Chopper – Skylander Review
Chopper is a new core Tech Skylander making his debut in Trap Team. Chopper is a dinosaur but he was one of the smallest in his village. Each year his village held a competition to honor the village idol. One year Chopper entered this competition. Despite his size Chopper wasn’t worried because he had built himself a super Gyro-Dino-Exo-Suit. Chopper dominated the competition by firing missiles, and chomping everything in his path. He was about to win, when a nearby volcano erupted, flooding the village with lava and trapping some of the residents of his village. Chopper left the competition and airlifted each of the stranded villagers to safety. He even saved the village idol. For heroically saving the villagers, Chopper was made a Skylander.
When you first hear that there is going to be a new dinosaur Skylander, you probably imagine a large, slow, melee focused powerful character. Chopper is almost the opposite. He is small and because of his tech based exo-suit, he is both fast and can fly. Really, he’s a flying dinosaur! The first thing you notice when looking at the character is the single propeller on his back. When you take a closer look, you can actually see that Chopper is holding on to a couple of rods extending from this propeller backpack, giving him ability to steer. Also, you can see tiny rockets just beneath the blade on the backpack, which supplies his firepower. Chopper wheres no armor to speak of, but both of his back legs are fitted with a mechanical harness that increases his movement abilities making him pretty fast for a dinosaur. They also probably add some shock absorption to his legs so that he can land safely after flying. For being a fairly small character he sure does have a lot of detail built into him. His normal dinosaur body is full of texture. He has bumpy brown skin that has blended colors from light brown to a reddish brown. Even his helicopter backpack looks like it’s bunching the skin of the back of his head and neck. When you look into his gaping mouth you can see the ridges on the top and bottom as well as several individual teeth. It really feels like a lot of time and effort went into the design of this character.
His attacks are almost exclusively ranged attacks. His main attack is firing Raptor Rockets. It’s a pretty basic and common ranged attack at first, but after some upgrades will 
become quite the devastating and powerful attack. His secondary attack is called Chopper Blades. This is pretty much a dash attack, but it is exactly the attack that you think you should have when you have a spinning blade on your back. Basically Chopper just flies forward quickly with his spinning blade angled in front of him, which chops through any enemies in front of him. A third attack becomes available after an upgrade which allows Chopper to roar and knock back nearby enemies in it’s path. A couple of the upgrades just increase rocket damage, and damage done by the Chopper Blades. The other upgrade adds homing missiles to the missile attack. This means that you only have to fire near an enemy to hit them. It’s not a completely unique attack, Pop Thorn and Bumble Blast use similar homing projectiles, but these are some quite powerful rockets that are locking on to their targets. It’s quite the powerful advantage when you can spend most of your time concentrating on dodging and getting out of harms way, while at the same time unleashing massive damage by not having to worry too much about aiming your attacks.
When it comes time to choose an upgrade path, you’ll have to decide if you want to upgrade the roar attacks or the Rocket attacks. We chose the rocket attacks, because how can you not choose the attack that automatically tracks and hits enemies? However, the Roar Like Never Before path does include an upgrade called R.O.A.R. Missiles which stands for Rage of All Raptor Missiles. It sounds pretty devastating. The other two upgrades in that path add damage and range to the Roar attack. Not too exciting, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t make the Roar a powerful attack. The Blast From the Past upgrade path has an upgrade that gives rockets extra damage with bigger explosions. There is also an upgrade that gives the Chopper Blades maximum damage. The last upgrade gives Chopper the ability to launch two extra large missiles for even more damage. The only problem with this attack is that these missiles are not homing, they just go straight. But if you want to take out one of the larger enemies, then these will do the job fast. Chopper’s Soul Gem ability is rather impressive. By jumping twice, he will enter Flight Mode. Once in flight mode pressing the Attack 3 button will shoot out a large salvo of rockets all which home in on enemies in every direction. It’s quite the devastating attack and it’s easy and fun to do too.
Overall Chopper is an excellent core Skylander. At first his attacks are fairly basic with rockets that shoot forward, a dash attack, and a roar that does decent damage as well as knock back enemies. But once you upgrade to homing missiles and find his soul gem to grant a devastating flying mode attack, a fully upgraded Chopper is hard to stop playing with. He becomes one of the few characters you can actively be attacking enemies while also running away and keeping away from them. However, his speed isn’t as fast as say a pop thorn, and his rockets are not as accurate as the homing bees of Bumble Blast, but the power is great and the explosions are greater. The upgrade path for the Rockets worked well, and it sounds like the other upgrade path would be just as damaging but only with the Roar attack. I don’t think you could go wrong choosing either path. If you don’t have a lot of Skylanders from other games and don’t already have one with homing attacks, then he should probably be in your collection.
SkylanderNutts gives Chopper…
9.0 out of 10
Chopper Video Review
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