This game is straight up awful, I don't know how people think it's better than Super Chargers. They nerfed all of the old characters to the point were the are practically useless on any difficulty above easy, attacks that used to do upwards of 200 damage coming from fully maxed out skylanders now do less than 20, and they did this so that they could show off how powerful the custom skylanders are, which is just the worst type of power creep. The imaginators themselves are just awful too, all the parts are just reused assets from previously existing models, the attacks that are offered for them are not interesting because they lack the personality of the core skylanders, and they just look bad too. The levels aren't too far behind either, with the best levels in Imaginators being comparable to the worst of the other games; it doesn't help them much either that by far the best levels in the game, The Lost Imaginite Mines and Cursed Tiki Temple, are locked behind two of the most expensive figures in the series, costing over $1000 for both. It also, somehow, has less levels than Spyro's adventure; it tries to make up for this with the sensei realms, but those are just glorified elemental gates and offer nothing of substance. The story, if you can call it that, is dreadful. It has complete disregard for all of the lore and stories from the previous games and just haphazardly reuses assets and characters from the previous games. It also just feels like a scrapped episode of the Netflix show, which this is 100% an advertisement for, if the main three characters you interact with being the core cast from the show wasn't enough of a dead giveaway. The only decent thing this game has to offer are the sensei characters; personally I think they are some of the most fun and well designed characters in the series, shame their trapped in one of the most miserable games of all time. I don't want to blame Toys for Bob too much here though, it's clear they wanted Super Chargers to be the last game in the series, and that Activision forced them to make a tie in to the Netflix show, but they still could have tried a bit harder to make something at least halfway decent. At least they would go on to make Crash 4, which I hear is pretty good.

You can tell with this game that Toys for Bob knew that the series was heading towards its end. Because I get a feeling that they were both apathetic over the end coming sooner than expected and yet having a sense of desperation from them to keep the series alive.

Starting with the gameplay, the same Skylanders gameplay is here, and it’s still fun. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Unfortunately, it gets broken by the new additions added, both with the Senseis and the Imaginators.

Starting with the former, the Senseis are completely overpowered, and honestly, they are fun to play with, all while being pretty good designs and varied gameplay, even though some of them share weapon types. But I have to complain about bringing back villains from Trap Team as Skylanders. Not only does it make that game less special (even if I didn’t like it), but Skylanders feels lacking in villains now when the Doom Raiders (at least four of them) are good guys. And the Senseis cause another issue which I will get to after talking about the latter.

For the Imaginators, I’ll admit, the customization gives you many options, and it’s fun to come up with new ideas for Skylanders. But that’s where my praise for them ends, because the attacks you can give them doesn't make them nearly as fun to play with as the Senseis. The game tries to make you wanna play as them with all the collectible parts, but let me tell you, you wouldn’t want to. Because despite sharing their name with the title, they have nothing to do. All of the cool things to do go to the Senseis, while the Imaginators just get to be stronger against the Doomlanders and get an absurdly high amount of HP, which basically just makes them player controlled damage sponges. Other than that, they are simply normal Skylanders with more uninspired gameplay.

And now for the issue I brought up earlier. There is power creep at play with these new guys. They were designed to be much more powerful than previous Skylanders and the game was made with this in mind, making them worthless. All in an attempt to get you to buy the new figures instead of just relying on your old ones. It was not a wise choice, as it neglects one of the things that helped Skylanders survive, at least for five years, the backwards capability. The last two games didn't require you to only use the new ones, but this time, Activision is asking you for more money, otherwise, better play on easy mode, bub.

The levels, aren’t bad, but they aren’t as memorable compared to previous games. There are still some, don’t get me wrong, but the others either don’t leave an impression or just reuses stuff that has been done before. You wanna play another dual-world level? How about having the magnet mechanic from SuperChargers again? I don’t know, I still haven’t played Lost Imaginite Mines because have you seen how much a Ro-Bow figure costs?!

The story? Forget it. There isn’t one. The series is known for its stories being just “go from one place to another to stop the bad guy”, but in this game it’s just ridiculous, because none of the levels flow into each other. It’s just Kaos needs a new plan of making a stronger Doomlander. Sure, they all follow the same idea as mentioned, but Kaos is just stuck in the same position when we foil his plans, so there’s no plot progression of any kind despite there only being 10 story levels. This may be a lighter game that focuses more on comedy, but it just gets boring after a while. It’s not until chapter 7 where it feels like the plot has a direction, and yet, that’s when the game starts taking itself a bit more seriously. But by doing so, it lets big plot holes go by unacknowledged, which is odd when the game usually makes fun of its plot. By the end, it just feels like nothing happened.

But the one positive I can give about the story is that I like the contrast between how the player and Kaos use Mind Magic to create their warriors. Kaos just wants to create the ultimate bad guy quickly without much thought on how they’re gonna be it while the player can take their time creating an Imaginator with the abilities to make them a Skylander and even give them a personality. It makes me wish the game actually explored Kaos’ lack of imagination in the matter instead of just simply having it be the catalyst of every level without delving into it.

Now I’ve gone through all things major of note with this game and it's either nothing special or have setbacks, even without comparing it to what came before. Remember what I said about the developers coming across as both apathetic over the end and desperate to keep the series alive while they were making this game? They blended together and it made this game the one in the series with the worst usage of toys at a time when the gimmick was about to crash and burn, pretty much ensuring that this game was gonna be it. This resulted in the game arguably leaving the smallest impression of the Skylanders series, and isn’t that just the worst thing a franchise killer can do?

Despite the near 200 hours I have on this game from when I was young, this is easily the weakest of the Skylanders games I’ve played. It has its strengths though like the very fine tuned character creation system, the new Sensi Skylanders are really cool, the return of fan-favourite villains from Trap Team with them now having full movesets and the fact that every single previous Skylander from every game can be played here. But for me, the negatives outway the positives. Levels are very dull and feel like they go on way longer than they should which is pretty sad because there are a lot of creative ideas here. Imaginators are basically useless compared to the way more powerful Sensi characters, the grindy lootbox character parts system gets annoying and repetitive fast and the fact that they completely retconned Superchargers ending just so they could bring Kaos back as the main antagonist. I wouldn’t recommend this game if you’re planning on revisiting the Skylanders franchise.

Everyone always rags on this one and I really don't know why... probably just nostalgia for older entries? Having played all these games through now, I can say pretty safely that this one's my favourite. I feel like a lot of the points I heard against this game were overexaggerated. Didn't have a problem with the "bad story" as it wasn't super in-your-face and had writing that for the first time in the series actually landed with me and made me laugh. I liked the use of legacy characters as the main navigators for the game rather than sticking with Kali and Flynn again "because tradition" which also helps with the dialogue feeling more funny than grating IMO. "The endgame is just filler" feels so dumb to me. People told me that grinding for the cake part takes hours and is poor padding. It took us like... 10 minutes??? Pretty bland way of getting extra runtime from the game, sure, but not mind numbing and lazy like I was told to expect. Levels feel solidly designed, the gameplay is the most fun yet and it all comes together into a package that feels like the definitive experience in this series for me.

Not without its shortcomings though. The map absolutely blows and the power creep for new characters VS returning ones is way too far out of control, but while there's definitely more I could complain about, it'd just be small nitpicks for the sake of trying to pick holes. All in all, really fun game that would've benefitted from the extra scrapped content, sure, but in the state it's in... I really think it's the best in the series. Gameplay unmatched by the others, which is perfect for me as I always felt the other parts of the game that got toned down in this release weren't to my taste anyways, so you really get the best of both worlds IMO.

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

This was very disappointing after I was so impressed with Skylanders Superchargers on replay. Patrick Warburton is great of course but the change in directors is painfully obvious. The humor feels like a more hollowed-out Spyro's Adventure and the jokes fell flat for me about as often as they landed. It is far more concerned with reference humor a la Skylanders: Swap Force than it is with the tightly written clever jokes throughout Skylanders Giants. Another big problem I had with this is that, outside of maybe a couple scenes, this game just doesn’t benefit from being Skylanders, and they don’t use the premise in any particularly interesting ways. The animation is beautiful, as is with all the Skylanders games, but I was left wondering what would really change about this game were it not Skylanders. There were still parts of this I liked, and there were a couple good jokes here and there, but overall it’s just a letdown, especially in comparison to its predecessor.