The season draws close for a spate of new titles, and Activision Blizzard — the newly independent gaming behemoth — plans to make sure you won’t forget about the next installment of the billion-dollar franchise Skylanders.
Rattle Shake Skylander.
Last week, Activision let us preview a new level from the latest entry in the toy-meets-game series, Skylanders: Swap Force. I am still stunned at two things. The new release, hitting multiple platforms on Oct. 13, has an incredible amount of variety. You can swap the top and bottom halves of the real-life figurines representing 16 new characters, resulting in 256 combinations. At the same time, the gameplay seems repetitive as ever.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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