Overview:
- Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
- Offline: 45 for 1000
- Online: 0 for 0
- Approximate time: 15-20 Hours
- Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 2
- Missable achievements: No [Level Select]
- Does difficulty affect Achievements: Yes
- Unobtainable/glitched Achievements: No
- Extra equipment needed?: Skylanders Giants Starter Pack, or Skylanders Giants Portal Owners Pack and one undead and one air Skylander
Introduction:
Skylanders Giants is the sequel to Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, and the second game in the Skylanders franchise. Kaos is back, and it's up to you and your Skylanders to stop him. The formula remains the same as the first game, so if you've played that, you'll know what to do here. This game introduces new Giant Skylanders, who have access to special areas in the game.
Story Playthrough:
First, you'll want to play through the story on the difficulty of your choice, though it's best to use the Cyclops Crusher difficulty, which is equivalent to normal. There is a chapter-specific achievement in each chapter to go for. Most of these are easy to get, but some may take a few attempts, like "Autogyro Pyrotechnician", "Talker in a Strange Land", "Cannon Confounder", and "Pedal to the Metal". If you miss one, you can replay the chapter from the chapter select menu to try again. All in all, playing through the story should take you 6-10 hours, and will get you all of the story-related achievements, and unlock Nightmare difficulty.
Miscellaneous Achievements Clean-up:
After beating the story, it is recommended you focus on getting 65,000 treasure on one Skylander for "Spend That Loot!". Thankfully, there's a trick you can use to do this quickly. If you don't want to do it now, you can do it on your Nightmare playthrough.
You'll also want to replay chapters to get any chapter-specific or other miscellaneous achievements you may have missed. This is also the best time to complete all arena challenges for "1 and 0" and "Great Gladiator!".
Nightmare Playthrough:
Once everything else is done, start a new save file, and choose Nightmare difficulty. Nightmare can be challenging at times, because the enemies can knock you out very quickly. You'll want to avoid any battles, and fight only when necessary. Use as many maxed out Skylanders as you can, so you can keep playing if knocked out and not have to restart a stage. This run should take 4-6 hours, and will unlock "Nightmare Avenger" upon completion.
Conclusion:
Skylanders Giants is a very fun and entertaining game, and the majority of its achievements are easy to obtain. Only a handful might require multiple attempts, but if you persevere, you get all 1000.
[XBA would like to thank HamKet for this roadmap]