Kaos is back and more determined than ever in Skylanders Trap Team with his latest hairbrained scheme to rule Skylands once and for all. It will take a third consecutive group of ancient Skylanders and more plastic than ever to fend off the new threat as the billion-dollar franchise seemingly peels back the years on its target audience while getting stuck in an evolutionary rut.
Skylanders Trap Team plays like a spiritual successor to Skylanders Giants, the previous franchise console game from Toys for Bob released in 2012. It can be argued that the translucent weapons-yielding Trap Masters themselves were born from the same gene pool as Giants characters given their hulking toy size, higher price point, and at least one of them — a personal favorite, Krypt King — being directly linked to a Giants prototype figure. The similarities carry forward into the game itself with the return of an updated version of Skystones called Skystones Smash, familiar faces like Brock and Arbo, a new and completely useless in-game radio broadcasting troll nonsense, and a handful of cameo appearances from repurposed machinery, among other recognizable touches.
The game’s namesake, Traps, are clear totem-like plastic toys, each Elementally aligned and requiring matching to a villain’s Element in order to trap him or her within it. Trapping villains in a Trap is not mandatory, but it is required in order to play as that villain within a fixed a time limit. Like the Swap Force gimmick before it, kids will absolutely eat up the Traps and villains barking dialogue from the new Traptanium Portal’s speaker, all while hollering in glee.
As an adult, what I found happening after several chapters in was laziness encroachment leading to skipping a couple less interesting villains simply because I didn’t want to get up and switch the Trap. Trust me; I won’t be the first or last person — child or adult — to partake in this practice.
The real star of Trap Team is not any single Skylander or trapped villain for that matter. It’s Kaos, and Toys for Bob has pushed the pint-sized mischief maker to the forefront not only in the narrative and cut-scenes, but also as a playable villain character and in his own dedicated mode with more deliciously evil dialogue to soak up and enjoy. His Trap will naturally be the most coveted and for good reason; the trio of attacks Kaos brings to the table all wonderfully pay homage to the villain’s debut final boss fight in Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure.
It’s about time sharks of doom munched on someone else
To be honored by the presence of playable Kaos requires beating the game and purchasing the Trap sold separately, a devilishly evil tactic by Toys for Bob that renders the greatness of Lord Kaos inaccessible until a second play through. This is an unfortunate theme that spreads throughout the game’s 18 chapters. There are numerous forks in the road, and choosing one path will quickly lead to a drop off that makes it impossible to retrace’s one’s steps and down the other path. Aggravation is nigh impossible to avoid when the forking phenomenon occurs and goodies are forcibly left behind.
Another deliberate and unsettling creative decision is the inclusion of Traptanium Elemental gates in lieu of traditional Elemental gates instead of complimenting them. These new crystalline gates are aligned to Elemental powers the same as an Elemental gate. However, only Trap Masters can access them, and since there are no Magic or Life Trap Masters in the first wave of figures, those gates might as well be built of diamonds as there’s no getting through them.
It’s no secret that two new Elements have yet to be announced and there are Elemental gates for those as well, marked with a big fat question mark. Frustration mounts when traveling down a path and fighting through enemies only to find one of these mystery gates at the end. This fuel for impatience will be alleviated when those new Trap Masters are available, but for now those mystery gates are nothing more than a vague tease.
The placement of villain quests, designed to offer a side-mission that will give each villain an extra boost and new visual “skin,” does not always align with when the villains are captured. There are numerous villain quests presented a chapter or more before encountering the villain required to complete them. Once again the design encourages replaying multiple chapters in a forceful manner that leaves behind a sour taste.
Villain quests are by and large not much of a “quest” at all. Many of them are as simple as breaking a block or opening a chest, a task that takes mere seconds to complete. Even the longer ones pale in comparison to the Elemental gate areas of the previous Toys for Bob games.
Hand’s down the Chompy Mage is one of the most colorful villains
This simplification is a common thread strewn throughout the DNA of Skylanders Trap Team. In addition to chapters playing shorter than Swap Force, a welcome change, for sure, the Traptanium Elemental areas are a fraction of the size as in previous games and always easy to complete, many of which not even requiring a teleportation pad to return to the beginning because they are so short. The laser puzzles are mind numbingly obvious to complete unlike the challenging ones in Giants, though the lock puzzles can be tough; Story Scrolls are now always extremely easy to find and reduced to two sentences of meaningless Flynn-speak rather than expanding Skylands lore; and money racks up much faster than in any of the previous games so it’s easier to max out abilities. Even the narrative plays younger with Flynn’s incessant Cali flirting from Spyro’s Adventure and Giants reduced to one questionable line late in the game, and the set-up for a Flynn/Cali/Tessa implied love triangle that would have yielded countless funny lines left out to pasture.
I have to hand it to Toys for Bob when it comes to the Skeletones rhythm-based mini-game in the Skylanders Academy hub that was surely inspired by Activision and RedOctane’s Guitar Hero franchise. On the surface this game appears to be an overly simplistic version of Guitar Hero for young kids to toil around in. That’s until the difficulty is cranked up to Expert and the real challenge for the fastest of gaming fingers begins.
Outside of Story Mode the Player versus Player modes of previous games has been eliminated entirely in a move that will rub a portion of the fan base the wrong way. I concur, unless for some technical reason there was no feasible solution to include it.
Kaos gets his own dedicated Kaos Doom Challenge mMode and ample opportunities to gloat over the Skylosers… err… Skylanders. This 100-wave tower defense-like game has some neat twists and turns as Kaos chimes in with his usual taunts of doom, and becomes challenging quite fast as the recommended Skylander level range for each section of waves increases. At the same time, I see no reason why this couldn’t have been an online mode other than Activision not wanting to expose themselves to adult language being spoken within their game, especially since the villains and any complexity they might bring don’t figure into the mode at all.
While Player versus Player is toast for at least this year, Arena Challenges are back with Brock once again running the show. There are a total of six challenges, each split into four different sections with three waves each, so there’s plenty action in new arenas pulled from Story Mode to keep one busy for awhile.
Adding villains makes for an impressive roster of playable characters
Many early Skylanders adopters now own hundreds of dollars worth of toys. Yes, all of those toys including the special rare ones still work in Skylanders Trap Team and that was no easy feat for Toys for Bob to accomplish. Other than activating a handful of turrets in the Kaos Doom Challenge Mode, there’s no other need for any of these legacy figures to enter the game since the level cap wasn’t increased past 20 and there are no traditional Elemental gates, and to me that’s slighting the players and collectors heavily invested in the franchise.
Even with its creative zigzags that shift Kaos’ allegiance for a time to provide new enemies for the Skylanders to chase and jokes for Flynn to crack, Trap Team feels more like a standalone reboot ordered from the top of Activision’s food chain; a reaction to increasing competition in the Toys to Life genre that shifts the target demographic back a few years. This would be to corner that younger tablet-obsessed niche market while the competition evolves with more complexity as their core player base ages. Grab ’em while they’re young and hold on as long as possible.
Don’t get me wrong; Trap Team is still a Skylanders game and incredibly fun to play through its polished AAA presentation, especially from chapter 12 and forward where the level creativity picks up alongside the difficulty. The mostly shorter chapters — with a few exceptions — are a blessing, and Wolfgang is cool beyond words.
After four years and a two-year development cycle I would have liked to see more growth into new areas like online instead of removing features like Player versus Player while keeping the Story Mode relatively unchanged save for swapping out villains.
I have leniently scored Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure, Skylanders Giants and Skylanders Swap Force incrementally higher given the high production values and good times those games offer. We’re now four games into the franchise and as you may have noticed, it was time to whip out the magnifying glass and starting nitpicking. My Skylanders Trap Team review score reflects this more critical stance with the franchise.
This Skylanders Trap Team review was played on PlayStation 4 using a Starter Pack furnished by Activision. The review only reflects the Starter Pack content that includes the game disc, two Traps, the Traptanium Portal and two figures: Snap Shot and Food Fight. Additional figures and Traps used to play the game — but not reflecting in the final score — and additional Adventure Packs are sold separately, and will be covered and/or scored separately.
Skylanders Trap Team was reviewed on PS4 and furnished by Activision for the purposes of this review. It is now available for Xbox One, PS4, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, Wii, 3DS (different game altogether) and Tablets.
