Skylanders Trap Team has you capturing and reforming villains to your team
The developers at Toys For Bob are back in the saddle with Skylanders Trap Team, the next entry in their hit toys-meet-videogame franchise. This time the hook involves you capturing villains and enslaving brainwashing reforming them to work for you. Same overall formula where you use Skylanders both old and new, but now you have the aid of all the bad guys.
This means a new Portal of Power, plus a whole new set of toys specifically designed for capturing the villains.
Skylanders Trap Team (3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 [previewed], Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One)
Developer: Toys for Bob (last-gen) / Beenox (current-gen, 3DS)
Publisher: Activision
Release: October 5, 2014
MSRP: $74.99 (Game, Portal, figure, two Traps)
The story sees Invader Zim Chaos trying to take over Skylands … again. This time, however, he’s going to enlist a group of villains trapped in a prison made out of Traptanium, the hardest material known to Skylanders. Chaos’ plan works, sort of — he’s able to free the villains, but they all just escape instead of joining up with him.
Enter the Trap Masters, the main draw of Trap Team. These Skylanders are bigger than normal core characters, but not as big as the Giants. The Trap Masters are skilled with all things Traptanium, and all their weapons are made out of the substance, shown off as see-through crystals in the game and the toys themselves.
There’s going to be around 50 new Skylanders, made up of a mix of these Trap Masters, new core characters, and reposed fan-favorite Skylanders. And of course all the previous Skylanders, Giants, and Swap Force heroes will work in Trap Team. Now here’s the surprise, there’s going to be over 40 playable villains as well that you’ll have to physically capture, so to speak.
“Pretty much the biggest thing we’ve done is this idea of constantly innovating,” executive producer Jeff Poffenbarger told Destructoid. “Bringing toys to life was the first initial big innovation. We can certainly just continue to do that, but for us we asked ourselves ‘What would even take that a step further?’ We know we can bring toys to life … but we also wanted to figure out how to reverse that magic. So you can bring toys to life, but how do we bring life to toys?”
All of the escaped villains can be converted over to your team. Take them on, defeat them, and then capture them in a new special crystal toy. So yeah, kind of like Pokemon. Once an enemy has been defeated, players are told to insert a special crystal into the new version of the Portal of Power. It’s actually a really cool effect, as the audio from the TV gets outputted into the Portal itself (and vice-versa) as they get sucked in and out of the adventure. Villains will also give you feedback, help, and advice from the Portal when not in use.
One of the first major bosses is called Chompy Mage (pictured in the lead image), a crazy old guy who fights with a sock puppet on his hand (kind of like the Ventriloquist from the Batman series.) He can summon little tiny monsters, and later in the battle he’ll transform into this giant jumpy gross monster thing.
After he joins your team, all the power sets he used on you are now yours. While some villains are powerful in this way, there will be some with more passive abilities. One example shown was a mini-boss troll that can use a gun to freeze opponents. He can’t really do damage, just freeze enemies. Those playing by themselves can actually hotswap between a Skylander and a villain with the press of the button to take advantage of this ability. Or say a parent can play as the ice troll to let their kid be more of the main star in the game. Traditional co-op with multiple Skylanders is still in the game too.
So a cool concept, but here’s where it gets kind of dumb. You can only save one villain into a Trap toy at a time. That I kind of don’t have a problem with. You can at least store villains at a new hub location so you can swap villains in and out as desired into a crystal. The dumb part is that the Trap toys are all elemental based. So you can only store an ice based villain inside of an ice Trap toy, for example.
My main concern is that this is going to get more expensive for fans than ever before. I’m just hoping the Trap Hero toys will include their respective Trap toy too. Plus these things are tiny compared to even the tiniest Skylander figure, and could potentially get lost really easily. Collectors be warned: There will be multiple variants of the Trap toys themselves as well.
That said, you don’t have to capture the villains, just like how you don’t need all of the elemental types of Skylanders to beat the games. So what happens if you don’t want to — or just can’t — capture a villain after defeating them? Toys for Bob is still figuring that out, having kids and adults of all ages try out the game to find the best solution for everybody.
Otherwise players can expect similar approaches to the mini-games, competitive multiplayer, the cross-platform saves, and the return of the jump mechanic from the past games. The visuals are just as gorgeous as ever, especially on the current generation of hardware. You know how you’ve always wished that the CG sequences from a game was what you were actually playing? That’s Trap Team, essentially. The great visuals extend down to the toys themselves too, looking more detailed than ever.
So yeah, Skylanders Trap Team. If you’re a fan of the series, you already know you’ll be picking this one up. I did want to make some special mentions of other playable characters before you leave. There’s Chopper, a new core hero who’s a little tiny T-rex with a helicopter rotor on its back. It can fly in the air and shoots swarms of missiles like it was straight out of Robotech. Then there’s a duo team of villain trolls who control a walking chainsaw tank. Just let that visual sink into your head. Also SPOILERS Chaos himself is playable.
