NEW SKYLANDERS SERIES GAME: WORTH THE UPGRADE!

Skylanders has a whole new team of villains in town just for the holiday season. Their new installment is Trap Team and it is worth the upgrade!

For those not familiar with Skylanders, it is a very popular story-driven interactive video game that uses an electronic portal connected to the gaming platform of your choice. Characters are placed on the portal to bring the story/game to life. Players add in and drop out characters through chapters of play and engage in adventures, mini-games, activities and combat missions. Other games in the series include Skylanders: SWAP Force, Skylanders: Giants, and Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. The game is geared toward ages 6 to 12.

SkyLanders Trap Team Game
The newest game in the series once again includes our favorite villain Kaos but this time he has broken all of his villain "friends" out of prison. Kaos thought this would get the villains back into his graces but, nope, the villains have gone their own way. The villains’ allegiance is still to the Gold Queen who plays to take over Skyland.

We (the players) are the good guys — the Trap Team. The Trap Team is a band of giant-sized Skylanders. Our mission is to "trap" or capture the bad guys with our Traptanium-infused weapons and have them fight for us back in Skyland. Traptanium is a very precious and rare material that allows us, the good guys, to transform the villains into fighters for our side.

The game has 18 chapters with various battles and gates that the Trap Team moves through. At secret elemental gates, only the Trap Masters with Traps in hand can collect the valuable Traptanium treasures and move into those areas. (Elemental traps are available for sale individually — one trap comes with the starter pack.)


What my kid likes about the new Skylanders Trap Team Series:

• The traps are fun.
• You get to play as the villains once you trap them.
• Villains can talk to you when they are trapped.
• Story Scrolls. They are hilarious! He never used to read them but now he always does.
• Trapmasters are fun to play with because they can do more damage than the minis.

What my kid is not so crazy about:

• Must use Trapmasters to capture villains.
• You can only enter the elemental gates with the use of Trap Master characters.
• Villains have a limited life span; but the trade off is that the character does not lose health so they can do more damage while they are alive.

And what would make it even more fun:

• Tethering of the players can make multi-player play difficult since you have to stay close together; and the story line does not really explain "why" the characters need to be so close together

Bottom Line: Skylanders Trap team is just fun to play with. Players can play it alone or with a friend. There are quite a few new characters and accessories as with previous versions. Characters are forward compatible to play with but do not have trapping capabilities. The key new pieces for this game are the Traps and Trapmasters. As long as you have one of each type of trap and one Trap Master from every element, you can actively play the game.

Platforms: Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One

Starter Pack: Two Skylanders figures, two trap crystals, the portal and the game disc. 1 Video Game
NEW Traptanium Portal™, 2 Skylanders Figures, 2 Traps, 2 Character Sticker Sheets with Secret Codes, 2 Trading Cards, 1 Character Poster

Find out more at www.skylanders.com.