I’ve always loved skateboarding games. I don’t really know why. I didn’t grow up in skating culture or anything like that. But from that first time playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on a demo disk I got from Playstation Magazine, I was hooked (I haven’t played the 3 & 4 Remakes yet, but I plan to. stay tuned for those).
Pulling off crazier and crazier tricks, and stringing together impossible combos was insane amounts of fun. And being able to create your own skate park, making ridiculous structures to gap over — or more likely, slam in to (come on, pungee pits?!?) — was incredible. I devoured every one.
After several years of arcade-style extreme sports games, the first skate. game was released. I remember playing the original, and loved how they went away from the button-pressing style of pulling off tricks to a revolutionary stick-based trick system.
On top of that, you weren’t reaching impossible heights in the average every day parks. The focus was on the rider and the board, not whether or not I could breakdance in the air.
It was dope to have a more realistic skateboarding game. The extreme air’s and nonsensical specials are a lot of fun, but there hadn’t been anything that made you feel what actual skateboarding is like. It was incredibly refreshing to get that perspective, and I loved it.
THPS even got me messing around trying to skate a little bit. Never got much farther than a stationary kickflip, though 😅
I was excited to find out that a new skate. was coming soon, and downloaded it as soon as I could. I was kind of getting tired of sweating in Silksong — so I decided to have a chill skate session and see how the new game felt. Read on to find out my thoughts.
Kick, Push, Coast
If you haven’t played SKATE, you may not know what I mean when I talk about the trick stick. In, say, THPS, in order to do your flip tricks — kickflips, heelflips, shuvits etc. — you’d press a direction on the D-Pad and press (on Xbox) ‘X’. For tricks that involve grabbing the board, it’s a direction and ‘B’. Grinds were ‘Y’ and Ollieing was a simple press of ‘A’.
In skate, though, you have to physically move the right stick in a specific way in order to pull off your tricks. Hold the right stick down and push it straight up to ollie; from down push it up and slightly right in order to kickflip, and slightly left to heelflip; or do a half rotation to do a shuvit, and so on and so forth.
There are hundreds of tricks, and they can get pretty complicated. But they’re all done with manipulating the right stick in various ways.
When doing grabs, each trigger corresponds to each one of your character’s arms. You can grab the board with either your right hand using the right trigger, left hand with the left trigger. You can also hold both triggers and hold on to the board with both hands (which isn’t a trick, really, and looks kind of silly in the air. If you do it on the ground, though, you can also hold ‘X’ + ‘A’ to luge around the city).
You can modify your grabs by pointing the stick in the direction you want to shift the board, too. And pull off various types of grinds, again, by pushing or rotating the right stick in different directions before you land on a rail.
There’s no grind button here, either. You simply approach the rail and time your jumps and tricks so that you land on whatever it is you’re trying to grind. And even though I appreciate the realism, this can be infuriating and make me miss the simple button press.
More often than not, it seems, you miss the grind. By not getting high enough, getting too high, jumping too early or too late, or coming in at just slightly the wrong angle you’ll either run into the thing you’re trying to grind, or miss it altogether. When one of the goals is to accomplish a certain number of grinds without falling — if you’re a bit of a completionist like me — you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to finish those challenges.
Skatin’ Ain’t Easy
The realism of using the stick to do your tricks can be a bit of a double-edged sword. It feels more “authentic”, but definitely makes things more difficult. There are fairly subtle differences between down, and down-right; so it takes a bit of practice to really dial it in. Also, by having one input correlate to multiple actions within the game, you often end up doing the wrong thing.
Since rotating the right stick is both flip tricks and grinds, you may do one when you want to do that other; frequently flinging flip tricks — or delayed flip tricks — in place of the grind you’re trying to do. This will usually cause you to fall, and depending on the challenge, to start all over again.
The different tricks — especially grinds — also need you to be oriented in the right direction for them to be pulled off properly. The controls shown are based on traveling straight in your natural stance. So if you’re trying to pull off a trick that’s required for the challenge, the input shown on the left* may not be correct given your position.
*Whenever you have a goal with a specific trick or trick type, the game is helpful in showing an example of one on the side under the challenges — along with the stick-motion needed to pull it off.
And at the bottom of your screen is a simulation of how you’re moving the right stick at any given time, so you can see what you’re actually doing.
There was one time I had to do two specific grinds, one after the other. But I kept finding myself doing the wrong second grind, despite the input indicator at the bottom* showing that I was rotating the stick correctly.
I was approaching the second grind at a strange angle due to having to do the first grind, so my second grind was different from what I was expecting. Definitely something to be mindful of while you’re ripping around San Van.
Also, there were a couple times where I 100% definitely did what the challenge was calling for but it just… didn’t register. It didn’t happen much, but it shouldn’t happen at all. On the flip side, there were times where I didn’t quite do exactly what was asked, but the game registered the challenge as completed. So I guess I shouldn’t be too upset.
It’s not only ollying onto rails that seems somewhat spotty. Often, I feel like I’m landing tricks but my character will stumble off of his board. It’s not so much that it makes the game unplayable. But it can be pretty frustrating — especially in challenges with 4 or 5 goals that you have to get without falling. I’ve got to admit, though, that this seems to have gotten better with the last couple updates.
Missions, Challenges, & Goals
The gameplay is mixed between completing challenges (while trying to accomplish goals at the same time) and missions. The missions are essentially a glorified tutorial, but I’ll get to those later. Challenges are where you’ll spend the most time and they come in a few varieties.
There’s Line challenges, where you have to skate a line collecting bearings along the way. Own the Spot challenges require you to pull off a trick combo onto and over obstacles and various structures. Session challenges, where you have to pull off a several tricks within an area and certain amount of time. And Stunt challenges.
Within each challenge, there are also a number of goals that need to be completed in order to “shut down” the challenge. Goals will be things like: complete 6 grinds, manual for 10 meters, do 4 flip tricks, and more. Often, having to do all of them in one go without falling. So you’re tasked with doing those things, while at the same time following the line & collecting bearings, or tricking on an obstacle.
Each goal completed gives experience points and San Van Bucks, too, so you don’t have to complete every goal in order to get something for the challenge. but you’ve got to do them all to “Shut it Down”.
While the skating is more realistic, the opportunities for outrageousness are still plenty. You’re able to get off of your board and can parkour around the city to reach high places. There’s tons of ramps and drop-ins on top of buildings allowing you to still get some crazy air. You just have to work a bit harder for it.
And with the Stunt challenges, this feels a bit like a cross between the realism of the original Skate and the ridiculousness of THPS. Stunts typically don’t require you to use your board at all — you’re tasked with parachute-free skydiving around buildings and through small gaps, slamming into specific targets in order to complete the goals.
And adding even more craziness (and difficulty) sometimes they do require your board. You’ll have to abandon it in the air, “skydive” to another place, get back on your board, riding your ridiculous momentum off of another ramp, “skydive” to yet another location, and land in a dumpster or something. Fortunately, you’re always able to summon your board like Kratos’s Leviathan axe.
It can be incredibly frustrating with the game feeling a bit inconsistent with accurate landings. But it’s stupid fun and feels that much better when you finally pull the stunt off. These challenges, honestly, might be my favorite.
They remind me of past extreme sports games — I remember a Dave Mirra BMX game where there were modes where the goal was to inflict as much pain on your character as you could. You’d have to get a ton of speed and air, then run into something to send your body flying. It was absurd. While the challenges in skate. aren’t quite that, I still get those vibes. And I’ve been enjoying free-falling and gliding around the city pulling off insane stunts.
Oh, and don’t worry about your character getting hurt doing these challenges, or simply fumbling a trick. there’s a startup that makes a product called “ImpervaTEK”, that apparently makes you impervious to pain. It’s how you’re able to do these crazy stunts, slamming into the ground with abandon. Don’t worry how it works, though. “It’s science”.
Impressing “The Locs”
The invention of ImpervaTEK made skating more accessible than ever, and now a group of them are trying to bring the skating scene back to San Vansterdam — the city the game takes place in. The “San Van Locs” and DaK’s (Do a Kickflip’s) offer increased status and rewards for impressing them by completing challenges. This is mostly expressed through a couple people — and your AI assistant VEE — who talk to you when you start these challenges (and sometimes when just skating around… VEE is kind of annoying and condescending).
The “missions” though, just strike me as weird. They seem less about skate. and skating, and more about gameplay mechanics. And they’re awfully redundant. There’s an entire opening “training” island before you get to the main city that shows you how to move, ollie, trick, and grind. But then most of the missions are.. showing you how to ollie, trick, and grind.
If all we have to do is prove what we’ve learned by hitting a line, why is it differentiated as a “mission” over the “challenges”? Especially when it doesn’t really seem like the missions themselves have much of an impact on the progress of the game in any meaningful way. They just tend to be further explanations of things you already know how to do. The entire “story” just feels like a long, convoluted tutorial.
On top of that once you finish certain missions, the next ones are locked until you’ve completed a certain number of goals. But once you unlock it, that mission will be about learning how to accomplish something that you’ve already done as a goal several times.
Like, there’s a goal in several challenges where you have to reach a x3 multiplier. And many times where you just naturally reach a x3 or x4 multiplier either as a necessary way to reach the higher required scores for that goal, or simply by completing all of the goals in a line.
VEE also talks to you while you’re out just skating around. She basically has a comment for everything you do, and is kind of annoying and condescending
But then, after having complete like 140 goals in order to unlock this mission, there’s an explainer on how to reach higher multipliers? Thanks!
IDK what the game expected here. Did they want you to go around only doing the first goal in each challenge, and only attempt harder ones once the “mission” was complete? I don’t even know if there’s enough challenges on the map for that to be possible.
It seems weird and arbitrary, and almost like the game was piecemealed together — like the people who made the challenges weren’t allowed to interact with the people who made the “story”. And like the people who designed the physics couldn’t interact with the people who designed the world.
Quick Restart
A welcome return is the session marker feature. This allows you to place a return spot that you can quickly get back to if you don’t quite do what you’re trying to do. You can hold ‘Up’ on the D-Pad wherever you’re standing to place the marker. Then by simply tapping ‘Up’, you’ll return to that spot.
Whenever you start a new challenge, the session marker sets itself to where the challenge starts automatically. You don’t actually have to do it.
Except sometimes. Every once-in-a-while, before you start a mission or challenge you are prompted to set a session marker. It’s not automatic in those scenarios. And I haven’t seen any real pattern as to when they do and when they don’t. It’s seemingly random, which is weird.
It is nice that the game largely sets the markers for you, though. Otherwise, you might hit ‘Up’ and get teleported to your previous spot, which would be annoying. Fortunately in this game, if you do find yourself at the wrong session marker, you can quickly tap ‘Up’ again and return to the spot you just were. It’s effectively an “undo”, and it’s very welcome.
But if you want to, just for shits and giggles outside of a challenge, pull off something ridiculous like that, the session markers definitely come in handy.
Lootboxes and Premium Passes
Character customization is rather lacking here. There’s a few different facial styles and skin tones, but there’s not a lot of dialing in. Seemingly, a lot of emphasis in this game is going to be on cosmetics. Which leads to my next point.
Yep, lootboxes. This is definitely on the “freemium” model. Your efforts of tricking around the city are rewarded with San Van Bucks, which can be spent on the various loot boxes in the game. Doing so also increases your rank in the various neighborhoods of the city; and as you increase your level in each neighborhood, you can unlock additional boxes to open.
And, naturally, if you want to spend your real world hard-earned actual dollars to open boxes faster, obviously the option is here. This is Ubisoft we’re talking about. I give it less than a year before we see Batman and Rumi throwing aerials and varials.
Each box contains around 10 – 15 items, and it’s random which item you’ll get when you open the box. So, yes, to acquire every item available, you have to grind (pun intended) for Bucks in order to open each box 10 – 15 times.
The items can be a sticker you can put on your board, a clothing item, and emote, a board design, grip-tape pattern and more. And, given the freemium model, there’s daily, weekly, and seasonal challenges that will give you yet another currency.
This on is Tix and there are tiers of rewards these can be spent on. The next tiers unlock as you earn more Tix and complete seasonal challenges. Unlike the lootboxes, you’re actually selecting the item you want to unlock here. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the more fun items are locked behind the battlepass skate.pass.
I’ve also got to mention that they’re doing holiday themed seasonal challenges, too. Just prior to posting this, there was a big update and the parks are Halloween themed, and there’s different challenges and Halloween-exclusive unlockables. I’m not mad at it, and am kind of looking forward to what they do in the future.
Despite the Lootboxes…
Fortunately if you like skating (and if they can clean up some of the inconsistencies with landing and grinding) there’s a lot of actual fun to be had here. Pulling off awesome trick combos and lines is extremely fun and satisfying.
I don’t love the freemium model, and the “story” isn’t actually much of one. But I’m going to continue shredding and gliding around San Vansterdam. I’m still hooked.
Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you thought about skate, and if there’s any combos I should attempt. And stay tuned to my YouTube for clips — I could definitely see myself playing this for a while.