It’s a simple system that’s spiced up thanks to a variety of special abilities for your Skylanders and your opponents. Some enemies drop bombs that must be avoided. Others ignite patches of the ground on fire. Some rush in and attempt to surround your heroes. To combat these baddies each Skylander has three special abilities (two of which must be purchased with in-game currency). Some are as simple as dealing extra damage or erecting a damage-blocking bubble shield, but some Skylanders have more exotic abilities like enemy poisons and party heals.The combat is accessible and fun - it’s just tuned too lightly. Sure you can move your Skylander out of that pool of fire, but why bother? It barely does any damage. You can carefully manage your cooldowns or you can just use basic attacks to whittle down enemies. If you do manage to lose a Skylander, it costs just 100-300 coins to summon in another, and each battle nets anywhere from 1000-4000 coins. So it isn’t a matter of winning, it’s just a matter of how thoroughly you’ll win. The stakes are always low.
Of course, this is only true for experienced gamers. The forgiving combat makes more sense when you think about a youngster that might want to use his favorite two Skylanders no matter what, instead of a gamer like me, that always tries to have a balanced duo of one melee and one ranged character.Additionally, although the included enemies all have interesting tricks up their sleeves, there simply aren’t enough of them. Over the 20-mission campaign I fought the same 8-10 enemies over and over – hundreds of times. Each mission also feels overly similar. One cutesy campaign has me collecting stolen cheese. In another it’s stolen brooms. In another still it is stolen balloons. There’s no real difference. The combat encounters and missions don’t feel distinct.
Gamers that purchase just the $7 stand-alone app will initially only have access to two starter Skylanders. Over the course of the adventure players earn enough premium currency to unlock 8-10 more – one from each Skylanders element and maybe a couple exras. The game is also available as a $50 physical package that includes a Bluetooth Portal of Power and three Skylanders characters. The portal allows players to hot-swap any Skylander in and out of combat at any time – very cool for gamers that already have a collection of figures. But considering that the portal only supports iOS devices, the $50 price tag feels a little steep. Thankfully gamers can also enter a Skylanders link code to access the digital version of that character.
Verdict
Skylanders Battlegrounds looks and sounds great, but the undemanding combat is unlikely to satisfy anyone but the youngest of gamers. Swapping any of the 50+ Skylanders in and out of combat on-the-fly to activate key special abilities is still a great use of the growing roster of colorful characters, though. If you already have a huge collection of Skylanders, think of Battlegrounds as a $7 investment to get even more fun out of them. But it's not the main event.
