skate Review
Played on:
Xbox 360
Every year we get another Tony Hawk game and every year, skateboard game fans wonder what things might be like if Tony wasn't the only game in town. And now, EA is answering that question with skate, a new title that offers its own take on the skateboarding world. Its hallmarks are a totally new control scheme and at least a bit more of a foundation in reality - not only in the mechanics of skating, but also the moves that today's skaters use as well as what's going on in the culture today.
And while I'm going to try and not just make this whole review a comparison to Tony Hawk, it's got to be pointed out that in the 9 years since the first game in that series has been released, it's gone from a great, realistic yet fun simulation to a circus of ridiculous proportions. It's been great for gamers who don't actually go outside to skate, sure, but it's nothing like what real skaters do. There are no ludicrous five-minute combos going on in real life, and a counterculture against the highest-paid skaters, like Tony Hawk himself, has been gaining steam for a while now. Neversoft and Activision are making a fun game, but EA's skate provides a fresh take and a more realistic depiction of today's skating culture.
Flickit, or something
At the heart of skate is a unique control system that has you moving your body with the left analog stick and your board with the right stick, along with the odd button press or trigger pull to modify your tricks. Pull the right stick down and your skater will crouch down - flick it up and you'll get an ollie. Go up and then down for a Nollie, or a nose ollie. If you pull diagonally to a side when you flick, you'll pull off a heelflip or kickflip, and you can modify these further with various tweaks to your controls. Moving the left stick lets you turn when you're on the ground and allows your body to spin when you're in the air, which can in some cases actually happen independently of what your board is doing. Most of this falls loosely into the realm of realism, although some of the moves you can do and some of the ways your board will move are clearly impossible in real life.
Moving On
Progress in skate is made by completing challenges in a made-up city called San Vanelona. Most of the city is accessible right from the start, but you'll find that the challenges available to you at the beginning mostly reside in the first area, Suburbia. As you progress through these challenges, most of which are pretty realistic and focus on skating skill rather than blowing up chickens or knocking over For Sale signs, you'll open up new areas and unlock some very nice skateparks. One thing that some gamers won't like is how you don't unlock new moves or improve any "stats" as you go - your skill is fully unlocked right from the start. It turns out, though, that at least on your first play through, you'll be skating like a scrub anyway, and only with real practice will you get anywhere. We'll see if this is still an issue when the likely sequel comes out. I also wonder if skate will travel down the dubious path of having to one-up itself every year if it becomes a yearly franchise, as that's exactly what led the Tony Hawk games to the point they're at now.
The challenges you'll complete in career mode involve you completing some rather free-form challenges that don't just make you grind this one rail and then heelflip off, or things like that. Well, if the game's teaching you a new move that's what it'll do, but otherwise you'll often have the freedom to start your challenge anywhere in a large area. You can set a restart point and then return to it when you want, which is a handy feature, but you won't be able to do this in the game's "no skate zones" where security guards will try and knock you over. Since some challenges force you to finish tricks in these areas, it can get frustrating at times. Beyond that, there are some fun challenges like downhill races and a HORSE-style game (aptly using the S.K.A.T.E. letters - a nod or a diss to Tony Hawk? You decide!), all of which are pretty fun and haven't been seen in a single player game in a long time. Completing some challenges will open access to exclusive spots, like the X Games Stadium or other internal areas with some very nice spots. It's nice to have at least a few surprises locked away in an otherwise free-roaming game.
The camera and skate.reel
As you play, the camera that's trailing behind you is actually held by a guy filming you, and the result is that the camera sits fairly low down with a focus on your legs and the board itself. It's a good camera angle that really helps you get some of the trickier moves to land just right, and you're going to need it - it takes quite a bit of practice to do many of the game's tough grinds and move modifiers like grabs and tweaks. Your buddy that films you will make some interesting commentary on your skating, and this whole thing also opens up one of the game's most fun features: the Replay Editor.
At any point in skate you can hit the start button and bring up the Replay Editor to review the last 30 seconds of your skating. You can crop a specific portion of the video to keep, and then set markers with points where you can adjust the speed, camera angle, and toss on a few special effects. But the best part is that you can actually upload these videos to the EA's "skate.reel" site for people to watch with their PCs, Youtube-style - they don't have to own the game or even a game console at all.
When skate.reel works, it's great, but EA's site for skate has been buckling under the weight of the game's retail release, and the system also poorly-designed when it comes to Xbox Live Gamertag integration. I'm hoping that before long they can fix this up and make it easier to create an EA account, link it to your Gamertag, and start uploading videos for people to watch. There are also some pretty restrictive limitations on what you can store online: three videos and six screenshots. That's it. Sure, you can store as many replays as you want on your 360's hard drive and swap them out on the website all you want, but the longest video you can make is still a mere 30 seconds. Someone with some technical skill could make multiple replays, put them (one at a time) on the EA site, save the .FLV (Flash video) files with a browser plug-in, and then piece them together in a real video editing program on the PC or Mac to make a longer video, but it'd have been nice to be able to make a much longer video right from the start.
And it's a shame that EA didn't take their video system to the extreme, because the skate mechanics in this game make for some very entertaining videos. The physics are mostly solid (with some exceptions regarding how the board can sometimes "snap" to your feet a little too magically) and the videos you can make really do look a lot like the ones that real pro skaters release. And even the moves that you do follow mostly what skaters are doing today, although this one is a little tough to appreciate unless you are actually out there with a skateboard on at least an occasional basis.
Not the easiest game to play
From a difficulty standpoint, it's hard for me to place skate on a comparison against Tony Hawk after so many years of playing the latter franchise. Grinds are harder to get into but are generally worth big points compared to the rest of your "line" (not a combo - in skate, you don't have to keep a continuous number of tricks to get a high score, just do tricks within a few second of each other), mostly because you have to actually ollie up onto your grind spot instead of pressing a magic button that automatically puts you on the rail. The way you pull the right stick during the start of the grind this determines what kind you're doing - boardslide, tailslide, crooked, 50-50, and the like - and you'll have to do an ollie again if you want to get some good height off the grind to do something like a flip or grab trick.
It goes even further, though. Curbs must be ollied up onto or you'll smash the ground with a pretty nasty crunch, and big vertical tricks, like in pools or on halfpipes, must be prepared for. Speed is your biggest asset when going vert, so you've got to "pump" your body on the way up and make sure you've got enough momentum to get into the air. Once you're up there you can do all kinds of fantastic-looking moves, but again you've also got to be aligned correctly if you don't want to come down on your face. You can't just spin yourself in the air whenever and wherever you want, so you've got to plan correctly. Finally, manuals are here and can certainly link your tricks together, just like Tony Hawk, but since you're going for lines and not combos here, they're there for more points rather than just as a way to link things up. All of this adds up to a game that can be frustrating to start on for a Tony Hawk player, but it's not long before you'll be pulling off some impressive moves without faceplanting yourself every five seconds.
Going online, and finishing it up
In multiplayer, skate doesn't get any easier. You've got tons of tricks at your disposal and can get six players into an online match, but the problem is that many of the arenas you can skate in are so tiny that you'll find yourselves literally falling over each other way too often. On Xbox Live, this often led to name-calling and all kinds of immature yelling, so I highly recommend that if you take it online, you plug in your headset and then leave it sitting to the side on the couch. Actually, I recommend that in most competitive games over Live whenever you can hear the opposition talking, so it's not really the fault of EA. Well, the yelling is not; the way players are constantly tripping over each other, well, that is their fault. Luckily, there are modes where you get to take turns and there are a few larger areas to skate in, but the open feel of the career mode game is pretty much gone when going online.
With some tweaks, I think that EA has a hit franchise on their hands here with skate. If they can improve the functionality of their replay video features and inject maybe a bit more fun into some of the goals and the online play, I think that a sequel has a really good chance of becoming the most popular skateboarding game ever. But for this game, the controls are still new to so many players and a few too many areas of the game - ones with a lot of potential - simply didn't have the time spent that they needed. And while I can't ever really recommend that a new game be immediately inducted into a yearly rehash like EA's sports games often do, I'm looking forward to skate 2 whenever it does happen.
