I mean it's a step in the right direction, I guess?

Perhaps after playing the previous games I have become numb to the cringe dialogue, but I didn't find this game to be AS bad as game 3 or 4 so that's something. The plot actually even manages to have a few serious moments here and there which was certainly surprising considering trap team had the tone of a bad jokebook for kids. That being said, most of the game does still just kinda go through the motions and there's still the patented skylanders cringe writing. Each level really has its own self contained plot loosely tied together towards a bigger picture, so it's kinda like playing a TV show and each level is a bespoke episode. Levels are still a bit longer than I would personally prefer, but it do have a steady pace to it.

The main gimmick of this game is vehicles, which honestly as I am a big racing game fan, I was honestly rather interested going in to see how the vehicles are handled. There are 3 different vehicle classes; land, air, and sea, and each of em can be used for specific vehicle zones in each level. I was hoping that there would be some sort of racing integration in the story as it centers around the vehicles, but they never really do that. The vehicle zones are usually either just an obstacle course, an enemy arena, or both. There IS a racing mode, but it's an entirely separate sub-mode divorced entirely from the main game. And even then, there really aren't too many mechanics or depth for it to be anything other than just a ho-hum generic kids racing game that's less than the sum of its parts.

In terms of how badly you get scammed in this game, it's nowhere near as egregious as game 4 making all your previous dudes useless and locking almost every optional area to ONLY the new guys. So long as you have one vehicle of each type you can see all the areas in the levels. The game even has an "instant" option that gives you a built-in character and vehicle to use, so you theoretically don't even need to buy a single figure to play through the whole game! There aren't even any elemental gates this time around, though in the main hub there are exclusive elemental vehicle challenges. As for power creep, the new characters really don't feel any more powerful than the older guys, though there is the new mechanic of "supercharging" your dudes. If you pair up a new character with their corresponding vehicle, they get a huge boost in stats, kinda defeating the entire purpose of mixing and matching anyone or anything. The new versions of old characters also have entirely new movesets which goes against the previous games rereleased characters being the same with the exception of a special move. Basically it makes the rereleased characters this time around essentially brand new, requiring anyone who wants to see every playstyle to buy a bunch of characters they already own. Donkey Kong and Bowser are also here too for some reason, hope you like playing on Wii U. Speaking of which...

Graphically this game is actually super polished, I can tell that they invested the bajillions of dollars into making the game look good, and the Alchemy engine really does lighting and material shading really well on old underpowered hardware. The only tradeoff is that the game runs at a garbagely low resolution, everything is chunky as all hell. The game also has a HUGE load time issue, with things taking FOREVER to load on wii U. Long as this review is, you could probably read this entire thing before the game could load the mfin hub world. Maybe the game is better on PS4 or xbox one, but then I wouldn't be able to use DK or bowser, and if I can't do that, what's the point?

Gameplaywise it's basically the exact same thing as games 3 and 4. This game does allow you to do your first playthrough on Nightmare difficulty which every other game does not, and I honestly do not recommend doing so. That mode is more designed for people with billions of characters, and all it does is just make every character die in 2 hits no matter what their stats are and turns every enemy into a damage sponge. Honestly due to how much I was swapping characters out I wasn't really able to dive as deeply into the new characters movesets and upgrades as I really wanted to.

But yeah. It's a lukewarm kids game, which is def better than how intolerable I found 4 to be. The vehicle stuff is unfortunately yet another gimmick, and I wish they either commit to just fully making a racing game or fully making a regular game. Meh.

Probably the most overhated Skylanders game of them all, even if I do understand that the vehicle sections are a turn-off for many, even for me. And the game has almost no post-game content at all.
But darn, Vicarious Visions really made the right choice in pulling back on certain decisions made in the development of previous games. There are less Skylanders and levels but it works to its favor, because these are some of the best Skylanders in terms of gameplay.
And of course, the story is the best in the series... BUT that is not a high bar to clear, as the stories in these games aren't known to be good. Actually, I think the third quarter of Trap Team might be better written than the entierty of this game. But still, this one has some nice twists and turns, plus it gives Kaos may more depth.
Do I think this should've been the final game? Well, it wouldn't have been the best game to go out on, but its ambitiousness is what I think makes it the most worthy of that honor. Plus, it would've prevented Imaginators from being it instead.

I was aware that SuperChargers was divisive going into it, journalists loved it but fans of the series hated it so it was often a battleground for heated discussion. In the end though, I just came away feeling... absolutely no strong feeling about this game. The only point I can really articulate fully is that it's definitely my least favourite so far.

Vehicles are difficult to control and their sections are boring to sit through, overal feeling more like a shark jump than a well fleshed out mechanic. Sure, the story is better than most, but that's not really saying much. The nicest things I have to say are that the book level was very visually interesting, and Bowser + DK are some of the most fun and inspired characters in the entire series, but otherwise I can't really force myself to say anything else about this game. For a series that I often find critical consensus was a little too harsh on, the middling rating this game gets when the bickering is said and done is entirely accurate. It's pretty drab and was a warning sign of the market crash just around the corner. Not really much more, but certainly much less.

While technically less cash-grabby than Trap Team, it's only by a little. You had to have land and sea vehicles to access some pretty significant areas, which I remember were just impossible to find at stores. I remember practically nothing about the levels in this game, except that they were pretty boring and not at all challenging. The racing sections are pointless, the game doesn't really have any big boss battles or memorable moments, which really sucks because that's what made the games at all entertaining to begin with. Truly disappointing to watch Skylanders fall from mediocrity to true boredom.