I went into Enter the Dragonfly with hopes and mild expectations that I could go into the game and come out of it saying that the haters were wrong and that the game is pretty good actually, a reality which unfortunately was not the case, since the game really does suck. On a base level, it's an experience plagued with too many issues to be able to fully enjoy, problems that irritate more than create intrigue, and the game being very structurally similar to Year of the Dragon puts it in a position where it feels like a very boring and broken retread rather than an ambitious or otherwise interesting game that could lead to a more unique experience despite the issues. While the game feels very fundamentally similar to Year of the Dragon, a lot of the finer details have been changed for the worse to lead to everything being miserable to play through. The movement of Spyro himself is far floatier and imprecise than before, with wider turning angles and a weird sense of inertia that feels as if you need to prepare to stop and slow down far earlier than before, with tighter platforming sections feeling frustrating due to this unreliability. He also feels slower now, and this is for a few reasons. Not only is Spyro's charge speed purely slower than it was before, but the less precise controls mean that it becomes far harder to actually maintain your charge while traversing each stage, especially when combined with the fact that charge jumping is straight up broken and will often put you into a falling animation when you try gliding out of it.

The level design itself also contributes to the game feeling slower overall with the amount of big empty spaces that populate each area in the game. There's still more or less the same amount of content in each of these zones as a Year of the Dragon world, but everything is made slower, so it feels like you're spending more time in each zone. Stages feel as if someone got the scale tool and just used it on all of them, leading to a lot of dead air with some gems randomly scattered about sometimes, which makes everything feel way too spacious and tedious to get around in. The side objectives are unfortunately no better, with clunky controls and mechanics that often feel very unfinished, especially in the flying vehicle levels with the enemy projectiles being almost impossible to see. The game almost always is rough in ways that make it slower to play however, and this further contributes to each stage feeling as long as it is despite only containing slightly more content than your average YOTD world, with everything else in the game also feeling slower than it ought to. The breath mechanic is also woefully underutilised, with each type only having one or two specific use-cases and otherwise functioning as a different looking flame breath, which made acquiring all of them feel very pointless, being more akin to an attempt at creating a unique selling point in the game to justify its inclusion in the series, but not really having the time to properly implement actual instances of utility to them, leading to it being one of many elements of the game that feels underbaked to the point of it still being raw.

Everything in this game screams that it was unfinished and does not stop reminding you of this fact in every facet of its existence. Not only is the framerate constantly tanking for just playing the game normally, but everything has some glitch or example of lack of polish plastered all over it. Some of the worst examples of this are to do with sound effects and how they'll often be very delayed or just not play at all, same with animations being mistimed, making any action you perform lose a lot of its impact, or how the gems have such little draw distance. The latter issue is one of the most egregious issues with the game in general, since the stages are so much more spread out, making a core collectible something that doesn't render in until you're rather close to it ends up encouraging the player to run across every surface in the game just in case they just didn't see something because they weren't close enough to do that. The game doesn't handle this in a way that rewards exploration however, as there are very few hidden areas for extra gems and the like, it just has you running across empty spaces while hoping that you find something shiny within those wastelands. Despite not trying to break the game, there were also a lot of glitches that took me out of things in the moment a bit as well, sometimes majorly so as swathes of the level would not load in, or enemies would not attack and instead lifelessly rotate in place.

Even ignoring the polish side of things, the unfinished state of the game is impossible to miss regardless. One of the most immediately noticeable ways this popped up for me was with how cutscenes were used, with there being only 3 in total, with one at the start, one halfway through that felt like it was initially meant to be the 2nd half of the opening cutscene, and one at the very end of the game. It's made even stranger by the fact that the final cutscene only happens if you beat the game with 100% game completion, which I did, and it was not worth it (surprising absolutely nobody). There isn't even a cutscene to signify when the final boss portal opens up, or any signifier that it has at all unless you go past it and see that it's no longer closed, which further contributes to an already lacklustre experience somehow feel disappointing in how anticlimactic it is. Most characters will only appear once before never showing up again, most confusingly with Moneybags being in the first area and then disappearing forever without even providing a way to get those gems back by the end of the game, kinda defeating the whole purpose of having a character that exists to provide gems with a more tangible value and purpose.

Overall, despite the fact that this is so fundamentally similar to Year of the Dragon, the execution of it is subpar to the point where it feels awful to play, exuding a constant aura of mild irritation and lacking in anything especially notable outside of the way that it can barely hold itself together. I can't even find myself enjoying being able to take in the sights, because most of them are awful, with the shoddy fog effects over the washed out, muddy colouration making it a dreary slog to have to be there at all. The character models don't help either, genuinely horrible animations that feel the need to be uncannily moving all around with each word spoken. Even if you ignored the glitches and lack of polish, this is a very boring game to me, but when including all the other stuff, it just makes me disappointed. The OST is cool and the Monkey Monastery level is an exception to a lot of this for me, but it's not enough to culminate in something that I found even remotely enjoyable beyond moments of being utterly baffled at something I'd just seen,