There's glimmers of a way better game in here sprinkled throughout, but the experience you actually get is an extremely quick yet somehow very tedious and repetitive campaign that doesn't really manage to contain any real substance.

Some parts such as the more platforming focused levels and jump button could make a serious case for this being better than the console version, but everything else just blows that all away and you're left with a vapid experience. Any time to stop and explore the levels get thrown out the window when the game throws a timer on you halfway through each level for... reasons? To stop you overanalysing each level because the charm of them would fall apart? I don't know, because just going from point A to point B without the timer BS and having to work on the objectives is actually really fun, but the game does its best to ruin whatever good tends to be going on. Oh yeah, also half the levels are arena "fights" (collect as much money as possible) that still have the damn time limits. Enemies do boatloads of damage to compensate for what would otherwise be extremely simple mindless gameplay?


This game really frustrates me, because with so few tweaks I think it could at least be on-par with the console release (a game that's worst sin is being mediocre) but instead those little annoyances grow into big irks that change the entire way the game plays for the worse. I'll take said mediocre game over a boring, short and irritating one anyday.

been obsessing over my backlog lately and decided that this game was next. managed to launch battery corrosion directly at my face while cleaning out the portal and now i don't feel very good.

turns out i had already beaten this game over a decade ago and somehow didn't remember a single thing about it. like, literally nothing. i don't know what to do with myself anymore.

if i have to go to urgent care i'll update this review

It's not a bad platformer, but there are just so many things weighing it down. Firstly, the time limit: Just awful. The game apparently can't decide whether it wants you to explore or to rush through the levels as fast as you can. This gets especially bad when you do elemental stages (which are completely arbitrary btw), during which the timer doesn't stop. Secondly: What is going on with the enemies in this game? They are beyond aggressive. You'd be hard-pressed to find even a single segment in the later stages where you're not constantly getting blasted, which gets annoying real fast. Last but certainly not least: Why make a handheld game that basically forces you to be stationary? Unless you wanna play the game with two Skylanders, you're constantly gonna be switching back and forth (which may not seem too bad, but piles up over time), since it doesn't allow you to load more than that at a time.

Honestly its the 3DS version of skylanders spyros adventure that got me interested in the series, not the more mainstream console version. I needed more 3DS games to play at the time, plus that version came with its own set of dudes unique to that version so I was like hell yeah. This game plays like a 3D action platformer, where you beam 2 skylanders up to the game from the portal wirelessly to then take em around with you, rather than needing a portal constantly hooked up at all times. It makes the game better paced imo, but if you have a large collection of figures it gets annoying if you want to swap characters, plus upgrades don't really exist between the 3DS and console versions, so take what you will with that. I brought my figures to a friends house to play the console version once and found out that while my dudes were high-leveled, they didn't have any upgrades. Honestly though I think this version of the game might have held up better than the main console versions.