Skylanders Trap Team – Catching criminals with crystals

It must gradually become a bit difficult for Toys For Bob to come up with new options for the success number Skylanders. We’ve had oversized Skylanders, we’ve had divisible Skylanders; what should be the gimmick of the fourth edition? Apparently the studio from California had plenty of inspiration, because Skylanders Trap Team even has several new gimmicks.

Those new options are hidden in the story that is woven through Trap Team. Kaos is of course central to this, the big bad boss that the Skylanders traditionally compete against. The story opens with Kaos finding Cloudcracker Prison, the prison where the Skylanders imprison any villain they defeat. The prison is made of Traptanium, a magical substance that – as the name already indicates – is very suitable for locking something up.

However, Kaos has very different plans. The game begins with him blowing up the Cloudcracker Prison, freeing all the villains. Kaos wants to use them to defeat the Skylanders and seize power. The impact is so violent that the Traptanium walls of the prison shatter and the material is flung into the air in chunks. It ends up everywhere in the form of Traptanium crystals. The crystals will play a major role in the game.

New crystals

The basics of the game have remained the same. You battle with Skylanders against the villains of Kaos, in levels where one or more elements are central. You can only play a level – or part of it – if you place a Skylander of the correct element on the Portal associated with the game. The villains also belong to elements such as earth, fire and water.

New is that if you have defeated a villain, you can trap its spirit in a Traptanium crystal. Those crystals aren’t just virtual objects; there will also be physical crystals, again neatly distributed over the elements. So there are water crystals on the market and tech and undead crystals.

To be able to use those crystals – and thus catch villains – you need a new Portal. This Traptanium Portal is included with the Trap Team Starter Pack. You can put a crystal in the edge of the Portal. Once you’ve done that, you can store the ghost of a defeated villain in there. The nice thing about that – and that’s the big innovation of Trap Team – is that you can now play with that defeated villain. So you not only have the physical figures that you buy in the store to enter the virtual battlefield, you can also use a crystal to store virtual villains of your choice and enter the battlefield with them. This way you suddenly have a lot of playable characters. Of course you can take a crystal to someone else, and then continue playing with the villain you captured.

Game of cards

In addition to those new characters, we also saw a new card game. To open part of a level, we needed two keys. The first was guarded by a follower of Kaos and we could easily capture it. The second was owned by one Bucko, a friendly character who was only willing to hand over the key if we succeeded in beating him in a card game. We had to play a virtual card game that resembles a simplified version of Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The mini-game will undoubtedly appear more often in the game.

There are of course also new Skylanders. The new Trapmasters, for example. They were the guards of Cloudcracker Prison before it was blown up by Kaos. Now you can use them to defeat the villains. There are separate types in between. We saw the tall Head Rush, a Viking woman who loves to sing – but unfortunately in a way that will not appeal to everyone. She has an upgradable singing attack that starts modestly and ends with full-on yodeling.

The new Trapmasters have Traptanium weapons, with the added benefit of glowing when near an escaped villain. As for those villains, we saw the funny Brawlrus pass by, a combination of walrus and pirate, equipped with a huge mustache. Then there was Bushwhack, a green warrior equipped with a huge double axe. We consider Brawl And Chain, a water character that can pull you towards itself with a chain, to be dangerous.

New market

In addition to Trapmasters and crystals, there is even more innovation, because you will soon also be able to buy Mini Skylanders. They are not completely new. There are already some Minis available that have been marketed on a small scale and act as pets for the real Skylanders. Soon, however, a series of Minis that can stand on their own two feet will appear. Despite their small size, they act as full-fledged Skymasters. We saw Spry, a mini-Spyro, and Minny Snappy, a small version of Trigger Happy. If you have an existing Mini, the passive figure suddenly becomes controllable when Trap Team appears. So Trap Team offers enough innovation, with plenty of options for spending money. A somewhat fanatical player will want a crystal of each element and – although not strictly necessary – a Trapmaster and Mini of each color. The fact that it is not strictly necessary to buy new Skymasters is because all old Skylanders can be used in Trap Team. However, the new Traptanium crystals mean that you need a new Portal for Trap Team and therefore you have to purchase the Starter Pack. Just the game is of no use to you.

Toys For Bob also had news of a completely different order. Because where Skylanders had to be played on large screens until now, Trap Team also appears for tablets. There will be a version for the iPad 3 and higher, for Android and for the Kindle Fire HDX. Toys For Bob has thought this through carefully, because there will be a mobile Starter Pack with a special version of the Portal and its own controller. That controller can be stored in the bottom of the Portal, so that it remains handy. Who wants it even more handy; the game can also be played via screen only, without Portal and without controller. You also don’t need to have dolls with you. You can choose from the Skylanders you used earlier in the game in a kind of lobby.

The version for tablets is otherwise identical to that for consoles. Even graphically the game is exactly the same. All graphic assets from the console version are also used in the tablet version, and everything runs at the same frame rate. The fact that Toys For Bob has thought carefully about the mobile version is not only evident from the cut-out for the controller. There is also a slot in the side of the Portal where a tablet can be slid into, with which the Portal serves as a support. Perhaps even better: the studio uses BLE, or Bluetooth Low Energy, in the Portal, which should ensure that data transport between Portal, controller and game requires significantly less power.

Preliminary conclusion

Anyone who thought that the Skylanders stretch was a bit out, is mistaken. With Skylanders Trap Team, Toys For Bob provides the necessary innovations, with the introduction of new crystals being the most important. However, we are particularly impressed by the mobile version. Knowing that a tablet is used as a game machine for the children in many households, so that no expensive extra console is needed, we suddenly see Skylanders appeal to a much larger target group with the mobile version.