Skylanders SuperChargers review: wheels up

Going on four years now, Skylanders continues to improve and impress and not just in its eclectic design of wondrous toys, the video game too seems in a race with itself to always outdo its predecessor.

This year, developer Vicarious Visions delivers a vehicle-themed sequel that brings with it a seismic shift in the way you play the game's main campaign and a host of additions meant to extend the life of the title well past completion. Cooperative online and local play, Mario-Kart-esque racing, an improved version of Skylander's in-game card game, daily adventure challenges and more help to soften the blow of the game's high price of entry.

Most importantly though, all of that content, all of the care shown in sculpting toys and crafting code, comes together to deliver an experience that is packed with surprises and never gets dull, be the player a child, a parent, or even a cantankerous teen.

The biggest change that Superchargers brings to the Skylanders franchise is the addition of vehicles. The eponymous Superchargers of the game are character toys that match up with specific cars, planes or boats. While any character, even the characters from previous games, can use any vehicle, when you match a Supercharger with their ride, the pairing gets a bonus. As with Skylanders' many character toys, the vehicles each have their own abilities and are upgradable. Though where characters have a skill tree they invest in to unlock new abilities, vehicles are upgraded by earning new parts and swapping them out to mix-and-match your way to a personal favorite.

After examining one minutely-detailed car, my son Tristan, every bit a surly 14-year-old grump, gave the little toy a nudge and watched it roll a few inches across the carpet in front of our television.

"That's cool," he said, almost with regret.

And it is.

The best part of the vehicle missions is how cooperative play works. Instead of having the two local players hop into two vehicles and then try to deal with the visual cacophony of high-speed, button-mashing, split-screen action gaming, Superchargers drops both players into one vehicle. One of the players focuses on driving while the other handles the weapons. It's an excellent pairing that made the cooperative play something to look forward to, and improved upon the basic elements of those action vehicle missions.

As much as I enjoyed playing through the game's many vehicle missions, it was the on-foot gameplay that dazzled the most.

Each setting in the game's story seemed to up the outlandishness and expectations of what the developers might drop you into next. I won't bulletpoint the specifics of everything the game delivers, because some of the joy of playing through Superchargers was in discovering just how eclectic it is. But I will say the missions seemed designed to fete the history of gaming. We'd be playing through a level that reminded me of LittleBigPlanet or Rampage or Tempest. I can't remember how many times Tristan or I would look at the other grinning and just say something like "Man, this is awesome."

The levels play with gravity, with humor, with painterly backdrops and size. There are even clever tweaks at some of gaming's tropes. Just when you think you've seen it all, you find yourself sitting back down to do something new and spectacular.

The best part is that the game never really ends.

The racing can be played and replayed either from Supercharger's Academy — the hub of the game — or from the start menu. It comes with four maps and supports online and local co-op play. While it likely won't live up to the latest Mario Kart, I found the racing to be well worth revisiting. There's also the ability to play hands of reworked collectible card game Skystones Overdrive either against the AI or in-game with online friends.

Once completed, the Academy becomes a sort of one-stop-shop for this sort of after-game play. Along with those extra games, you can pick up daily new missions in the game's levels, take on challenges and decorate the place with collectibles.

And of course, the game still does include optional, locked away content that can only be played with additional purchases. The side stories in the game, most of which have to be unlocked with new purchases of vehicles or characters not included in the starter pack, aren't very simple to find. Instead of giving you a place to pop in and select those missed missions, players will have to either remember which mission they were located in or play through the whole game again.

While the in-game advertising for these unlockables seems much less egregious than in previous games, it's still there and those locks do make certain elements of the game feel a bit anemic.

The game is a vehicle-centric title, not a car-centric one. But the starter pack only comes with that one type of vehicle. If you want to see what it's like to fly in the game or race on top of or underneath the waves of Skylands, you're going to need to buy the toys to do it. And as fun as those driving levels and courses are, the optional sea and air missions are incredible, and the twist those vehicles bring to racing help set it apart from other kart racers.

After beating the game, there are also ten elementally-aligned vehicle missions that can be played if you have the character with the right element.