Somewhere, deep in the bowels of Electronic Arts, something is stirring; something nobody could have predicted. They are producing good games again, and skate is the herald of this new beginning.
Taking the skating genre and revitalizing it is not an easy task, but Black Box has managed to do just that. So many aspects of skate are so well-conceived that, while the game has its flaws, it still remains so fresh and exciting that it will make you play it for hours at a time.
The most important change is the controls. All skating tricks are performed using the right analogue stick and the shoulder triggers. To do even the most basic of tricks, an ollie, requires you to pull the stick down then flick it to the top. More complicated tricks are just building off of this base; to kick flip, for example, you lower the stick to prepare the ollie, and then flick it up to the side, spinning the board. This may sound simple but it provides a depth to gameplay rarely seen. Because you are manually performing every single trick, the satisfaction from pulling off even basic maneuvers is huge. The challenge of more complicated tricks is also amplified; where in other skating games performing triple kick flip 360s landing on a rail for a fifty yard grind was just two button presses, in skate this is a series of perfectly timed flicks of the analogue stick. This means, as you would expect, the learning curve for skate is shaped much like the ramps you will be skating over: steep.
And yet you never feel as though the most difficult tricks are out of reach. As the game progresses, you will improve your skills constantly, but not with arbitrary experience points; rather in a real, tangible fashion. You, the player, will improve your skills out of the game world. While simple grinds are tricky at first, after a few game sessions they will become trivial and you’ll look for new challenges. And herein lies the real cornerstone of what makes skate really stand above the competition. skate rewards creativity rather than perfection.
The entire game is open and can be played as a free-roaming sandbox skating game, both off and online with friends. There are challenges and events, culminating in an appearance at the X-Games, and a career mode, but they mostly have to be activated as you skate around; the real meat of the game is in the ‘free skate’ mode. You can cruise the fictional city of San Vanelona and find the fun for yourself, and this proves incredibly rewarding. The city is so well-designed that you are never more than three strong pushes away from a ramp, or a rail to grind, and with a bookmark system, you can attempt the same line again and again until you hit that impressive trick just right.
Also, with Electronic Art’s impressive ‘skate: Reel’ system, you can upload a saved film of your best tricks to the internet to share with friends, enhancing the creativity and the endless search for new and improved skating lines. The replay editor also proves excellent, giving you control over the look, feel and timing of a run from all possible angles. Trying to recreate other players’ impressive tricks, or discovering new lines and gaps via watching someone else’s highlight, the Reel is certainly useful.
The developers clearly put a lot of effort into the camera in skate, and this is most evident when you first start skating around. The camera is much lower to the ground, and the game focuses on your feet and board rather than your character. There will be many times while performing tricks that the top half of your body is simply out of shot. The borders of the screen are also darkened, really focusing your eye to the center, onto the skateboard. It shows off the high-quality texturing and motion blur that the game employs, as well as the realistic character models and good animation. In this game, when you bail, you really feel it.
This camera, however, can also prove frustrating, as it sometimes means your body obscures the view of an object you want to perform a trick on, meaning you can miss a jump entirely, or ram right into a rail that you couldn’t see. A minor problem, and one which will never prove game-breaking, but also certainly a worthwhile sacrifice for the immersion and incredible dynamic such a camera scheme provides.
While the freedom and realism of the game is certainly a selling point for many, others might find it a turn-off. As mentioned, tricks are hard to pull off, and not everyone wants to invest time and effort into improving and learning to play the game well. The controls, while satisfying to use, can sometimes be so complicated you end up flailing the stick to pull off an impressive looking trick, but it ends up like nothing you had planned to do. While you can set your own goals and decide upon attempting certain tricks, having more rigid career challenges would have been nice.
Another area in which the game doesn’t quite live up to expectations is the character creation tool. You can’t have female skaters, and the selection of hair and clothing is modest at best. But with the focus of the game on the board, this isn’t so huge a problem as you may think, and finding a character you like the look of, while not necessarily looking exactly like you, is definitely possible. These really are minor shortcomings, and for a new franchise, forgivable faults.
skate is not just a lot of fun, it’s fresh. Going online to bomb around a skate park with friends or staying up into the wee hours of the morning trying desperately to hit that one ledge-to-rail gap that you just found, skate will give you a ton of enjoyment and satisfaction, but more importantly, will offer endless creativity in a genre that had become so stale.
