Practice, practice, practice. This game isn't an easy one, but taking the time to learn how to play is worth it.
This is no Tony Hawk game. I used to be a die hard Tony Hawk fan, well technically I still am a Tony Hawk fan, just not a fan of the recent games that have been released. I stopped playing after THUG, even though I thought that game was fun. The formula just got boring to me. It was nothing to score 1,000,000 point combos, hit the vert, reverb, manual, fliptrick, grind, manual, and so on and so forth. It got easy. No longer do you use the x button and the directional pad to fliptrick. Yep, that's right, because us gamers have the Skate series now. An open ended style skateboarding game with a decent sized city which will become your playground.
For those who actually skateboarded at one point in their life and understand some basic tricks like pop shove-its and heelflips will learn this game's controls a bit quicker than others. You use the right stick and left stick to use you board. You use the left stick to control your direction and the right stick to ollie and flip your board. So let's say you want to kickflip. You draw the right stick up or down (ollie/nollie) and flip it in a diagonal direction. What feels so great about this is if you can actually do a kickflip on real skateboard (I can) the motions that you go through with your feet transfer to the Xbox 360's controller very well. That's why skakeboarders will pick up on these controls quickly, assuming they play video games (like me). Other flip tricks take time to learn, like the Laser Flip. ( Which I can't do ). The right stick is very sensitive. But with practice you will get the hang of it and the next thing you know you will be nailing tricks like a Nollie 360 Hardflip 540 in an online game of S-k-a-t-e like it's nothing. (Yes even with Skate 2 currently out, people still play this one online) Grab are very simple to do. You pull in one of the triggers and push the right stick up or down, left or right and hold it there to perform different grabs. Grinds can be tricky. You don't have to press any buttons to get on the rail. I believe in TH you have to press a button to get on the rail. In Skate, you just ollie right on to it.( LIKE YOU DO WHEN YOU SKATEBOARD FOR REAL ) Depending on how you land will determine the grind you do. This also takes a bit of practice, but with enough you can do Noseblunt slides when you feel like it. Don't get pissed off like my buddy when your trying to grind a rail and your heading at it at a perpendicular angle and expect to ride the rail. (He doesn't skateboard)
The single player part of the game is challenging and frustrating at times. I did complete it so it's not impossible and maybe the person who reviewed the game for the site just isn't as good as me. You compete in events like Jam, in which you score as many points as possible or Best Trick, in which you try to get the best trick. It really should be called Best Combo instead of best trick. You will know what I mean if you play this game. Performing specific tricks for challenges is the hardest part in the game in my opinion. Like I said earlier, it's not impossible. I remember one challenge I must have repeated 50 times. It was for Rob and Big. You have to do a crooked grind and specific fliptrick out of the grind. It's really not that hard and Big doesn't even get in your way really (he's suppose to) but sometimes the stick won't do exactly what you want it to. If I had any complaints about the game that would be the one, but it's not really a problem.
The multiplayer is fun. You can play skate, which is like horse. Although playing skate is irritating sometimes. The person who starts the game can keep their turn to set a trick forever if that person is good enough. You have to wait for that person to screw up before you can get a chance to set a trick, so these competitions can take a long time if you have 4 good players playing. (I hope they fix this in Skate 3) There is also jam, best trick, spot battle, spot race, deathrace and maybe another one. There are some people online who are freakishly good. For example, in Spot Battle, you can chain a quick combo of flip tricks to get your multiplier up to get more points when you actually hit the spot. I don't think that should be allowed and I hope they fix that also in Skate 3. I like being able to do tricks and get my score up, but I don't want to be beat when I do a Christ Air frontflip and the guy after me does a kickflip on the spot but got his multiplier up so he receives more points for his weak kickflip. Multiplayer is fun and definitely adds some replay value to the game. Hopefully you get a game with people around your skill level and I'm sure you will because I have been beating people all day.
All in all, Skate is great game. The change of the controls and how well they perform is going to benefit the skateboarding genre. The game is challenging and if you want to kill a half and hour before work, this game is perfect for that. I see Tony Hawk Ride is trying to do something new to combat Skate, but if you going to buy that game for $120, you may as well go out and spend a $120 on a real skateboard.
Well this is my review and I hope it was helpful. I'm going to go outside and try to land that Laser Flip before I get too old to skate anymore.