I went to midnight launch with Liz for Skylanders trap team and we got quite a haul, which you can view here. That video was about the toys, so now let's talk about the game itself!
First of all, WELCOME BACK Toys for Bob! It's good to have you guys back. That being said, this game, pretty much right off the bat, feels like it should have been the sequel to Giants. Although there are characters from Swap Force, it feels like the old Skylanders games did, and IMHO, that's a great thing. I don't think it's as hard as Giants was (IMO, Giants is the toughest game in the series), but it's still leagues away from Swap Force's difficulty.
The backgrounds and the setting are all completely fleshed out, which is something I'm glad about. They've FINALLY allowed us to choose to jump off cliffs, and this even sometimes leads to hidden areas. You'd think I was suicidal the way I leap off cliffs now! It doesn't even do damage to you, which makes me feel a bit sad about it. If you're in an arena match and you get knocked off it will deal damage, however.
Unlike Swap Force, the Giants have a purpose again, they can do basically everything that they could in Giants, though their jobs are less frequent. They can once again lift giant boulders and break bomb doors without a bomb. The best part about the giants in Trap Team is that THEY ACTUALLY FIT ON THE STAGE AGAIN. The new team, the Trap Masters, are about 3/4 the size of the Giants so it makes sense. It seems like they actually playtested them before they released the game, unlike Swap Force, where the giants served really no purpose at all and often caused the game to wig out since they didn't really fit anywhere. They had giant chests though, which have been replaced in Trap Team by villain chests, but they're basically exactly the same except for the symbol on the front. In Swap Force it was Tree Rex and now it's Kaos.
The new gimmick for this game is the traps, and while I love that they've come up with the idea to reverse the formula, where you capture the characters and then play with them, some of them appear to be a little lackluster. Not all of the trappable villains have three attacks (actually, I think that most of them have 2), and some really don't make all that much sense to me in their elements. There's also not the same amount of villains for each element. The fact that they talk to you and comment on what's going on from inside their traps (The speaker in the portal, actually), is a really nice touch that helps with the immersion.
I said in the video that minis/sidekicks have no special purpose, but there is actually a section in the Academy (your new hub world) with tiny paths just for them. I'm not sure if it happens anywhere else, but on the Mystic Mill stage, one of the villains, the Shrednaught, has areas that only he can access in his evolved form, which is actually a really nice touch, it makes it seem like the villains have some purpose once they're with you, besides dealing TONS of damage. The cores themselves don't seem to have any sort of special purpose anymore though, since elemental gates can now only be opened by Trap Masters. Everyone else has something special to do though.
The minigames now have some meat to them as well, there's a new version of Skystones, that sort of functions like somewhat of a mash up of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon cards, and it usually turns out to be really fun. The more villains you trap, the more cards you get for the game, so capturing villains serves more than one purpose. The Skaletones showdown is a kind of... Rock Band-lite rhythm game that is personalized to your skylander OR villain, where they sing along to music of varying styles with another NPC singing lead. The four difficulty levels mean that everyone has a chance to try this out. The expert levels are actually REALLY challenging and remind me of Amplitude/FreQuency on the PS2.
The traps are actually really interesting themselves, since there are all different sculpts, but it's not really necessary to have more than one of any element's traps, beyond the sake of having them. I also learned that the 'evolved' status of a villain is held on the trap itself, not by the game, so you'll have to do the villain quests over and over if you intend to buy more traps, which is kind of unfortunate... You might be wondering what villain quests are? Well, they're what replaced the missing heroic quests. Each villain has a quest somewhere on a stage, that can range from just talking to an NPC to playing Angry Birds with a sheep cannon. I heard a lot of players whining that there are no more heroic challenges for them to help up the stats of skylanders they like, but I don't have a problem with this. There also appear to be more traps than there should be, since there are 5 or 6 sculpts for each element, but some elements *cough* MAGIC *cough* only have three trappable villains.
The Arena is back, but each set of 3 waves has a different goal, and none of them are just "HIT THESE GUYS HARD." You don't have to follow the gimmick of the map, as it won't kill you outright if you ignore it, but you needn't usually rely on the gimmick of the map to get by. Player vs Player though, is completely gone and sort-of replaced with the Kaos Doom Challenge, which is sort of like if Skylanders was played like Dungeon Defenders. You can build towers and you have a box to protect. While I miss SkyGoals a lot, since it wasn't even in Swap Force, there are allusions to it in the arena challenges. One of the 3 round matches involves you carrying the ball from SkyGoals and it powering you, or any other carrier up.
The co-op is actually the only real problem I've had. The tether keeping you and your partner together is REALLY short this time around, and it leads to some unfortunate respawn chains, especially when a bounce pad is involved. The game itself seems to be more glitchy than ever before. I've been stuck in the floor multiple times, my cutscenes often hang for absurd amounts of time, and there's even a weird glitch that happens in co-op every once in a while where none of your buttons do anything. You cannot attack, but you can walk, while the other player has no issues. I've also noticed that about 20% of the time I move something off the portal, the game does not recognize that anything has been moved for a minute or so. Unfortunately, it seems like the portal is just slower to recognize and activate items in general this time around. Some of the items have had their effects changed, so maybe it's trying to figure that kind of stuff out?
I think that's about it for my impressions, this post is long enough already!
DO ANY OF YOU GUYS HAVE ANYTHING TO ADD/ASK?
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