Skylanders Giants

I’ve been given a new task of getting rid of all games that involve peripherals, mainly because the wife is fed up of having 24 Skylander toys dominate the shelves (I didn’t buy them all!). I set to work on this task thinking that completing Skylanders Giants would be the end of it… but it turns out they are backwards compatible for Skylanders Superchargers, so they’ll be hanging around for a little while yet.

Anyway, Skylanders Giants sees you use the toys and portal of power to revisit Skylands to save it from Kaos again. He is the worst villain ever, even by kid’s standards – full of bad guy cliché and has absolutely no reason for wanting to take over Skylands other than to create a plot to the game. And it doesn’t really need him in this regard.

The main component of the game is obviously the ‘toys to life’ concept of placing the Skylander toys on the Portal of Power and playing with them in the virtual game. It’s a pretty solid concept, the only problem with this being that if you want to go everywhere in the game, you won’t be able to unless you buy additional Skylanders outside of the starter pack. Essentially, it’s a game that costs money in addition to the game for the full experience. In terms of achievements though, it has been developed to be completed without the need to buy additional Skylanders.

I found the gameplay to be laborious and slow. The game is spread over 16 levels and while some Skylanders do have the ability to move slightly faster than others, generally speaking its snail’s pace for most of it.

Graphically, it’s fairly standard cartoon graphics with environments that prevent you from dying by having invisible walls surrounding you at every turn. This sort of goes hand in hand with a lack of jumping and preventing any kind of inventive exploring along with protecting you from insta-death a lot of the time. However, a lot of the environments aren’t very well thought through and there are lots of points where you can get completely stuck on your surroundings, forcing a reload or mucking around with which Skylander you have on the portal.

Musically, it’s so un-diverse and hollow that I think it’s another one that could cause young children to develop unconscious depression. This, along with the fact that the levels themselves are unnecessarily drawn out, is not a good combination.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

In terms of an achievement list, I would say it’s 50% designed for children and 50% for adults and masochists. The game will award you 14 achievements for playing the game’s 16 levels without going out of your way, however there are 16 other achievements for doing something specific in each level. Most of these are linear and will be done just by playing the game in no particularly targeted way.

However, some of the these are fairly tricky and annoying, the most notable of which is Chapter 6 where you have to shoot down some specific flying enemies during robot ‘vehicle’ sections. Some of these enemies give you seconds to shoot them and this is combined with a terrible shooting mechanic where the bullets only sort of go where you are aiming. This leads to a lot of checkpoint reloads, retries and repeated dialogue.

There are tons of collectibles throughout the levels however, the achievements for getting them are limited to requiring 10 ship upgrades, 10 story scrolls and getting all of the collectibles in just one level, not all of them. You also need to beat the time trial on the same level for an achievement. This is potentially to do with the fact the achievement list is designed specifically to be completed by just the 3 starter Skylanders that come with the game.

Throughout the game, you will come across three battles that take place in arenas against waves of enemies. This then unlocks an arena battle mode on your hub ship. You are then required to play through a large and repetitive amount of arena battles for another achievement.

There are another three achievements I would consider a pain in the ass. The first one of these is for playing a minigame on the ship where you shoot projectiles out of the sky. There are three different mini games and they are random so first you need to get the right one which just so happens to be the hardest of the three. Once you’ve got the mini game, you need to do a perfect run. This can be frustrating but thankfully, once you’ve got the right mini-game, you can just die every time you get hit to restart. The painful part is if you try to do this before completing the main game, the mini game will lock itself out until you complete the next mission.

There is a massive grind of an achievement for amassing 65,000 gold with one Skylander. This is totally pointless as it means stacking so much gold you won’t use. Thankfully this carries over across games and some of mine had a lot already on them.

The last one is for completing the game on Nightmare mode and this is obtuse because Nightmare mode doesn’t  unlock until you complete the game once. So you have to play through the whole thing twice if you want 100% and this is just as likely to kill you from boredom that anything else. On top of that, the enemies do silly amounts of damage to you and they are very spammy with their attacks, especially towards the end of the game, filling the screen up with near unavoidable lasers that kill you with one hit. I had the luxury of having a lot of Skylanders but if you just have the base game ones, not only is this a chore but it’s a hard one to boot.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Skylanders Giants is a very middle of the road game with an expensive gimmick that doesn’t really excel. It’s not an advert for getting the rest of the series and I won’t be doing so. I do already have Skylanders Superchargers but that will be the last game I play in the series.