Prepare your pennies for new Skylanders game, Skylanders Swap Force

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The next Skylanders game has been unveiled as Skylanders Swap Force.

It's big new thing is swapability: a new range of Skylanders figurines will have interchangeable top-halves and bottom-halves. There are 16 to collect. To use them you'll need the new Swap Force portal peripheral.

There will also be 32 new standard Skylanders toys and eight new Skylanders LightCore toys (the ones that light up, I think). Half of that 32 will be completely new Skylander characters/toys, and 16 will be new versions of oldies.

All existing Skylanders Spyro's Adventure and Skylanders Giants toys/characters can be used in Skylanders Swap Force.

Skylanders Swap Force also adds jumping. But there's still only two-player local co-op.

Skylanders is all the rage. For those who don't know, it's an action RPG at heart but with a clever twist: the characters you control and level-up are plastic figurines that exist in the real world. They enter the game when they're placed on a light-up portal peripheral that comes with the game. Swapping between the toys is quick, easy and necessary to solve puzzles in the game.

Cleverly all game progress is to the toys, so the plastic figurines can be taken to friends' houses and used either cooperatively or competitively there.

There's no mention of a specific 2013 release date for Skylanders Swap Force. Vicarious Visions will make the PS3, Wii U and Xbox 360 versions; nSpace the 3DS version; and Beenox the Wii version.