Skylanders: Trap Team asks players to do something the series had never asked before: catch the bad guys, then play as them. Toys for Bob built the fourth Skylanders game around a prison break, a new kind of toy, and a mechanic that moves a villain’s voice out of the television and into a plastic portal on the coffee table. It is a clever idea, and for the most part it works.
Trailer, via Invision Game Community.
Kaos Blows Up Cloudcracker Prison
The story starts with Kaos, still chasing rule over Skylands. He finds Cloudcracker Prison, a fortress built entirely out of Traptanium, the magic substance that harnesses the power of the elements. The prison holds the most feared villains in Skylands. Kaos blows it up anyway, hoping to build an army from the wreckage.
The blast frees the Doom Raiders, led by the Golden Queen and her cohorts: The Gulper, Chompy Mage, Chef Pepper Jack, Dreamcatcher, Dr. Krankcase, and Wolfgang. Shards of Traptanium rain down on Earth as Traps. The player, as Portal Master, has to round up the escapees and put them back in the box.
It is a thin premise, but it does one job well. It gives every capture a face. Skylanders has always been a game about collecting toys; Trap Team is the first in the series where the thing you collect has a name, a voice and a grudge.
The Traptanium Portal Has a Speaker
The hardware is the headline. Players place toy figures on the Traptanium Portal, a near-field communication reader that scans an NFC chip in the base of each figure and activates that character in the game. That part is standard Skylanders. The new part is the trap.
Traps are a second class of collectible. Unlike figures, which bring characters into the game, traps store villains. Once defeated, those villains become playable characters who are more powerful than Skylanders. Stored characters can be carried to other consoles. The portal itself has a speaker built into its design, and that speaker is the whole trick: when an enemy is trapped, its vocals travel from the screen down into the portal.
That is a small piece of theater and a smart one. The villain is not just a menu entry. It is talking to you from the hardware on your table.
Trap Masters and Skystones Smash
Trap Team introduces the Trap Masters, a group of Skylanders who hit harder against trappable villains. It also adds Skylanders Minis, miniature versions of regular characters. The game brings in eighteen new Trap Masters, eighteen new core Skylanders, forty-six trappable villains and sixteen new mini Skylanders. Five reposed core Skylanders from earlier games and eight Eon’s Elite Skylanders with shiny finishes round out the shelf.
The side content is stronger than it needs to be. Skystones Smash is a number-based card game played in a tabletop style, the successor to Skystones from Skylanders: Giants. It is the kind of mini-game that eats an evening.
Switching Between Villain and Skylander
The core loop is generous. Players can switch between a villain and a Skylander at any point. In co-operative play, two players can share a trapped villain and take turns using it, which turns a single toy into a shared resource.
There is a catch. Villains run on a timer. The limit shrinks every time the player using the villain takes a hit. When the energy runs out, the villain is gone until it recharges.
That constraint is the best design decision in the game. A villain who could be played forever would flatten the difficulty and make the Skylanders themselves pointless. The timer makes the villain a burst — a tool you spend, not a mode you live in. It also gives co-op a rhythm, because the second player is always watching the meter.
Hidden quests tied to individual villains unlock exclusive upgrades. Captured villains can be stored in the Villain Vault in the game’s hub world.
Fred Tatasciore and Billy West Lead the Cast
The voice cast is deep for a kids’ game: Fred Tatasciore, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Matthew Moy, Laura Bailey, Alex Ness, John Paul Karliak, Matthew Yang King and Richard Steven Horvitz. That roster is doing a lot of work. A game about trapping villains and then listening to them talk needs performances that survive repetition, because the player will hear the same lines every time a trap fires.
A Bluetooth Portal on Mobile
Trap Team shipped on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo 3DS, Android and iOS. The mobile version uses a Bluetooth Traptanium Portal and optional touch controls. If the portal is not connected, the game still runs on touch alone.
The release dates: October 2, 2014 in Australasia, October 5, 2014 in North America, October 10, 2014 in Europe. Beenox co-developed with Toys for Bob. A sequel, Skylanders: SuperChargers, followed in September 2015.
The Fourth Skylanders Game, and the Best Idea in It
Skylanders: Trap Team is the fourth game in the franchise and the sequel to Skylanders: Swap Force. It is a 3D platform game, but the genre label undersells the mix: platforming, role-playing, hack-and-slash combat and adventure, played from a third-person perspective, in single player, multiplayer, co-operative and split screen.
The series had already asked players to buy a lot of plastic. Swap Force sold figures that came apart. Trap Team sells figures and traps, two separate lines, and the traps are not interchangeable with anything else on the shelf. That is a real cost, and it is worth naming plainly.
But the traps are also the only Skylanders accessory that does something the screen cannot. The portal speaker turns a capture into a physical event. The villain’s voice leaves the television and lands in a piece of hardware the player is already touching. No other game in the franchise has a moment that literal.
The fiction is serviceable, not memorable. Kaos is a means to an end. The Doom Raiders have names and silhouettes, and the Golden Queen leads them with some authority, but the campaign is built to move the player from one capture to the next, not to linger. The writing does not try for more, and it does not need to.
The villain timer is the mechanic worth studying. It solves a problem the series created for itself. Once you let players control the enemies, you have to stop them from simply becoming the new default character. Toys for Bob answered with scarcity, and the answer holds up. Short bursts, shared in co-op, recharged between uses.
The mobile build is the weak link. Touch controls are optional and the Bluetooth portal is optional, which means the version that travels is also the version that loses the speaker trick. The trapping mechanic is the reason to play Trap Team. Strip the portal out and you are left with a competent platformer and a card mini-game.
What the Traps Are Worth
Skylanders: Trap Team earns its place as the high point of the series’ middle years. The trap mechanic is not a gimmick bolted onto a sequel; it is the sequel. It gives the player a reason to care about the villains beyond defeating them, and it gives the hardware a job that justifies the shelf space.
The campaign is familiar, the story is thin, and the toy cost is real. None of that outweighs the portal. When a villain’s voice comes out of the plastic on the table, Trap Team does something no other game in the franchise does, and it does it on the first try.
KEY FACTS
– Score: 8.0/10, the published critical aggregate
– Developer: Toys for Bob, with Beenox
– Publisher: Activision
– Release: October 2, 2014 (Australasia), October 5, 2014 (North America), October 10, 2014 (Europe)
– Platforms: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo 3DS, Android, iOS
– New content: eighteen Trap Masters, eighteen core Skylanders, forty-six trappable villains, sixteen mini Skylanders
– Traps store villains as playable characters
– Sequel: Skylanders: SuperChargers, September 2015
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