Skylanders Battleground app review

Skylanders Battlegrounds

Price: $6.99

Skylanders Battlegrounds by Activision Publishing, Inc. is a strategic combat game for your iPad.

The Skylanders franchise is built on a spin-off of the Spyro the Dragon series and gives you integration with the Portal of Power.

You can control up to two characters at once. Your goal is to defeat Kao’s warlord army. You’ll drag your finger across a grid to tell your Skylanders where to move. The game is turn-based because when you move, so will your enemies. If your character(s) happen to land on the same space as the bad guys, a battle will commence.

You’ll have to point to the bad dudes you want your guy to attack. The bad guys will fight back, of course, and you’ll have to survive waves of enemies. If you do survive, you’ll get virtual currency you can then use to buy stuff. You’ll also earn experience points and other fun stuff.

The app itself is $6.99 but if you want to play using the Mobile Starter Pack, it’s $49.99. This gives you a promo code to download the app, three different Skylanders figures, the Portal of Power, and a Platinum Treasure Chest. This bundle is the best way to go if you plan on making in-app purchases because it also works with Lost Islands and Cloud Patrol. You can also purchase Skylanders characters individually.

Features of the game include more than 30 Game Center Achievements you can unlock; amazing abilities to unlock for each of your characters; fun quests; and the ability to swap your Skylanders into and out of battle using your Portal of Power.

Skylanders Battlegrounds was updated to Version 1.1.0 on December 7, 2012. The update added new content, made some performance improvements, improved gameplay, and fixed a bug. The current version has 936 customer ratings with an average of 4.5 out of five stars. Feedback comments appear to be mostly negative, with complaints of the upload not loading and prices increasing across the board.

I’m not a huge fan of this type of gameplay but the graphics are good and the integration with the figures is fun. It’s disappointing if they’ve made the update only to increase prices; given the price of the Mobile Starter Pack, you’d think the developers might be a little more generous.

For: iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad with iOS 5.1 or later. Skylander Battleground is optimized for iPhone 5.