X
- E10+
- Activision
- E10+
- Activision
- E10+
- Activision
- E10+
- Activision
Skylanders Imaginators
Released On: Oct 16, 2016
79
6.2
Where to Buy
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Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 50 Critic Reviews
79
82% Positive
41 Reviews
41 Reviews
16% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 50 Critic Reviews
79
82% Positive
41 Reviews
41 Reviews
16% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Imaginators captures a magic that I’ve rarely felt since my late childhood, playing the aforementioned N64 platformers on a Winter’s afternoon. This is how you do games for younger people, this is how you do Toys to Life, this is how you do action platformers in general.
Skylanders Imaginators is one of the best games of the franchise. Create our own Skylanders is fantastic and the Sensei are a great addition. A great design of levels and a dozens of hours of action, fun and humor complete this great adventure.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 56 User Ratings
6.2
48% Positive
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
21% Mixed
12 Ratings
12 Ratings
30% Negative
17 Ratings
17 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 56 User Ratings
6.2
48% Positive
27 Ratings
27 Ratings
21% Mixed
12 Ratings
12 Ratings
30% Negative
17 Ratings
17 Ratings
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PlayStation 4
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PlayStation 4
Skylanders Imaginators is a great step for the franchise, far from perfect and still quite the drain on the wallet but fresh enough to keep even the most fatigued Skylander player (or parent) coming back for more. The addition of the joyous loot grind along with (finally) the ability to create your own Skylander, coupled with a lengthy yet colourful and downright fun campaign, Skylanders Imaginators shows that this is one toys-to-life franchise that isn’t going anywhere.
If you haven’t been a fan before, you won’t be a fan now. There’s not enough new to call this a revamp to the formula; it’s just the same, solid game that it’s always been, returning with the same things you loved or issues you may have felt.
Just when you might have expected the original Toys-to-Life franchise to be running out of steam, Activision has brought it back, revitalised and exciting. Imaginators might just be the best Skylanders yet.
Skylanders Imaginators introduces at last the character customization, which gives the player lots of possibilities and entertainment. Apart from this and the Skylanders Supercharger, there are no other improvements in this new installment.
For all its focus on customization, Skylanders Imaginators feels fairly paint-by-number. It makes some smart improvements, and its creation gimmick is oddly addictive despite some of its design drawbacks. Even so, this is the sixth entry in a long-running series, and it's showing its age.
Personally I really enjoyed the Skylanders series when I was younger and as I’ll admit they got worse and worse as the years went by, this game definitely had potential, it only didn’t succeed because the Toys To Life Genre had already been killed by frequent launches of Skylanders, Disney Infinity and the recent LEGO Dimensions
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PlayStation 4
I enjoyed this game, but I have my gripes with it:
1. Cutscenes: very repetitive, way to many of them, mostly unskippable, ruin your emersion and the flow of the game
2. Balancing: Some of the enemies have way too much health and hit way too hard, a way of getting more money out of you, because you basically need to buy additional figures
Otherwise the game is fine and I've played through it multiple times
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PlayStation 4
I have a LONG history with Skylanders, I’ve been playing since the first one came out and have been smitten ever since. Eventually collecting every toy got to be a bit much on my adult wallet so I took a break for a few years after Superchargers came out, so I never got to play this last Skylander game. But with the lovely benefit of pandemic unemployment money last year when everything was shut down, I finally completed my Imaginators collection, leaving me with every skylander that has come out! So after 5 years, is the game any good or is there a reason there hasn’t been another one since? Well... yes and no. Imaginators is a decent enough game, I know it got a lot of flack for the microtransactions (it was only a matter of time with this series) but I never felt the need to pay anything extra since you unlock so much stuff throughout the course of the game. For as much fun as the Imaginators & other new skylanders are to play, you can tell very early on there is MAJOR franchise fatigue going on. As with any yearly franchise, this was the 6th skylander game to come out in a row & you can tell the yearly releases have taken a toll on the quality of this entry. Right away the graphics & character models don’t really look that great & I played this on a PS4! The physical toys can look better at times. The moment to moment gameplay doesn’t feel as good as it used to either, maybe it was my younger brain thinking it was all these years, but after replaying the rest of the series a lil over a year ago, it’s definitely a problem I noticed growing with most of the sequels & seems to have reached its boiling point with Imaginators. Even the jumping doesn’t feel all that good and with some precise jumps needed in certain levels, it can get annoying. I’m tempted to say this is probably the longest and toughest skylander game of them all, don’t get me wrong the game is still very easy, but compared to the rest of the series, I actually lost a couple of skylanders in some fights lol. Also, right before the end of the game there’s this EIGHT MISSION FETCH QUEST for absolutely no reason other than padding this long Skylander game out even more. It was incredibly frustrating even though each of the missions are fairly quick, some of them take place in the exact same map with minor differences. Doing the same mission 3 times for the same goal is beyond tedious & I don’t see why this part of the game wasn’t just another level. Easily among the worst sections in any skylander game, maybe even the worst. Imaginators does things right though, the humor is surprisingly on point for a kids game, although not EVERY conversation has to end with a joke guys. Kaos is still an endearing villain even though his goals remain the same, Invader Zim’s voice will always be music to my ears! It’s a shame this ended up being the last Skylander game since it just kinda... ends abruptly. The final cutscene ends and you’re thrown back into the game, no credits or fanfare or anything lol. A rushed feeling is all over this game & some of the sequels before it and it’s at the point where it can’t be ignored. Skylanders also brought Crash Bandicoot out of retirement for this game and.. it’s ok? Maybe they just put him and Neo Cortex in as a nod to the remake of the original Crash trilogy they were working on at the time, but I guess we can thank the people behind Skylanders for bringing Spyro & Crash to their well deserved renaissance that they’re experiencing today. The game has its moments & I LOVED creating my own Imaginators, but can’t recommend it for much else, especially as a huge fan who’s played all the other games, watched the surprisingly fantastic Netflix show & thought SWAP Force was the weakest entry, Imaginators may have tied it for that title. Maybe in a decade or two when the inevitable revival of the Toys to Life genre comes, we can get a truly amazing send off or even a new start for Skylanders. Just please stop making game releases an annual thing lol. It never ends well.
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PlayStation 4
The sixth "Skylanders" game brought with it the ability to create your very own Skylander, as well as the long-awaited return of classic PlayStation icon Crash Bandicoot, but along with it also came rumors of the series taking a break. And sure enough, with declining sales and lower ratings on the television show "Skylanders Academy," Activision announced that there would be no new main series game in 2017. However, I nevertheless walked into the 2016 entry, "Skylanders: Imaginators" pretty intrigued, because sometimes a decline in sales may just be a result of franchise fatigue, and not the result of a drop in quality. Little did I expect, however, that "Skylanders: Imaginators" would be a major drop in quality compared to the previous games.
There's very little good to say about "Skylanders: Imaginators," other than that it retains a few of the standard things you'd expect the "Skylanders" series to have: some pretty visuals, decent music, and accessible gameplay for the younger audience it is geared for. So, at the very least, the game, as a whole, is functional, and it controls as smoothly as the other games in the franchise. And, at the very least, it is nice to see that some of the old "Skylanders," like Stealth Elf and Jet-Vac, actually play a role in this game's story.
All of those positives, however, are completely destroyed by the game's laundry list of problems. For starters, the game simply doesn't have enough to feel like a change of pace from "Superchargers." Instead, it just feels like your standard "Skylanders" game, to an unfortunately bland degree. Where the other games felt like more polished versions of the last, with enough small changes to keep them interesting, I can't even called this a "more polished" version of "Superchargers" when it literally just feels like a copy-and-paste of that game, even with the "new" minigame "Creation Clash," which is "Skystones" from "Skylanders: Giants" to a literal tee. Hell, I'll go as far as to say that it doesn't even feel like a copy-and-paste because the gameplay is so dialed-back compared to the last few titles. There's no new content for old Skylanders, the game is completely incompatible with old Traps, and while the "racing" minigame is still there, your old vehicles are inherently useless in the context of the main story mode. The gameplay also begins to feel very repetitive in the boss fights, which all follow pretty much the exact same format, even on the incredibly anticlimactic final boss fight. Oh, and if you're like me and you thought "Superchargers" underutilized it's concept, get ready, because "Imaginators" is even worse in regards to actually utilizing its "gimmick." I almost forgot the game introduced a new concept because of how little of a role the "Imaginators" actually had in this game. Even though the game gives you a lot of chests filled with collection tools, it's not difficult to run through the entire game without creating a single Skylander. Trust me, I did it. And finally, while I liked that the story gave us characters from the older games, the fact that the stakes really weren't high at all this time around (especially after "Superchargers"), and the lack of a really satisfying ending really ruined the game's extremely bland story.
I'm sure you can tell from that novel that I did not like this game, and it's unfortunate, because as a "Skylanders" fan, I don't want to see the series end with a whimper, but unfortunately, the damage is done: beyond the declining toy/merchandise sales and lower TV ratings, "Skylanders: Imaginators" is by far the weakest game in the entire franchise, and I can't even recommend this to the most die-hard of "Skylanders" fans. If you're a young child, that's different, but if you're not, I'm gonna suggest that you pass on this one. It's a shame to see it end like this, but leave it to Activision to completely destroy another novel concept like they did with "Guitar Hero" and "Tony Hawk."
Final rating: 4 out of 10 "Bad"
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PlayStation 4
Skylanders Imaginators is by far the worst entry in the series, as well as the most monetized. It's no wonder this game was the last real game in the series, considering how much they screwed up with it. The gaming is filled with tedious puzzles, not actually challenging puzzles mind you, they're just so boring to do and take so long to finish. It's obvious these puzzles were made to pad out the play time, considering how short the levels are in the actual game. What's even worse is the fact that all the characters explain the puzzles to you, every single time, even the most obvious ones. Yes the game is for kids, but kids don't need to be lectured on how to push blocks every minute. Combat encounters in the game are also scarce. With the first games, combat encounters were around every corner, but in this one, there are about three major combat encounters and one doomlander fight per level. This is garbage when you realize skylanders is supposed to be a baby's first beat 'em up, considering your spending more time doing tedious puzzles rather than fighting crazy magical goons. Another thing is this games insane level of childishness. Skylander games were always childish, no argument there, but they never felt this childish. The most embarrassing parts of it was the plot point **** damn guacamole monster, which not only felt so dumb and childish compared to other more interesting and compelling boss monsters in the series, but was just unfunny and dare I say cringe-inducing. Not to mention other cringy things like the god-forsaken "selfie-stages" which felt so out of touch even when it first came out. One last dumb thing was the area called the golden arcade, which is actually just a casino. Kids aren't stupid toys for bob, they know what a Casino is, and its even more when you have a gambling system in the game. That's right this game has a loot box system to help kids get parts for their imaginators by gambling real world money in a hope they'll have a chance at getting a really cool part. Absolutely disgusting especially when this game is marketed for god damn six year-olds. This game is riddled with the other problems in the games, which if your familiar with the series you already know. It's a shame the games had to die like this, they could've grown up and matured with their audience like other continuing series do, but instead they got even more childish, to the point where this game feels like an add for the **** tv show. The only saving grace for this series is the rumor that activision is planning a more mature but still characteristically childish reboot for the series, which I would be on board with. The success of amiibo still show that there is hope for the toy game fad to be more than a fad, or at least for skylanders to out live the fad, and I want skylanders to be something I can go back to with out feeling like a man child for doing so. This game has potential, and has a fully grown, college-age audience it can appeal to. But until the series returns, this game is the bullet that killed this series, and I can't forgive it for that.
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PlayStation 4
Summary Use the power of your imagination to create Imaginator Skylanders to battle in the ultimate adventure alongside the almighty Senseis to save Skylands.
Rated E +10
for Everyone +10
Platforms:
- Xbox One
- PlayStation 3
- PlayStation 4
- Wii U
- Xbox 360
- Nintendo Switch
Initial Release Date: Oct 16, 2016
Developer:
- Toys for Bob
Publisher: Activision
Genres:
