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?

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.

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

The game is solid all around. Gameplay is still solid, and there are some really fun new Skylanders introduced in this game such as Crash, Cortex, Painyata and the creation of making your own Skylanders is novel enough, but I can't help but feel that the game still lags behind almost every other Skylanders game. The story feels way shorter than all the other games, not to mention that they also add a very unnecessary and tedious cake quest to the middle of the game that's just a plain unfun slog to trudge through. This game also feels like the most aggressive in its push to get you to buy more add-ons for the game such as other Skylander sensei's, creation crystals, playsets, etc. Not the fault of Toys for Bob. They can't be helped that they work for one of the shittiest and abusive companies out there. I'd say the game is worth playing if you're a Skylanders fan already, but if you are just getting into the game, I'd probably recommend playing something like Giants or Superchargers instead.

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.