NGL after hearing literally no marketing and this being the last game before the series (and TTL genre as a whole, honestly) finally suffocated to death, seeing the ho-hum reviews even from fans on this site, and being cringed to death by trap team and superchargers, I had negative expectations going in. After playing it though, I'm honestly surprised to say that I'd put this game up there with the first two games as the best in the series!
The new gimmick this game around are the imaginators, which are basically custom characters you can save to these weird capsule doohickeys. The character creator is quite robust and I definitely made the stupidest guy I conceivably could create. His name is greg and his catchphrase is "I like water!" Greg is the true hero of skylands. For a time, you could even use an app to buy a real 3D printed model of your custom character, which is extremely fucking cool actually. There are also a bunch of new original characters known as the "sensei" skylanders that are distinct in that they have their own super moves and can access certain parts of levels. On the capitalistic side of things, yes there's still the good ol' power creep making all previous characters as technically useable as possible and there are the level challenges that only the new guys can access. It's nowhere nearly as confusing as the supercharger gated content in 5 or as blatant as the trap masters being objectively better than anyone else in 4. Pretty much all the collectables are replaced by lootbox-esque treasure chests and apparently you could buy extra one-use treasure chests in blind bags back in the day and that's kinda lame imo. Also since this game didn't sell that well getting the actual figures for this game is incredibly difficult and expensive, if you want to legitimately play as Ro-Bow get ready to mortgage your house or sell a kidney. Definitely get some NFC cards if you want to see the new guys tbh.
As for the normally-cringe plot, this games narrative is extremely barebones so it doesn't have the effort put into being cringe and I actually could tolerate it this time around! It felt like they didn't really have the budget to hire the ol' corporate writing team they used for 3-5 so things are more snappy. What would be events in the plot that the cringe games would probably spend several scenes making jokes over are usually one-off things that happen and leave without dwelling too much. It's honestly refreshing! Nothing plot is certainly better than groanworthy plot, that's for sure. They also use playable characters from previous games as the primary NPCs rather than using the usual annoying crew, which doesn't make much sense given you can still play as those guys so there can just be two of em, but whatever.
For a final game in the series, it felt like a return to form. It's a very gamey game, not really concerned with being as corporately kid-friendly as possible and just concerned with having competent levels and solid if-not basic gameplay. This game being the last in the series also means that it has 100% perfect figure compatibility so there's literally hundreds of playable characters each with their own bespoke movesets and fighting styles. Special shoutouts to the switch version, as that one ditches the portal entirely allowing you to save figures straight onto the game itself, so you can basically have quick access to every character in the entire series including the nintendo-exclusive characters without even needing to pick up a single plastic figure or reach for a table. Considering the fact that this game was a switch launch title, and I already had my own preexisting army of characters from the first 3 games, I really regret not getting this at the switch launch because it sure as hell would have been a lot more substantial than super bomberman R or 1-2 switch. Unfortunately, just as the figures are expensive and hard to find, the switch version is also quite difficult to snag for a decent price, and there's no digital version that exists. Def not worth the aftermarket value, I had to do some goofy gamestop shenanigans to get my copy for a reasonable price (ill write that whole ordeal in a comment to this review).
I've finally did 11-13 year old me justice and played every skylanders game both on the home console and 3DS front. I've made the most I functionally out of the hundreds of dollars I've spent on these dumb plastic toys. Was it worth it? Not really sure, to be honest. If you are curious about playing any of these games I'd just really suggest either the first two games or this one. And if you are curious about the more cultural fan-community side of the series, I'd suggest checking out the darkspyro skylander forums for each game and the general collecting scene. That place used to be THE place to go for the community and nowadays it's just an abandoned inactive time capsule, only now sparsely populated with people remembering the good ol' days of chasing figure waves and discussing these doofy cringe-ass games.
this game also gets swag reduction for using youtube kids-ass skylander influencers for the credits music, miss me with that shit bro
The new gimmick this game around are the imaginators, which are basically custom characters you can save to these weird capsule doohickeys. The character creator is quite robust and I definitely made the stupidest guy I conceivably could create. His name is greg and his catchphrase is "I like water!" Greg is the true hero of skylands. For a time, you could even use an app to buy a real 3D printed model of your custom character, which is extremely fucking cool actually. There are also a bunch of new original characters known as the "sensei" skylanders that are distinct in that they have their own super moves and can access certain parts of levels. On the capitalistic side of things, yes there's still the good ol' power creep making all previous characters as technically useable as possible and there are the level challenges that only the new guys can access. It's nowhere nearly as confusing as the supercharger gated content in 5 or as blatant as the trap masters being objectively better than anyone else in 4. Pretty much all the collectables are replaced by lootbox-esque treasure chests and apparently you could buy extra one-use treasure chests in blind bags back in the day and that's kinda lame imo. Also since this game didn't sell that well getting the actual figures for this game is incredibly difficult and expensive, if you want to legitimately play as Ro-Bow get ready to mortgage your house or sell a kidney. Definitely get some NFC cards if you want to see the new guys tbh.
As for the normally-cringe plot, this games narrative is extremely barebones so it doesn't have the effort put into being cringe and I actually could tolerate it this time around! It felt like they didn't really have the budget to hire the ol' corporate writing team they used for 3-5 so things are more snappy. What would be events in the plot that the cringe games would probably spend several scenes making jokes over are usually one-off things that happen and leave without dwelling too much. It's honestly refreshing! Nothing plot is certainly better than groanworthy plot, that's for sure. They also use playable characters from previous games as the primary NPCs rather than using the usual annoying crew, which doesn't make much sense given you can still play as those guys so there can just be two of em, but whatever.
For a final game in the series, it felt like a return to form. It's a very gamey game, not really concerned with being as corporately kid-friendly as possible and just concerned with having competent levels and solid if-not basic gameplay. This game being the last in the series also means that it has 100% perfect figure compatibility so there's literally hundreds of playable characters each with their own bespoke movesets and fighting styles. Special shoutouts to the switch version, as that one ditches the portal entirely allowing you to save figures straight onto the game itself, so you can basically have quick access to every character in the entire series including the nintendo-exclusive characters without even needing to pick up a single plastic figure or reach for a table. Considering the fact that this game was a switch launch title, and I already had my own preexisting army of characters from the first 3 games, I really regret not getting this at the switch launch because it sure as hell would have been a lot more substantial than super bomberman R or 1-2 switch. Unfortunately, just as the figures are expensive and hard to find, the switch version is also quite difficult to snag for a decent price, and there's no digital version that exists. Def not worth the aftermarket value, I had to do some goofy gamestop shenanigans to get my copy for a reasonable price (ill write that whole ordeal in a comment to this review).
I've finally did 11-13 year old me justice and played every skylanders game both on the home console and 3DS front. I've made the most I functionally out of the hundreds of dollars I've spent on these dumb plastic toys. Was it worth it? Not really sure, to be honest. If you are curious about playing any of these games I'd just really suggest either the first two games or this one. And if you are curious about the more cultural fan-community side of the series, I'd suggest checking out the darkspyro skylander forums for each game and the general collecting scene. That place used to be THE place to go for the community and nowadays it's just an abandoned inactive time capsule, only now sparsely populated with people remembering the good ol' days of chasing figure waves and discussing these doofy cringe-ass games.
this game also gets swag reduction for using youtube kids-ass skylander influencers for the credits music, miss me with that shit bro
jtduckman
4 months ago
so im a gamestop employee which has its own fair share of ups and downs but the store I used to work at was always like hella dead so in my downtime I would go on the store locator and look to see if any games I was particularly interested in were around me. The only thing was the store locator can only look for things within a 50 mile radius of any given zip code so I literally just entered as many random zip codes I possibly could until I finally found a singular gamestop in the united states of america that miraculously had a copy of the game unknowingly traded in to them. I eventually found a copy in motherfucking Cleveland of all places and gave them a call from my west-coast ass time zone asking for them to ship it over for "a customer" and the legends over there actually followed through. That was in early July and nowadays gamestop is bleeding so much money that they cut out the mail store-to-store transfer protocol entirely as a cost-cutting measure, so it really was a stroke of luck that I was able to get the switch version of this game in the first place. shoutouts to cleveland, and no shoutouts to gamestop being cheap because now i can't ship over copies of crystar or disaster report 4 from some random missouri gamestop or some shit, BOOO