After the Skate series was left alone for 15 years, I was optimistic that the fourth game would breathe new life into it. However, if you also fell into this trap and you're yet to delve into its free-to-play addition,"skate.", I think you should lower your expectations now. It's certainly a skateboarding game, and it has decent bones to grow into something better, but as it currently stands in early access it feels half-baked, and could seriously improve some areas before it's held to the same standard as the series is known for.
Being on your board is fun, which is the most important gold star a game about skateboarding can really receive. It's also quite challenging to mess that part up. Cruising around street-skating, pulling off curb grinds and flip tricks is easily the best part, and is what I spent a lot of my time doing. After all, that's what this whole experience is about. There is a significant "one more run" mentality, which led to a number of hours poured into runs of tricks I'm still yet to perfect.
The runs you pick up around the map are challenging, but never become frustrating. When you first head out, these are valuable in teaching you how to make the most of each area, and if you are entirely new to the series, they help in showing you the ropes. The tricks you can pull off and how you move around on your board play entirely the same as in the previous Skate games too, so you'll easily find your footing after some warmups if you're a fan already.
But, the enjoyment of cruising around is interrupted often by the voiceover telling you where to go and what to do. Which happens a lot, and I mean a lot. The general "guidance" (although it definitely feels more like instruction: you can't go anywhere without being told about a nearby challenge) quickly becomes grating and takes away from what is actually enjoyable about the game.
What I loved so much about previous Skate games was that you were free to just roll around wherever you wanted and at your own pace. There were challenges you could complete but you didn't have to race to them, and it was the sort of game you could load up and just mindlessly play for a few hours. The newest installment lacks this freedom, and instead offers something that feels far too hand-holdy and takes away the raw fun of learning to (virtually) skateboard.
You're also expected to do a surprising amount of not-skating. At the very start of the game you're guided to a section which is essentially a tutorial for throwing yourself off tall buildings. Where Skate fanatics would expect Hall of Meat, the series' infamous game mode that shows you each bone you've broken in your body and rewarding you points for how intense your slam was, an entirely new stunt system has been introduced. It's explained that "thanks to new AI technology" each skater has been programmed to never feel any pain. Which explains why you can essentially fling yourself off skyscrapers and dive into dumpsters, broken structures, or just straight into the concrete if you need a quick way down.
I'm not super pumped about this feature and actively avoid it where I can. It feels like a huge gimmick and takes away from the actual skateboarding, and the whole novelty of having to climb a building just to throw yourself off it for some points loses any sort of charm it had in the first place incredibly quickly.
Its setting, San Vansterdam or 'San Van' as it's referred to throughout the game, doesn't feel particularly lively either. It's a city made for skaters which, sure, is great in principle. But there's so much empty space and an extreme lack of NPC's which make it feel desolate. The cars on the road are simply there for effect too, since you can't skitch them, and multiple areas require building your own parks by dropping in ramps and rails because there's not much else to do outside of the challenges.
NPC interactions were never a big part of Skate games, but they helped bring the world to life. There was nothing quite like practising a trick for hours on end only to finally get your run flawless before a pedestrian walks directly in front of your skateboard and starts shouting at you. The world isn't meant to like skateboarding, and I know San Van has been created as a safe haven for skaters everywhere, but I actually miss being a mild inconvenience to innocent bystanders, or being chased out of a shopping mall by a cop.
Other players make up the entirety of other people you see around San Van, but even then you can never really get in anyone's way. You phase through them, and the only sense of interaction you have is through emotes unlocked through loot boxes and phrases like "follow me" and "hi" which don't help create much of a community spirit. With that being said, I know additional co-op features are being added in the hopefully near future, which should make the experience a lot better.
As a result of all of this, Skate doesn't feel like it was made by passionate skateboarders. It feels more like a bunch of corporate folk brought up skating in a boardroom meeting and this is the product of that. In an attempt to appeal to a younger generation, evident by the Fortnite-esque aesthetics and the emphasis on clumsy stunts and cheesy dialogue, the game has completely detached itself from the target audience. Hopefully as it changes throughout early access it'll find itself a bit more, but for now, it's just a game in which you skate rather than being the next Skate game we were so desperate for.
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