemies flip over or become incapacitated after you wail on them and essentially become immune to your attacks until they get up again. Spyro isn't nearly as lucky. Once he gets knocked down the hits just keep coming. Possibly one of the most frustrating parts of combat is that if you do happen to execute a quick special attack, the controls are so unresponsive, that you can find yourself in midair, gliding to certain doom, even on the safest looking platforms. We swear, if we hear that dragon fall one more time...

Even though The Eternal Night boasts an impressive cast of Elijah Wood, Billy West and Gary Oldman, the cut scenes are still too long and intrusive. With the lack of ability to skip lengthy lead-ins, the amount of time you sit waiting to play verges on ridiculous. Furthermore, with all of the dying you'll no doubt go through, many of these cinematic beauties repeat quite a few times for your enjoyment. Just... Let us skip... Please.

For all of its technical flaws and obvious oversights, The Eternal Night isn't a horrific game, it's just one that seems like it should have come out a long time ago. It's still enjoyable if patience is your particular virtue, and hearing Elijah Wood kick the bucket repeatedly fulfills our inner nerd who thought Frodo whined way too much. Dirty, filthy hobbits, er, we mean dragons.