I bought Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, and I hated it :(

I watched the Quick Look, and it looked like a lot of fun. Costly, but still fun. So I went all in, bought the starter pack, one extra character (Whirlwind from Target), and three $19.99 packs (one character pack and two level packs). I was so excited about the game that I opened up the starter pack in the car to look at all of the pieces! It's been quite a while since I was so excited about a game.

As soon as we got home, we fired up the game, and we played 6 chapters in co-op, using only the three characters that came with the starter pack. I didn't open any of the other packs, just in case I didn't like the game and I needed to take them back. We were giddy with excitement at first; however, as we kept on playing, our excitement vanished. The game is easy. It's not just kind of easy -- it's really easy. It was so lacking of challenge that it was not fun at all. The layouts were linear; the game holds your hand to an annoying degree; you are constantly watching advertisements for characters you don't have; and the enemies are go down with 1-2 shots. I primarily used Gill Grunt, and he has an ability that sprays all enemies down with water, so if you just hold down spray and spin in a circle, everything will die. I looked for a difficulty slider, but I was unable to find one. Given that I had spent about $120, still needed to buy more to fully play the game (by having one character of each of the eight elements), and was not having fun, deciding to sell the game online and take back the unopened characters was an easy choice.

One thing that I found that was interesting was that your portal of power will detect the characters if they're still in the pack. I didn't use any of the characters that I didn't open (other than to see if it would work), but an unscrupulous gamer could take advantage of this -- especially with regard to the pirate ship and crypt levels.

With all of the above being said, I think that I would have enjoyed this game a lot more if I were playing it with my son, and if he were old enough to play games (He's eleven months old right now). I've seen several comments wondering why this game was not targeted to the gaming community, but rather is marketed as a children's toy would be marketed, but after playing the game, it's clear to me why this was done. I think that it would be totally awesome though to play a more challenging version of this game, perhaps with a different franchise such as Champions of Norrath or even something like Torchlight.

I'm a dad of a 11 month old baby. I love being a dad, and I love spending time with my son. Doing so has necessitated that I spend less time with my favorite hobby. You guessed it -- video games! I used to spend nearly all of my free time playing World of Warcraft and the rest of my time playing AAA console/PC releases. I completely quit WOW about a month after my son was born, and I haven't had a whole lot of other time to play other games. There are so many good games coming out that I'd love to play, but I know that I won't be able to play them for a while! Right now, I still need to catch up on all of the good games that I neglected when I was really into WOW, such as Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.