For someone like me with two left feet, Skate is the closest thing to skateboarding without actually putting my feet on a board… and falling down repeatedly. With innovative controls, the game takes advantage of the dual analog sticks, looks great on Xbox 360 and PS3, and has the ability to sculpt tricks that define your own style, so as Electronic Arts puts it, it delivers an authentic boarding mecca like no other videogame.
Individual style can be combined with physics-driven animations that promise that no two tricks will ever be the same. And there’s plenty of room to pull off those tricks — San Vanelona challenges you to explore, find, and own the best spots. You can even capture footage to create and show off your style with friends across the world — because without footage, it didn’t happen.
Get ready for all the fun, creativity and culture of skateboarding without the hours of practice, broken bones, and hospital visits.
System: Xbox 360, PS3
Genre: Extreme sports
Release dates: September 14th 2007 (USA), September 28th 2007 (EURO)
Players: 1-4 (2-6 online)
Developer: EA Black Box
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Origin: America
Skate delivers the feel of skating through innovative controls, authentic cameras and a fully reactive skateboarding city. The game features professional skaters such as Danny Way and PJ Ladd, as well as a reactive city and relevant in-game cameras.
Skate’s unique control scheme REALLY does capture the true feel of skating versus the typical button mashing gameplay of past skating games. Featuring physics-driven animations, gamers will have a unique gaming experience every time they pick up the controller since no two tricks will ever be the same unless you want them to be.
Watch Skate’s mad introduction trailer.
So what are Skate’s main features?
* Flickit — The days of button mashing are over. The intuitive Flickit dual analog control lets you perform skill-based trick executions that capture the real-world feel and true attitude of skating.
* Define Your Style of Skating — Create your own style and personality with animation and physics that give you the freedom to decide how your skater looks, feels and rides. Get creative as you develop your own tricks and string them together to create lines.
* Without Footage, It’s Fiction — Capture your sickest moves in game and bring them online for the world to see. Using innovative online video editing tools and add music to create the ultimate skate vid.
* Create Your Own Story — Skaters don’t follow rules, they can choose how they want to progress through the game. Open progression allows gamers to skate how they want to skate. Become famous and generating mainstream hype or go the infamous route by outrunning security guards, owning spots and building street cred. Depending on how you roll in the game, you’ll start seeing your own coverage in Thrasher or The Skateboard Mag.
* Make San Vanelona Your Playground — Get chased by security guards, impress and/or annoy the citizens in this fully reactive city. San Vanelona is the ultimate skate mecca where you can ride with pros, discover skate shops, and own spots to make them yours.
* Roll with the Pros — The game features professional legends and upcoming pros including Danny Way, Mark Gonzales, Rob Dyrdek, Mike Carroll, P.J. Ladd, Chris Cole, Jason Dill, Pat Duffy, Jerry Hsu, Paul Rodriguez, Dennis Busenitz, Alex Chalmers, Chris Haslam, Colin McKay, John Rattray, Ryan Gallant, Ryan Smith, Terry Kennedy, and you can even unlock the funny Dem Bones by breaking each bone in your body three times.
* Online Gameplay — There’s an extensive online gameplay system including multiple online multiplayer modes. Gamers can hit up popular spots in the city with friends across the country.
Watch Skate’s controls & features being explained.
As a conclusion I’d have to say that while you can’t do every trick you’d like to try from real-life, the realistic approach to skating isn’t often interrupted and you’ll likely keep skating for hours on end. Imagine what you want to do, look a location where it’d be possible and (lo and behold) you can likely pull of your feat. A downside is that your online buddies move around choppy (not laggy) when there are too many of them in a small space, so it’s not that smooth, but aside from that and the game’s load times that occur, there’s not much that takes away from such an overall relaxing and fun experience of just skating all over the city and taking on some of the over 100 challenges in career mode with varied difficulty. Now let’s rate this game on its fun-basis.
FUN FACTOR – 8.5
The Tony Hawk series has found a worthy adversary in newcomer Skate, except its controls are so different, it’s more like finally having a different flavor of skateboarding to taste from. This skating game has taken a different path, and it’s great, really great. I love it and I’m not even into skating, so I can only imagine the joys this amazing feeling of control Skate brings to skaters and fans. Perfect control scheme, a great presentation, expansive environments, top audio track. Can’t say it’s a surprise this game sold half a million copies in just over a month in stores, there’s lots of fun to be had in the city both alone and with friends, offline and online.
Graphics – 8.0
The environment physics and skater animations looking convincingly real! Motion blur and slow motion is added to great effect. Being able to record and edit everything you do in-game on short videos to share on Skate.Reel is cool too.
Audio – 7.5
The soundtrack focuses heavily on hip-hop and dance, both originals and remixes. Add good dynamic sounds and great competition commentary to complete the package.
Ingenuity – 9.0
So fresh, so clean, so cool. The difficulty in mastering controls isn’t a downside here, it’s rewarding, and failing looks fittingly painful.
Replay Value – 8.5
You’re good to go for a long long time if you give your thumb a little bit of encouragement…