Skylanders Trap Team lets you use villains as teammates

Put your enemies to work for you

Activision's Skylanders series is nothing if not innovative. A pioneer in the toys-to-screen mode of play, every generation of Skylanders toys brings something new to the table (or little glowing platform) to keep them ahead of the game. Two years ago it was giants, last year it was swapping hero parts, and this year it's capturing the game's most dastardly villains and getting them to work for you. And does it look good.

After persistent series villain Kaos destroys the Skylands' crystal version of Alcatraz, pieces of the powerful Traptanium are scattered throughout the world along with all the baddies that were previously imprisoned there. It is now the task of the Trap Masters to round up the wayward villains, but it's more than a clean-up mission: every jailbird you defeat can be captured and used as a teammate, tagging in for your Skylander, up to and including Kaos himself.

For that you'll need Traptanium traps, small vial-looking toys that can be loaded up right beside your hero on the game portal, which can be taken out and swapped at will just like any other toy. Baddies must be caught with a trap set to their associated element (one of a possible eight), but if you don't have the right trap or don't want to swap out, they can be transported to an in-game vault for later use. You can also share your captured villains with others as easily as you can share your Skylanders, with cross-console and backwards compatibility; Trap Team will be available for all major last and new gen consoles, and will support all previous Skylanders releases. Combine that with 16 trap masters, 8 new categories of villains, and a whole new world to explore, Trap Team makes for an all-encompassing experience.

Want to know more? Check out the following slides for screenshots and info!

You'll have a bunch of new Skylanders to play, including a bow-wielding crocodile and a tiny T-Rex with a jetpack

And you can still play with your old Skylanders just as easily

The villains you capture have plenty of personality too, like a guitar-riffing werewolf and rough-and-tumble pinata

You capture them in these little things...

...and they load right into the gamepad beside your Skylander

They can assist you for a limited time, even leaving behind helpful healing and offensive items when they go