In addition to these elements, Spyro also acquires a projectile-like 'secondary breath' attack with each element, which can defeat most enemies, but the player can only store a limited quantity of secondary-breath attacks. Similar to previous titles, Spyro also acquires multiple breath types to use throughout the game, including electricity, water, and ice each element has different characteristics and uses throughout the game-for example, electricity can defeat metal-armored enemies, and water is used primarily to solve puzzles.

Spyro's gliding mechanics have been tweaked from previous titles, with the addition of a double-jump and the ability to hover downwards by releasing the analog stick. Spyro begins A Hero's Tail with most of his standard abilities including gliding and fire-breath. There is also a considerable amount of backtracking in the game, with important items only reachable with certain abilities acquired later in the game some items also require a certain number of light gems (itself an important item) to be acquired. Gameplay in A Hero's Tail is largely the same as in previous Spyro games, but with various tweaks to Spyro's abilities and the game's controller mapping (for example, the right analog stick/C stick now directly controls the in-game camera, a standard mapping for many action and platform games), and less of an emphasis on gems they now act strictly as the game's currency, and are no longer important to completing the game with 100%.

A hero's tail