Skylanders: Swap Force landed in 2013 as the third main game in Activision’s toys-to-life franchise, and it is the entry where the plastic finally changed how the game plays. Vicarious Visions developed it for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Beenox is also credited on the game. Swap Force fixes the series’ strangest omission — for two games the Skylanders could not jump without a bounce pad — and then adds a mechanic that goes deeper than a new button.
Trailer, via SkylandersGame.
The halves that come apart
The hook is in the title. The Swap Force are new figures with a top half and a bottom half that separate and recombine with halves from other characters. There are 256 combinations between those tops and bottoms, and the game supports every one.
Those bottom halves are not cosmetic. Each carries one of eight distinct ways of moving: Rocket, Spin, Dig, Stealth, Teleportation, Bounce, Speed and Climb. The movement type is the key that opens side areas called Swap Zone Challenges. A player who wants everything has to own the right legs, not just the right character.
A Portal of Power that holds sixteen
The hardware changed too. Swap Force introduces a Portal of Power that can read up to 16 figures at once, against the four-figure limit of the previous portals. That is a practical concession to the new gimmick, since swapping halves mid-session means keeping a lot of plastic on the reader.
The rest of the game builds on Spyro’s Adventure and Giants rather than replacing them. The portal still brings real figures into the game, and the structure that worked twice before still works here.
Sixteen swappable, sixteen core
The roster is the largest the series had attempted. Swap Force adds sixteen new swappable characters: Wash Buckler, Blast Zone, Free Ranger, Freeze Blade, Night Shift, Magna Charge, Stink Bomb, Rattle Shake, Hoot Loop, Trap Shadow, Grilla Drilla, Spy Rise, Rubble Rouser, Doom Stone, Boom Jet and Fire Kraken.
It also adds sixteen new core characters, who do not swap: Bumble Blast, Countdown, Dune Bug, Fryno, Grim Creeper, Pop Thorn, Punk Shock, Rip Tide, Roller Brawl, Scorp, Scratch, Slobber Tooth, Smolderdash, Star Strike, Wind Up and Zoo Lou. Sixteen reposed Skylanders from earlier games round out the set.
The voice cast is stacked for a game aimed at children. John DiMaggio, Jess Harnell, Audrey Wasilewski, Richard Tatum, David Sobolov, Josh Keaton, Keythe Farley, Dave Wittenberg, Joey Camen, Gregg Berger, Troy Baker and Robin Atkin Downes all appear.
Master Eon and the Cloudbreak volcano
The story opens with Master Eon introducing the player to Skylands and its protectors. He then tells the backstory of the SWAP Force, a special group who guarded the Cloudbreak Islands and the magical volcano that regenerates the magic in all of Skylands every one hundred years.
During a battle against a swarm of Fire Vipers summoned by a dark figure, the SWAP Force were caught in the eruption. The blast gave them the ability to swap halves and banished them to Earth. The game’s own material frames it the same way: the eruption blasted them apart, sent them to Earth, and gave them the ability to swap powers.
Flynn, Tessa and the Greebles
In the present, Flynn is on vacation at the Cloudbreak Islands for the next one hundredth eruption. He runs into Tessa, a fox girl riding a large bird named Whiskers, and gets pulled into another adventure when Kaos orders a group of Greebles to attack Tessa’s village ahead of the volcano celebration.
Flynn drives the Greebles off with help from the Skylanders, but his ship is damaged in the crash. He and Tessa reach her home village of Woodburrow and meet the village crier, Rufus. There they learn the chieftess has been captured, and that Kaos has built a device called the Evilizer.
Kaos, the Evilizer and the Elementals
The Evilizer uses Petrified Darkness to turn its targets into stronger, more aggressive crystal versions of themselves. The Skylanders rescue the chieftess and bring her back to Woodburrow, but Kaos has already learned where the Elementals are.
The Elementals are four ancient creatures — the Flashfin, the Terrasquid, the Frost Hound and the Tree Spirit — who unite every 100 years to replenish Skylands’ magic through Mount Cloudbreak. Kaos plans to evilize one of them, which would turn the volcano evil and spread Darkness across Skylands.
Kaossandra, Kaos’ mother, tried to destroy the volcano during the last eruption ceremony and was stopped by a team of Skylanders. That defeat is the origin of the SWAP Force. Glumshanks, meanwhile, begins to doubt Kaos can take Skylands, so Kaos evilizes him and sends him to his dig site. Tessa leads the Skylanders to Mudwater Hollow, where the Flashfin lives, to stop the evilizing. They reach the dig site, shut the operation down, defeat Glumshanks and turn him back to normal.
Why the swap mechanic earns its shelf space
Here is the case for Swap Force as the high point of the trilogy. The series had already proved that a portal and a shelf of figures could carry a platformer. What it had not proved was that the toys could change how the game plays rather than just who you play as.
The eight movement types do that. Rocket, Spin, Dig, Stealth, Teleportation, Bounce, Speed and Climb are not stat bonuses; they are keys, and the Swap Zone Challenges behind them turn collecting into a routing problem. The 256 combinations sound like a marketing number until you are standing at a gap that only a Dig bottom can cross.
The ranking of the three games by ambition is not close:
- Skylanders: Swap Force — jump button, 16-figure portal, 256 combinations, eight movement types.
- Skylanders: Giants — the direct sequel to Spyro’s Adventure, and a smaller step.
- Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure — the game that started the franchise and the spin-off of The Legend of Spyro series.
The 16-figure portal is the detail that dates the game best. It is a quiet admission that the previous hardware was holding the design back, and it is the kind of fix that only shows up when a studio is paying attention to how people actually play.
Two other firsts matter less but are worth noting. Swap Force was the first Skylanders game released in North America before other regions, after Australia got the previous two installments first. It was also the first in the series not owned by Vivendi.
What the game gets right and wrong
Swap Force is the entry where the toy line and the game stopped arguing. The jump button fixes a control complaint that should never have survived one game, let alone two. The swappable halves give the franchise its first genuinely new idea since the portal itself, and the eight movement types make the plastic matter in the level design rather than only at the checkout.
The weak points are the ones the series never solves. The story is a vehicle for the next set of figures, and the Evilizer is a device rather than a villain. Kaos remains a comic nuisance, and the arrival of Kaossandra in the backstory does more for the lore than for the moment-to-moment play. The roster of thirty-two new characters plus sixteen reposed figures is a lot of shelf for a family to fund.
None of that undoes the design work. Swap Force is the most complete Skylanders game, and the one where the gimmick and the game are the same thing. It scores 8.3 out of 10, matching the published critical aggregate across 15 outlets.
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