Skylanders Giants: Playing with Portals - Preview
by Daniel Share-Strom , posted on 15 June 2012 / 5,951 Views
What an ingenious marketing scheme Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure was. Make a kid-friendly action game where you recruit characters not by finding them in-game, but by buying them in-store. Put one of the many available figures on the portal of power, and BAM! Toy Story turns into reality as you see your action figure come to life on the big screen. Kids were mesmerized, and they badgered their parents into spending untold millions on additional accessories on top of the original game purchase.
Now, where do we go next? Declare the idea a success and move on to an original project? Hah, no. This is Activision we’re talking about — it’s sequel time, and it probably will be for the next five years, too. Luckily, from what I played at their E3 booth, Skylanders Giants is still shaping up to be a quality way to spend some time with your kids.
Having made such a large time and cash investment in the original, the first question that will be on a lot of minds is if the two games will be cross-compatible. To a degree, yes. The new Giant toys will not be usable in the first Skylanders. However, all characters released for last year’s game are compatible with this year’s edition, and all of their hard-earned levels and stats will be well intact. The level cap has been raised from 10 to 15, so even if you maxed anyone out in the first game, that character will have plenty to do here.
But you want to know about the new guys, right? From the small selection available to me, I picked the wooden Giant, Tree Rex. This lumbering tough guy (‘lumbering’-- ‘cause he’s a tree, get it?) will come packaged with the game, and is capable of dishing out serious amounts of hurt. He can pound the ground with his giant, glowing arm, or dash into any foes too dumb to get out of the way. Tree Rex is useful for solving puzzles, as I used him to push huge boulders off of cliffs in order to create makeshift bridges. Eventually I switched to Bouncer, a delightful robot with a unicycle instead of legs and pistols for index fingers. This guy brought some much-needed range to the proceedings, especially when I got to the final endurance round which tossed enemy after enemy at me.
The last new character I tried was Pop Fizz, though he was certainly not a Giant. A tiny goblin who runs around with beakers of potion, he can either whip them at enemies or drink them in order to transform. Different potions bring about different changes, though I’m partial to the one that just makes him go completely berserk. Eventually, however, I switched back to Tree Rex, whose physical strength finished things much quicker than Pop Fizz’s magic ever could.
Parents can look forward to lighter wallets when Skylanders Giants launches for all major platforms this October.
