Skate. - Review

Added October 6th, 2007 by Justin McBride

It’s not too often that a genre is entirely dominated by one series of games, to the point that no one wants to contest it. The Tony Hawk series has long had a bit of a monopoly on the extreme sports genre. EA Black Box is looking to change that with its entry into this genre, Skate. This could’ve easily fallen apart at the seams, but EA has succeeded in creating a game that not only challenges Tony Hawk for the skateboarding crown, but also stands firmly on its own.

Skate drops you into the large, fictional metropolis of San Vanelona, a mash-up in more ways than just its name. It seems to combine the best elements of San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona into a sort of Mecca for skaters. From here, you are free to skate around the world. The city itself is a highly believable and beautiful place. The attention to detail is simply astounding, with distinct differences between the five major districts in both design and layout, adding greatly to the variety. Things never feel repetitive or overly familiar between districts. As mentioned, the city itself is quite large, and the developers have wisely implemented a subway system, which transports you to various sections of the city and allows you to warp instantly to any of your various career objectives. The load times when traveling between these points aren’t overly long, but seem to noticeably break up the pacing.

The career mode follows your skater as he progresses from a relative nobody in the skating world to a seasoned Pro, gaining sponsorships, exposure and other rewards along the way. At any given time during the career mode, you’ll have a number of different objectives in the form of invitational trick contests, challenges from other real life pro skaters, and the most common, the video challenges. These 30-second trick challenges require you to execute specific actions, such as performing a 30-foot grind or scoring a set number of points before the time limit expires. These challenges are simple at the beginning, giving you a chance to get your feet wet before diving in, after which, the challenges grow progressively harder, throwing tougher and tougher objectives at you, some of which seem impossible to perform in the 30-second window. These will surely push your skills to their limits, testing your mastery of the control scheme and gameplay mechanics.

As you complete the many challenges, you gain experience, which propels you closer to your next big challenge from the Skateboard or Thrasher magazines depending on which path you are completing objectives for. These challenges are also, at times, incredibly difficult but completing them earns you sponsorships for your board, wheels, trucks and so on. Sponsorships can prove to be quite lucrative, since all the gear from your sponsor is free and completing challenges while using their gear garners more money upon successful completion.

All of this advances you closer to your ultimate goal of becoming a pro skater and performing at the top tier competition, the X-Games. The story is nothing you haven’t seen already a million times over in other skateboarding games, progressing fairly linearly as you complete objectives. It’s sort of a shame that it doesn’t shine as brightly as the rest of the game and makes the career mode as a whole less appealing.

The biggest difference between Skate and the venerable Tony Hawk series is its revolutionary control scheme. Instead of employing a similar, button based control system where the face buttons are your primary method of pulling off tricks, Skate relegates most tricks to the two analog sticks, dubbed “FlickIt” here, and uses the triggers to grab the board with the left or right hand. The left analog stick moves your skater’s body on the board, handling such actions as spinning the board while airborne while the right analog stick controls ollies, flip tricks and tweaking grabs. To get moving, you press and hold the A or X button to push with either your left or right foot. Things can be very confusing in the early going and the learning curve is rather steep.

Once you’ve learned the basics, you can begin wrapping your head around more complex actions you’ll need to master to progress through the career mode. It’s worth noting that, despite its complexity, this control scheme becomes natural, fluid and simple to use. Simply put, Skate’s analog stick based trick system is widely accessible to newcomers who just want to jump in and have fun for a bit, while deep enough to accommodate hardcore skate fans who want to really let loose, creating insane skate lines.

Skate leans much more to the side of authentic skateboarding mechanics.  You won’t find many of the insane, impossible to perform tricks along the lines of pulling a pizza box out of thin air and eating a slice while grinding a rail you see often in the Tony Hawk series. That’s not to say there aren’t any amazing tricks to be performed here, quite the contrary. You’ll find plenty of opportunities to pull off amazing looking tricks that tread the line of fiction and reality.

As any skater will likely tell you, Skate does an excellent job of replicating the actual feeling of skating and I have to give EA a lot of credit here for pulling it off. Clearly, a great deal of time and effort has gone into developing the physics and animations. Even the simple, mundane action of pushing to gain speed looks amazingly authentic. Each animation flows seamlessly from one into the next, so there’s rarely any disconnect between you and the skater you see on the screen. Combine this with the intuitive control scheme and you have perhaps the best skating simulation ever created.

Another area Skate really shines is in its audio. Besides having an excellent soundtrack that fits perfectly within the skater culture, the ambient sounds you’ll hear throughout the city are very well done. It really helps push the living, breathing world of San Vanelona helping create an amazingly realistic environment. Graphically, the game isn’t the best-looking game you’ll play, but you can’t fault it for its clean look, impressive attention to detail and nicely detailed character models and animations.

The multiplayer component is nicely fleshed out for a title such as this. There are a good number of enjoyable multiplayer modes, such as Jam, which has up to six skaters performing tricks in the same skate park, which are culled from locations you’ll come across in the career mode. This works well most of the time but some of the multiplayer maps aren’t conducive to so many players performing tricks at once, such as a small pool where players are likely to have their lines interrupted as someone skates into their path. Other, turn-based modes such as S.K.A.T.E., which has players taking turns to match the trick set by one of their opponents. There are a few street skating race modes as well, which are enjoyable as well as a free skate mode, which drops you and your fellow players into one of the many districts to skate around, closing off the rest of the massive city. This was likely to keep players close to each other and preventing them from getting lost.

One interesting component in Skate is the online Skate reel feature. While you’re skating around in the career mode, you can pause the game and jump into the replay editor, which allows you to view the last minute or so of your recent exploits. Here you can edit your clip, changing camera angles and adding various effects. Once you’re finished, you can save your creation and upload the footage to EA’s YouTube style online video depository for the world to see.  You can recommend your clips to friends for them to view and rate.

It’s hard to draw comparisons between this and the Tony Hawk series aside from the fact that they are both skateboarding games. The two are radically different in their approach to the sport and will likely appeal to different groups of people. Skate stresses realism over fiction and I can’t say I’d have it any other way. Skate’s intuitive, but incredibly deep control scheme and extremely realistic physics model feel wonderful in motion. If you’re looking for a realistic approximation of skateboarding, look no further. Skate will not disappoint.