Skylanders Trap Team review: figure study

First, and perhaps most important to Activision, it’s a mechanism for selling expensive, high-margin toys to a large audience of children and dedicated collectors. There are few properties that have been able to take over both the electronics and standard toy sections of retail to such a degree. The game goes out of its way to push these toys on you, and a large amount of content is gated in such a way that you need a wide array of toys and accessories to see everything the game has to offer.

Trap Team is shameless about using every hook it can to get you to buy toys, as you’ll need to buy new figures and the titular plastic traps to play the game in the most enjoyable way. Which is the second, and perhaps most important aspect of this game to players: It’s fun, especially when played with a friend. The development team clearly cares about the game and its presentation, and it offers much more variety and gameplay than it needs to in order to sell those ever-present toys. Trap Team delivers on the high price point, and then some.

The Skylanders series consists of basic combat and exploration in a bright and colorful world filled with interesting and broadly-drawn characters. You aren’t simply given an army of pocket monsters with which to do battle, you have to place specific toys on a physical portal to play as that character in the game, and when a character loses all their health they have to "rest" while you play as another Skylander.

If you were worried that the Skylanders franchise was going to ease up on the hard sell when it comes to toys, don’t worry: Trap Team has learned a few new tricks to get you to buy as much as possible.

Trapping a character leads to a neat audio illusion where the sound of their voice fades from the television speakers and begins to come through the built-in speaker on the portal as a hidden light causes the plastic trap to blink along with the words. It’s a simple magic trick, but it gives you the feeling of bringing characters from the game into the real world.

It’s fun to dig through your pile of traps to find the right one to grab an enemy you can later use in the game itself, but it all begins to add up when each of those traps costs $7. Children will be asking for more traps so they can play as their favorite enemy, and of course they’ll want at least one toy of every type so they can find all the hats and trinkets that allow you to customize each character. It’s a system designed to separate you from your money, and it’s brutally efficient at doing just that.

The game is excellent at rewarding you for spending money, but it’s also a sort of transitional game for players who are getting ready for more complex titles.

Trap Team almost acts as a sort of training device for young children who may grow into other genres as they get older, as the game provides basic versions of tower defense games, trading card games, simple flying levels, side-scrolling classical platforming and even sly references to MOBA design and bullet-hell shooters. It’s not such a large leap from the newest version of the "Skystone" card game in Trap Team to Hearthstone, after all.

Trap Team also mimics family films that hide clever jokes for parents. "I have not been using all my powers to defeat you," one villain tells you during a fight, "I have merely been incrementally increasing the difficulty!"

Captured villains are also given the chance to redeem themselves by doing good deeds in their own side-missions, and from time to time they discuss the rewards of doing good things for others. This balances out the sometimes annoying running commentary each boss gives you from the speaker in the portal. Trap Team feels like video game boot camp, which is the perfect thing for children growing up in houses filled with gaming consoles. I’ve played with my five year-old all the way up to my 12 year-old, and later finished the game by myself. It was enjoyable in each context, and I plan to go back and play on the higher difficulty levels to level up my characters even further.