The whimsical, colorful world of the Skylands is back, in Skylanders: Trap Team. All your favorite characters are back - quite literally actually, as you can dig them out of wherever you put them and put all of your existing Skylander characters to use in Trap Team if you have any characters from previous Skylanders games. Of course, there are a whole slew of new characters to collect and level up, designed and built specifically for Skylanders: Trap Team. Most notably, there are the members of the Trap Team, themselves. Trap Team Skylanders are larger than average, but smaller than Skylander Giants, featuring weapons forged of "Traptanium," making them the only Skylanders that can open certain gates and areas (and being represented on the figures, themselves, as being made of a translucent plastic). The Trap Team Skylanders each have an affiliated element and they can only open gates of that element, so in order to open all of the elemental Traptanium gates in the game, you will have to have access to a Trap Team Skylander for each of the elements, which includes the 8 that have been featured in previous games and unknown elements (I believe two, in fact), that have yet to be revealed. In the box, you'll get your first Trap Team member, Snap Shot, a water element Trap Team Skylander.

Speaking of the box, be careful when opening the box, as there is a cardboard trap organizer inside that will hold your traps in a tidy fashion and help you keep track of which one is storing which villain. This is a nice touch, but speaking as a collector and a long-time fan of the series, it's getting a bit difficult to find room to keep and display my collection. For that matter, with the traps (and the trap organizer), the characters and the portal, it's also getting difficult to find the room to keep everything in front of you and in arms reach when playing.

In addition to the other Skylanders mentioned above, there are also Mini Skylanders which are full-fledged purchasable and playable characters this time around, rather than the promotional side-kicks of previous games. These are tiny versions of some of the popular characters of previous games in the series and are cute as the dickens, with squeaky, high-pitched voices to match. Too cute.

The music in the series has been nice, to date, but I really enjoy the music in Skylanders: Trap Team. I have even let the game sit in the background, just listening to the music for hours, on occasion. Each villain has their own theme music which plays when you play as them and there are little interactive radios through the levels that will randomly select a "Request" and play the theme song for one of the villains. (Oh, and if you interact with a radio long enough, it usually spits out some coins. Just sayin'.)

In addition to the Skylander characters releasing with this installation of the Skylanders series, there are also Traps - little translucent plastic prism-like things that can store a defeated enemy and allow you to have them fight for you, rather than against you. If you've ever wanted to play as the bad guy, these traps give you that chance. If you beat the game - and you are able to find and buy a KAOS Trap, you can even take control of Skyland's public enemy number one himself, Kaos.

Most of the gameplay is very reminiscent of the previous games in the series, with 3D platforming, arenas and puzzles that are part of the environment, as well as 2D lock puzzles and 2D platforming bonus levels where you try to collect as many coins as possible. New types of gameplay to be found in Trap Team include Skystone Smash, a collectible card game that you play in-game against certain NPC characters in the various levels (and one character in the Skylander Academy hub), and a rhythm game where you rap against certain in-game characters to prove that they're not good enough to be the lead singer for the skeleton band that plays in the Skylander Academy. There is also a series of challenges that have been taken over by Kaos. This amounts to a survival mode with tower defense elements. There's also a box to protect from being opened by enemies and, should you fail, a bigger, badder enemy get released to try to take you out. Survive through the levels of the challenge to earn great rewards.

Multiplayer is possible, as well, allowing for two player local multiplayer with split-screen. However, you can almost feel like you're playing a multiplayer game when you're all by yourself. When a villain is riding shotgun in a trap, they will throw in some remarks to respond to various things you do, from winning a battle to previewing a character's soul gem to simply running low on health and the villain suggesting that you send them in for a bit. Several times, I was reminded of Ed McMahon's responses on the Johnny Carson show, and then I found that Broccoli Guy actually says "Hey-o" much like Ed McMahon when you switch back from Broccoli Guy to your Skylander. Too funny.

The Skylanders series is an interesting case, as it is designed to be appealing to younger players, with its bright, whimsical and colorful characters and environments, but is also appealing to older gamers who like collecting the toys. As such, the difficulty level tends to be a bit wide; it may be easy to play through the game, but it's another thing entirely to open all of the areas, beat the times, achieve all of the goals, and collect all of the in-game collectibles.

The game features a decent difficulty progression, with early levels being easier to play through and later levels adding more complexity and increased challenges to make things a bit more difficult. There are three different difficulty levels available at the beginning of the game (Easy, Medium and Hard), but you must select one when you start a new save game and stick with that difficulty for that save slot unless you decide to delete that save and start over. Luckily, there are four save slots, so if you find the difficulty to be too hard or too easy, you can simply start a new game with a different difficulty and, should you decide to return to the previous difficulty, you can resume your old saved game. It's especially nice that there are four slots, since once you have completed the game, you unlock an additional, harder difficulty level called "Nightmare." Once you have unlocked this mode, however, you will have finished the game once and will have leveled up your favorite characters quite a bit, most likely, and since these upgrades are stored in the figures themselves, it's really not like you're starting at square one when you start a new game in Nightmare Mode. Personally, I didn't find the first few levels to be very much more challenging in Nightmare than the game was in Medium difficulty when started with fresh characters. However, while I didn't find the game to be overly challenging, I did find it amusing and quite enjoyable to play and, with the many conflicting goals (seeing all the areas, unlocking all gates, playing through without changing characters and/or speed runs), the game gives you ample reason to replay the various levels.

If I was to point out one aspect that had was challenging at times for me, it would have to be the lock puzzles. As you proceed through the game, these can get fairly complex and, while you're not really penalized for messing up, you can't proceed until you successfully solve the puzzle. On a couple of occasions, this took longer than I felt comfortable with, so I can see this being frustrating for less mature players.

Anyone who played the original Skylanders game (Spyro's Adventure) all the way through will likely remember the final battle that dragged on and on. It literally had me viewing my Skylander figures more as ammunition than as characters there was so much turnover. Skylanders: Trap Team doesn't put you through nearly as much trouble in the final battle. It's tricky, yes, but possible. I actually made it all the way through that battle with just Snap Shot and Broccoli Guy. (As a side note, Snap Shot is the Trap Team Skylander that comes with the game and Broccoli Guy is a Life type villain, which I trapped using the Life trap that was also included with the game.)

The big gimmick here is the addition of the traps and, if you've been following the series, you'll probably agree that getting to play as Kaos is kinda a big deal. Mind you, the Kaos trap appears to be (at least at this time) a rare toy, so I expect a lot of fans will be touring the local (and, perhaps, not-so-local) toy stores in search of this special trap... which is sort of ironic, given the fact that the elemental traps can each hold a variety of baddies, while the much sought after Kaos trap can only hold Kaos. That said, Kaos is pretty over-powered and is pretty fun to play as, so he may just be worth it.

The series is known for dragging things out, releasing characters in waves and, as a result, having areas of the game that aren't reachable until players can get their hands on these specific characters. Well, this time around, it's more of the same, but worse. Not only do you not have the ability to get everything yet, you don't even know what you don't have. There are "Unknown" elements that have yet to be revealed; at least one, but I'm thinking it will be two separate elements. The villains that are of these Unknown elements are merely identified as being of Unknown elements and, since you don't know what the element is yet, you obviously can't have a trap of that element, so you can't trap those villains, yet. Later, once these elements are identified and the traps have been acquired, you'll have reason to revisit these levels and trap these currently untrappable enemies and open the currently unopenable gates.

Overall, the production quality is quite high. I only encountered one bug while playing the game: There was a level in which you can pick up and carry around the boards needed to build a bridge and after I left one area while carrying a bridge kit and the game forced me to drop the planks, when I arrived at the next bridge and tried to pick up the boards, it didn't offer me the option to do so. Eventually, JR Nip suggested that I switch characters. I did and was able to operate the bridges again, even after switching back to the other character. So, if you have that same issue, swap out characters to keep going.

Skylanders: Trap Team is highly geared toward collecting the toys, which can easily make the game a lot more expensive than it may appear at first. However, the fact that you can use characters from previous games and that friends can bring their characters over to play in your game help to provide options for those who don't wish to invest in the "collect them all" aspect of the game.

If you're a fan of the series, I highly recommend picking up Trap Team, as it's just more familiar goodness. Parents who are new to the series should make sure they know what they're getting into, whereas fans and collectors already know what they're getting into and we generally see each other at each midnight release being held at Toys R Us, Wal-Mart or Target.