Last week, Sidd was in Albany, New York to take a tour of developer Vicarious Visions studio. During the trip he got a chance to talk to the developers and get some hands on time with the game. In our first two feature articles (Part I, Part II, we took a behind the scenes look at the game talking about everything from the character creation to how the story was crafted. In this third and final article gives us some hands-on impressions of Swap Force for the Xbox 360.
The Skylanders series has garnered a cult-like following over the past couple of years and has sold millions of copies worldwide, which is to say nothing of the number of toy sales that has generated.
Just to double-down on something I've written before, Skylanders can be best described as a toy-game crossover that at first glance appears to be primarily aimed at children, However, if you dig a little deeper, you'll quickly learn that Skylanders offers something cool to players of all ages.
The core game has always been about switching between different characters on the fly, with each one featuring their own abilities and powers. The game comes with a number of action figures and a portal (that lets you switch characters). If you wish to switch a character, simply remove them from the portal and place your new character and the game instantly switches characters. If you have already built up a pretty large Skylanders collection, you'll be happy to know that the game supports past characters too.
SWAP Force takes the character swapping to a whole new and interesting level. Each character now features interchangeable top and bottom parts that can be combined with other characters. This allows for a total of 256 different character combinations, each with their own unique abilities and powers. When you think about it, the possibilities for experimentation seem almost endless. To keep it simple, your top is how you fight and your bottom is how you move.
I had played the game for a really short time previously, but this time around I spent about an hour or so with the first four levels of the game's story.
There was a mix of new Swap Force characters and older characters to experiment with during my hands on time. One thing I noticed was that there were several times the portal had a little trouble registering my characters when I switched them. I had to remove them and place them back on the portal until the game registered them. Aside from that problem, the portal worked well with both the older and newer characters. With so many characters to play with and so many possible combinations to create, it is really difficult to play the game with solely one character for a majority of the time. Certain situations lend themselves to a particular type of Skylanders.
Like I mentioned in our behind the scenes preview article, the characters tops and bottoms are connected by magnets. Every time you combine both elements you hear that great "click" sound letting you know your character is created.
The toys felt like they were of high quality and could go through some wear and tear. Just make sure you don't have children or pets who can hide them from you.
Another new feature is the ability to jump with your character. (SWAP Force being my introduction to the series, I am a little perplexed by how people played the first two titles without jumping!) The jumping introduces new elements such as puzzles, exploration and new combat abilities. In fact, some new characters can actually fly now. The game also features up to 20 bonus levels, a horde/survival type multiplayer cooperative mode and competitive multiplayer.
SWAP Force is the series' first entry onto the next generation consoles. That said, the current gen version of the game looks great. In fact, during our tour, I was able to see a Playstation 4 demo of the game and the visual difference between next gen and current gen wasn't very drastic.
I walked away pretty impressed by what I saw and played. The swapability elements introduce something that we've never really seen in games before. Having already pre-ordered the Xbox One and PS4, I think it's safe to say that Swap Force will be a title that I will be looking out for near launch.
Skylanders Swap Force is set for release in October for the PlayStation 3, Wii U, Wii, and Xbox 360, with the Xbox One and Playstation 4 version to follow in November.
- Sidd Masand
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