So I played Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure with all the new figures I got from Gamestop's buy 2 get 3 free sale. Turns out some of the figures I thought would work in the first game, didn't, so I had to pick up a few more. Why? Because this game encourages new figure purchases every minute of gameplay.
First of all, the more figures you have of a particular element, the bigger a boost you get. There are eight elements and four figures per element. The starter pack my friend Mark had came with a poster that shows you all the core figures for the first game. (see pic)
Yea, that's a lot of figures. I had all four earth element figures but none of the life element ones. What made me go get a life element figure or two (and Mark needed Earth and Fire element figures) is the game suggests you switch figures all the time. Within a level, you may be asked to change figures three for four times. Now, you don't have to, but you will get a boost if you do, which can help.
Then there are special areas that can only be unlocked by figures of certain elements. What do you get by playing these side missions? Treasures chests and a new hat, which gives you special boosts to your abilities, which can really help. So it behooves you well to have at least one of each element to unlock all the special areas you come across. That's a minimun of 8 figures.
Also there are Hero Challenges in the hub world. Each one is tied to a specific figure and, if completed, gives you an ability boost. Now, you can do these with any figure, but it's nice to do it with the one it's made for.
Later on, I found out there are special action packs of figures that include a new level and unlock new abilities for certain figures. Darn, this game doesn't really require you to have a lot of figures to beat it, but boy does it give you as many reasons as possible to want more figures.
It's fun though. I loved changing characters on the fly, or choosing another character when one got knocked out in a boss fight.
The game is just like Diablo or Gauntlet but with a few environment puzzles and light platforming (I kept trying to jump like in a platformer, because it looks like one, but you can only jump on jump pads). You play through levels in isometric view and use your abilities like spells in Daiblo. There's a hub world where you can upgrade abilities and gain new ones which you pay for with the treasure that you find. Each figure has a memory chip that records all your progress with that character. When buying used figures, I could've just used the saved abilities and level progression already there, but I decided to reset them all so I could level and choose abilities myself.
I didn't quite finish the game the weekends I played it, but my friend Mark did, and I watched him beat the final boss. He had some trouble with that one and had to grind for levels a bit to beat it.
With my 2016 plan of playing new games first, I may not get to the other Skylanders games, but maybe SuperChargers, which came out in 2015, and which, I heard, didn't do as well because of Disney Infinity. I wonder if this is the end of Skylanders. We'll see.
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