emeraldzoroark
Emerald Sparx
Gems: 4635
|
#31578 Posted: 23:26:35 11/07/2019
Sorry for the wait. Time to review Skylanders Swap Force on 3DS
Gameplay: The gameplay is mostly the same as the previous games, but it seems to strike a balance between SSA and SG. Many areas have fast-paced platforming areas but there’s also more combat. I found the combat to be better than Giants, but still slow. Enemies had more health than they should. Although I did play on hard difficulty, so that’s fine I guess. There are some puzzles in the game, but... they suck. They’re like the lock puzzles from the console games, but they’re incredibly slow and way too easy. The main difference in gameplay however... you can now use more than 2 Skylanders per level. Just pick an element in the bottom screen and you can switch to any Skylander you’ve registered. It’s slow and clunky, but I feel that it’s good to not be limited while playing the game. Unless you have a big collection. Then the game is too easy. But that’s true for any Skylanders game.
Boss Fights: This game has 3 boss fights. All against Moneybone. The first 2 are fun enough, but I genuinely love the final boss. Maybe because of the fact that I’ve done it over 200 times easily. The boss fights are all “fight some enemies, fight Moneybone’s mech, repeat,” but they’re still fun. Unless you want to do the challenges. Then they aren’t fun.
Story: Count Moneybone is trying to turn the whole world undead with his Immortalizer ray so you have to stop his robot army. Not much else really.
Characters: Flynn and Hugo are pretty much the same. Not many new characters were introduced other than Moneybone. He’s honestly a really fun villain who actually decides to fight you a few times. He also just assumes you surrender the first time you meet him, which is great.
The Ferryman is a mood though.
Level design: As I said, the levels have a nice mix between combat and platforming. This is way better than in Giants where there are long stretches of just... running until you can do something else. Most of the levels were pretty fun, aside from some Swap Zones I’ll go over later.
Presentation: I never mentioned this in my other reviews, but this game genuinely has great 3D effects. I remember spending loads of time looking at the 3D models in the Collection Vault. But anyway, one issue I have was how slow some parts of the game are. Not like gameplay, but the menus. Especially when picking a Swap Force Skylander. The icons don’t show up for a few seconds, and you can’t press the arrows to swap right away. It kinda hinders the game.
Side Content: There’s not much here, unless you got the Adventure Packs. They’re pretty fun. The Elemental Gates are good too, but some of them are platforming ones where if you fall, you go all the way back to the beginning.
Gimmick: This game allows you to dismember the characters the game expects you to like and- hang on, I’ve made this joke before. Well anyway, the premise is the same really. Each Swaplander has their own Swap Force Meter that, no matter how much is leftover in the meter, you have to wait until it charges up again to use it, which sucks. There are different Swap Zones available in the game;
Climb: They’re ok, but they’re basically areas where you can’t jump.
Rocket: They’re pretty bad, you sometimes don’t get enough from the meter to get to the checkpoints.
Speed: These are the best ones. You can use the speed ability to slow down time and move faster. These are usually the most fun parts of the game.
Bounce: These ones suck. The distance you bounce is very inconsistant which leads to a lot of falling.
Spin: These are ok. You float through tornados. That’s it.
Sneak: These are terrible. The game is pretty vague on how the first Sneak Zone works, leading to many deaths. A lot of it is waiting for the meter to recharge.
Teleport: These are fun. You can float up through an invisible maze to get to where you need to go.
Dig: Normal parts of levels but you need to dig under stuff. Not much else.
Roster of Characters: I used Free Ranger, Rattle Shake and Volcanic Eruptor. And the bottom halves of other Swap Force characters. Free Ranger is mediocre, even before his data got reset to level 1 for some reason. Rattle Shake is an actual god in this game, his snakes just destroy everything. Eruptor is great too, but his Wow-Pow is... eh. It leaves you way too open for attacks.
Portal of Power: The portal is even more compact this time, so that’s nice. I like this more than the previous one just for this fact alone. Not sure if the design or better or worse though. The future 3DS portals are just the same as this, so don’t expect me to write about them.
How Well The Game Supports Older Figures: Like the console version, I used Chill, Ninjini, Drobot, Prism Break and Sunburn. While Ninjini was slow and not very good, the other 4 performed amazingly, so old Skylanders are still good in this game.
Overall, this game is much better than the other 3DS games. I would even say it surpasses the console version of SSF at times. I had that much fun.
SG>SSA>SSF3DS>SSA3DS>SSF>SG3DS
---
Soon.
|