The world of Skylanders is a very unique one, as I mentioned before in my review of Skylanders: Giants. It is an immersive game where a toy comes to life and I have to say that I really love the concept. People, in general, love to collect things and with this game, you get to collect these pretty cool little toys that actually do stuff in the game. You can level them up to make them stronger and you can also get them new and better abilities too. They did something new in Swap Force that I was pretty fond of too and that was that they included new character bios on everybody. I am a huge fan of designing, creating, and making up characters (complete with bios) so I found this new feature really awesome. Those are just some of the things that I liked...here's some others:
The Things I Liked:
There's not a whole lot I don't like about Skylanders. The story is somewhat simplistic but when you are making a game for children, it's best not to get too complex. The story line for Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure was a pretty basic, must-get-these-certain-objects-to-defeat-evil plot line, but it made for a longer game than Giants, which I liked. I did think that Giants was more basic and that it was also a lot shorter, so I liked the fact that Spyro's Adventure was considerably longer. Again, the same can be said for Swap Force. They upped the levels again and I think that made it a lot better to play. The graphics in the game were definitely a lot more advanced than in both Spyro's Adventure and in Giants (although in Swap Force any character with a flame ability, their attack could barely be seen. Try Hothead's flamethrower). It was nice to be able to jump during the game too. The main draw with me, however, is the characters. Both my son and I are a little obsessive when it comes to collecting them and we have to have at least one of everything. And of course, the fact that they can swap the top and bottom halves of any of the main, swapable characters. It is a really advanced level of gameplay and ups the character count to over 200 possibilities. It is definitely fun to be able to switch and merge the characters together and combine different characters' abilities.
The Things I Didn't Like:
Not a whole lot of things I didn't like about Spyro's Adventure and Swap Force. They were fun to play and the ability to buy new characters and upgrade them extends the game's shelf life a lot, in my opinion. I will say that impatience is probably one of my bigger weaknesses with these games because I want the characters leveled and powered up as soon as possible and sometimes it seems to take forever to do so. Swap Force had a lot of improvements but at the same time, a lot of setbacks too. The jump feature was a blessing and a curse. With the first two games the main attack button was the A button (on a WIImote). In Swap Force, that changed to the B button. It was a serious adjustment and sometimes I still screw that up. I also don't like the fact that sometimes during gameplay, the game will just freeze for no reason. That is seriously irritating. It does it way too often. Again, the fire powers of some of the fire element characters was nearly invisible, which I thought was weird and it made it hard to play as that character sometimes. Also, I found a secret, hidden level in the pond in the middle of Wood Burrow but apparently you can't get to it on the WII, which sucked. A lot. There was probably a reason for that, but it doesn't change the fact that it sucked. There were these little annoyances throughout the gameplay but it didn't detract as whole from Swap Force that much.
Overall, the games are fun. They are great video games to play with your kids and it takes a long time to get through these two, which is a good thing. The fact that you can upgrade these toy figures' abilities and make them stronger.