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.

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.

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.

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.

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