Skylanders is quite simply huge. Activision and Toys For Bob more or less created the toys-to-life genre back in 2011, blending physical models with easy to grasp and simplistic platforming. Since then the market has boomed and made billions of dollars, with Skylanders remaining by far the dominant force in the market, even as Disney, Nintendo and now Lego look to take a slice of the pie for themselves.
With so many pretenders to their throne, Skylanders can’t afford to stay still for too long. Swap Force saw characters with which you could mix and match tops and bottoms while Trap Team had you trapping villains in crystals and let you switch back and forth. However, with this year being Vicarious Visions’ turn to lead, SuperChargers feels like it could be a real step forward for the gameplay, thanks to the addition of vehicles.
While all of the existing Skylanders will still be supported and playable within the game – there are quite staggeringly more than 300 of them! – the real draw will be with the twenty new vehicles, which range from race cars and bikes, to boats, submarines, helicopters and fighter jets, not to mention the mixture of twenty new and revamped SuperCharger heroes that go alongside them. New character Spitfire goes together with the Hot Streak car – surely Spitfire should have been paired with a WW2 fighter plane? – while Stealth Elf has been given a bit of a makeover, with a new splinter cannon in place of her traditional daggers.
With three different forms of vehicle, it’s great to see that each has their own particular styles of play, as well as individual abilities and characteristics. You’ll always be trying to drift around corners, avoid obstacles, hit boosts and go over jumps, but in a submersible like the deep-sea diving submarine, Dive Bomber, you can dive under the surface and discover a second layer to the level design. Similarly, hop into a plane or jet such as the Sky Slicer and this plays rather differently, as you’ll be shooting at enemies with gameplay not too far removed from StarFox and Lylat Wars.
You’re not always going to just be following a set path within these vehicle sections, and there are hidden routes tucked away with power-ups and parts that let you upgrade the vehicle in all manner of ways – though you can only mod vehicles in-game when paired with a SuperCharger Skylander – as well as battle areas, where you can roam around more freely, exploring the environment and doing battle with enemies with each vehicle’s weapons. Co-op play is included for vehicle sections, with one person controlling the guns and the other driving around.
The models are a marked step up over previous efforts, with moving wheels, propellers and so on for many of the vehicles, and the new SuperCharger characters are larger and look more like an actual toy than before, with less obvious bases. Though there is a new and rather minimalist portal to go with this, that’s thankfully optional, with older portals still supported.
Of course, much of the game is still focussed around the series’ traditional form of kid-friendly platforming and brawling. Kaos is on the loose once again, determined to rule the Skylands with the use of his Doomstation of Ultimate Doomstruction, and it’s up to you to stop him. The demo level showed the Ancient Greece-like realm of Skylantis, which Lord Stratosfear has already surrendered to his control, and made for an excellent demonstration of the game’s visual polish.
The puns might be ever-so-slightly awful, but bright and colourful graphics are quite excellent, approaching the quality and refinement that you might see in an animated kids show. The manner in which the pink energy whip lashes around at enemies from Hot Streak was very nicely done, as too are the volumetric clouds that shroud much of Skylantis and must be dispelled, or the huge waves that are generated during a water vehicle boss battle. These effects aren’t just for show either, with those clouds hiding enemies ahead of you, while you have to ride the waves to get up and over the huge blades that are part of the machine creating them.
As always, the levels are packed with offshoots and side quests, but while these were formerly locked behind the requirement of having characters of a specific element, they now stretch to requiring a particular form of transport in order to explore them. It naturally ties directly into the sale of more and more of the physical figures, but at the same time it adds up to a large degree of replayability.
It’s easy to view the game through the eyes of an adult – for whom Skylanders’ rivals might provide a greater sense of nostalgia for ones own childhood – but the handful of children privy to this early look at the game were visibly awed by some of the things on show. Their enthusiasm for the world of new possibilities was without doubt, and with it, it seems that Skylanders will continue to go from strength to strength.