Skater XL is a realistic skateboard sim coming to Early Access this month

"The PC needs a new skateboarding game," Mat wrote last year, and that still rings true. Session, a spiritual successor to Skate, looks promising, but is still a long way off. Could Skater XL, a newly-announced game that will enter Early Access on December 19, be the sim we've been waiting for?

It's being made by the developers of mobile game Skater, but it's not simply a port: it's a fully-fledged sim with a city map inspired by real-life West Coast locales and a video editor so you can film your best tricks. As you can see from the teaser trailer above, it leans towards the more realistic end of the spectrum—you're not going to be doing triple backflips in a half-pipe.

When it launches in Early Access you'll be able to skate around an arena styled on the West LA Courthouse skate area with a single character. It'll have all the game's "core gameplay and game mechanics", Easy Day Studios says.

The developer is saying all the right things: it has spent four years "perfecting the thing that really matters for a new big step in the genre—the gameplay and controls", and promises it will be "involving the community in every step from here forward and communicating when and why we make each key design decision".

It doesn't yet have a price, but the Steam page is here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.