Context:

It seems to be bad form to make an “unconventional” review to be the fourth review posted on my website. Either way, the Skylanders Trap Team set for tablet is something that I wanted to talk about.



About a month ago Gamestop had a special sale for Pro-members and I ended up spending about twenty dollars and random things. A couple wall adapters, an ice cube tray, a charger, and the biggest thing I got, the Skylanders Trap Team starter set for Android and iPad. As a preface, I want to state that I’m not into Skylanders. I haven’t played any of the games, but I have purchased a couple sets (both the Bowser and Donkey Kong starter sets), and a Spyro Skylander. The same with Disney Infinity: despite owning quite a few, I have no interest in playing the game. I purchased this Skylanders Starter Set for 5$.

Parts:

The Skylanders Trap Team Tablet Starter Set comes with two figurines, two “traps”, a wireless Bluetooth Skylanders portal, and a Bluetooth Skylanders controller. It also comes with a display for the trap pieces, a checklist of figurines, and a few cards, but I doubt I’ll be touching on these items.

Figurines:

The first of the two figurines is a muscular and scaly dragon-like character named Snap Shot. He’s a water-type, meaning he’s weak to grass, electric. He has on gold armor, he’s holding a bow and presumably an arrow, but it ends up looking more like an Energy Sword from the Halo series. Either way, the figure does have some very nice detail, especially for the scales. I actually have no problem at all with this figurine. I like everything down to the bubble texture the character is standing on.

The second figurine is of Food Fight, a small green character with quills. He’s holding a tomato gun in his right hand, and in his left, a tomato. One incredibly small nitpick I have is the fact that he’s holding a tomato. Presumably, this tomato would be used to be stuffed into his tomato gun in order to reload it, but his tomato gun is full! The tomato gun he’s holding is obviously a two handed weapon, so in order to fire it once he’d have to just drop the tomato! I’m a bit less fond of this figurine. He’s staring at his gun with a bit of an inquisitive look, maybe it’s new in the context of the game. His teeth and mouth also seem just a bit odd to me, and he looks like an artichoke, which I assume is intentional.

Traps:

The “trap”… things, are substantially less interesting. One of them is a water type, and the other is a grass type. These are used in-game to capture your opponents and be able to play as them, which makes me think of the upcoming Mario Odyssey game. This also seems like a cool way to play as the Invader Zim character who I think is named Chaos. The water trap resembles a tiki totem with wings that look like gears. The grass trap looks like a hammer, looking Very similar to Thor’s.

Portal:



The Skylanders Portal is actually quite nice. It has a neat golden emblem in the front with a button and a small keyhole, right in front of where the trap emblems go.

The design of the top of the portal has a cracked glass design that lights up blue when it’s powered on, which is very visually appealing. One of my favorite aspects of the Skylanders Portal is the incredibly convenient hole at the bottom of the portal designed to hold the controller.

Controller:

Getting into the controller, it’s very interesting. It’s both my favorite and by far, least favorite part of the entire set. In my opinion, the controller is amazing. It has the ABXY layout of an Xbox controller. It also is lacking the Start and Select button, only having a small button used to sync the controller. It also doesn’t have left and right triggers, instead having an L2 and R2 button replacing each of them. The controller has a design showing all of the elements in the game on the front of the controller. It’s also quite lightweight, and small compared to any console controller.



I love the controller. It feels great in my hands, despite being very small. It’s the reason I bought the set in the first place! But that brings me into my least favorite part of this controller and this set: the controller, despite being Bluetooth, is incompatible with anything other than Skylanders Trap Team. It cannot connect to a PC (at least, it wouldn’t connect to mine), and when connected to your phone or iPad, it will refuse to work for any other games. There are also no third party drivers for it on PC, but it does seem that one was made for Mac, but according to the developer, it also seems spotty.

Ending:

The Skylanders Trap Team set is pretty great, even if it was quite irritating on my end. I bought it solely for the cool looking controller- I don’t even own a tablet. That being said, all of the parts seem to be higher quality than I expected, given the few other Skylanders that I own. All of the components are built well, and some have some very cool designs. I bought it on GameStop when it was in stock for 5.00$, and now it’s no longer in stock, and is going for only 2.00$. If you have one in a nearby store and you have any interest at all in Skylanders, I’d buy it. I feel like I’ve got 5$ in value just staring at all of the pieces and… Feeling the controller in my hands.