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.

the only good thing about this skylanders were the cool designs of all the sensei. The story was boring and bland, the imaginators concept was decent, the levels werent as appealing, only the sensei and imaginators were viable as they had pretty much nerfed every single other skylander to be way worse so playing as the skylanders before this game were only useful if you wanted a nightmare difficulty mode. This was also the last game of the franchise (hopefully not), unknowingly, so for the franchise to go out with a game like this... was disappointing to say the least. Another annoying thing which was really frustrating at the time was that if you bought an imaginator capsule of a certain type, you could make an imaginator of a certain class, but thats it. Once you choose the class for that imaginator, you could never change it ever again. You would have to buy an entirely new capsule in order to make an imaginator with a new class.

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.

This always happens! When I moved my reviews from Metacritic to Gamespot, I forgot this game. Now, when I started reviewing 2016 games here, I forgot this one.

Goes to show how good the game is.

They really just did nothing interesting and actively removed a lot of things to make this easily the worst one. It was clear the franchise was ready to end by this point.

The gimmick and roster is great but man everything else is meh to bad the levels are pretty uninteresting on par with trap team levels imo the soundtrack is souless stock music because they couldn't be bothered to get balfe back,the boss fights where pretty bad with 90% of them being against personalityless doomlanders and a fucking guacamole monster that is literally the worst boss in the entire series they removed fan favourite collectables such as story scrolls and winged sapphires and on top of all that the story was written by a five year old on crack which is super disappointing since the game literally right before had the best story in the series while i personally hate trap team more i can 100% understand if this is your least favourite skylanders game

Letdown of the century. This game butchers the franchise's consistent growth to try to appeal to a much younger audience, which wouldn't be a problem if it followed the same smart, soulful approach the Spyro's Adventure did, but instead ops for a soulless, fatuous version stripped of its magic. The story doesn't work, the characters aren't as endearing, the level design is atrocious at times, and this is the one game not featuring one of Lorne Balfe's masterful scores, instead replaced with stock music.. yes, stock music. The roster of characters and their figures especially are still a great load of fun both visually and in game but there just isn't a good enough game to go alongside them. As for the character creation gimmick, I do think it was executed surprisingly well, even if every imaginator starts to feel samey overtime. Overall a pretty disappointing end to my favorite franchise, at least until the inevitable cashgrab reboot makes this game a masterpiece in comparison.

With Imaginators being the final console game in the illustrious Skylanders franchise, the series ends with a wet fart rather than a bang. I am a grown-ass adult who will make all sorts of excuses for how Skylanders is actually a pretty cute, overly hated series for kids with some fun writing and characters but this game is where my compassion ends.

For starters, this is the Skylanders game that finally brings a character creation mode to the series (which you use by buying a separate Creation Crystal for each element you want to use, with only one coming with the starter pack at the beginning) and Activision somehow found a way to make it feel deeply cynical and disgustingly corporate just by making one small change - the Creation Crystals have no ability to reset, meaning that the only way you can experiment with all the different character classes is to A) buy more crystals, which retailed at around 13.99 each, or B) take advantage of a glitch that involves a very specific version of an older Skylanders game. There is no reason to restrict the player from ever resetting their character on the toy that they spent almost 15 dollars on beyond "what if we made ALL the money".

As for the game itself, the whole package feels less like a Skylanders game and more like what people picture the Skylanders games to be like in their head if they never played them and thought the games were a really bad game series for kids. The Skylanders games always had a lighthearted element to them that gave them their charm while also knowing when to up the stakes and having some charming set-pieces; this game feels like it's mocking the kids playing it and the story is just kinda there as an afterthought. The characters from the Netflix show are here now, and boy do they all sound like they're phoning it the fuck in. In addition, a lot of the joke writing is "what if we made this thing we said in the dialogue into a running gag that runs for way too long", which gets even worse when you're replaying levels and trying to get all the treasures in the levels because you also can't skip these cutscenes. Wonderful.

Since a solid half of the game is locked behind paywalls, it's a shorter game than the other Skylanders games, which both works to the game's benefit since the story is bad and I wanted to get through the game faster than the other games, but also just completes the whole package with a sinking feeling of "wow, is this really it". They had a Skylanders game with the ability to make your own Skylanders! A winning formula was right there and they messed it up!

By the way, don't be fooled by my 2.5/5 score. I'm only rating it this high because my boys Dr. Krankcase and Wolfgang are playable and they're OP as fuck. I was very easily swayed by the fact that I purchased a toy of Dr. Krankcase and he's running around and making goo puns. And in the end, isn't that what Skylanders is all about?