While the press didn't get to actually try Skylanders Trap Team at Activision's reveal event tonight, I was able to spend quite a bit of time talking with the developers and watching the demo (over and over and over again). Here's some of what I was able to take away from the first gameplay:
- Jumping is most definitely sticking around, despite the move from Vicarious Visions (developer of Swap Force) back to Toys for Bob (Spyro's Adventure, Giants) as the game's developer. I had my worries that jumping might leave, but one developer assured me that once they added jumping, they knew they'd never be able to take it back away.
- The game looks great. Obviously the game has a cartoony feel as always, but you can really see things smoothing out and looking a lot nicer on the next-gen systems graphically. Also, for an early build, I didn't see any noticeable bugs or clipping. The version of the game that was being played was on the PS4.
- On that note, as far as I could tell there was no specific features for the DualShock 4 touch pad in this game. Or if there was, none of the devs were using it (there were quite a few things they weren't permitted to show).
- I noticed that attacks were doing about double what my best Skylanders normally hit for (about 160 hit points for some attacks), but one dev explained to me that they had amped up the damage just for the effect of the demo (and so none of them would mess up and lose!).
- Boss battles feature many of the same things you've come to expect in the series - enemies changing forms, shockwaves to avoid and the like. The cool thing about this game is that you can hit your enemies with the same stuff now. For example, when you play as the captured Chompy Mage villain, you can send out shockwaves that hurt all enemies around you, something that you normally have to avoid.
- All of your favorite voice actors are back - Kaos, Flynn, Tessa and surely more. One dev told me that Patrick Warburton as Flynn and Richard Steven Horvitz as Kaos are such staples that the franchise just wouldn't be the same without them at this point.
- All old characters from the three previous games will be playable, and while the devs couldn't go into details with me, both that I spoke to did confirm that there will be some sort of special things cooked in for past characters (such as the chests only openable by Giants in Swap Force). There will also be some all-new areas that can only be unlocked using an attack from a Trap Master character.
- Two-player local multiplayer is still the way of Skylanders. No online, and no additional player support in this title.
- Trapped villains will be able to be instantly switched in and out during combat, but there can only be one trapped villain active at once and only one player can use the villain at a time when playing multiplayer.
- Traptanium crystals will be type-coded (either fire, water, earth, undead, air, life, tech or magic) and all trappable villains will need their respective crystal to capture them. If you defeat a villain and don't have the requisite crystal at that time, you can come back later to trap him or her, but you have to beat the boss a second time.
We've got plenty more Trap Team coverage incoming, so keep it locked to GameNGuide for all of your Skylanders news!
