In some ways, this is the first worthy competitor to Tony Hawk's monopoly over skating games.
The game starts bad right from the start, with some weird scene involving you getting hit by a bus, having to have surgery, barely living, then skating. Wait, skating? You got hit by a bus! The whole thing seems very tacked on, in some lame attempt to have a story line. Sports games don’t need story lines. They need some form of progression, but a storyline? Totally unnecessary. After that scene you start in some area resembling a skate park with a whole bunch of tutorial mini-missions. And you are going to need every one of those. Grasping the control scheme can be a little tough, especially if you’ve play the Tony Hawk series for more than 3 hours. The left analog stick controls your body, meaning it will turn, spin, and flip your skater. The right analog stick controls your board, allowing you to do board flips and modify grabs. The R2 and L2 buttons have your skater grab your board, whether or not you’re in the air. The R1 and L1 buttons bring up specific menus. The X and [] buttons have your skate pump. The O button is your brake, and the triangle button is your action button. I’m sure most Tony Hawk fans have a raised eyebrow. “So you don’t hit the square button for a board flip?!” No you don’t. If fact, flipping your board is the hardest thing to first grasp in the controls. Flipping your board is easy. Doing a specific flip is hard. Just ask anybody who has completed P-Rod’s Pro Challenge.
Once you grasp the controls, you will start completing some missions. These missions include Best Trick, Tutorials, Races, Pro Challenges, S-K-A-T-E, and, well, that’s really it. The first bad thing about this game is that it’s repetitive. You see all of the types of missions you are going to see within the first 2 hours of gameplay, give or take a mission type. At first, it may not seem like that big of a deal. But when you really get into the game, you’ll realize that this makes the game a little boring.
Speaking of a little boring, let’s talk about something both boring and irritating about this game, which is the second bad thing about this game: Traveling. There are supposedly 3 ways to travel in this game. The first one is just pressing the X button until you die, which means skating from place to place. You’ll find yourself choosing this option a lot, but if you’re going uphill, it’s a pain. The second way is the subway system. I have a couple of problems with this. It seems like there aren’t enough stations, or they are just too far apart. But the really bad thing is that once you get to the subway station select screen, you can’t see where your objectives are. It’s a pain to finally get to a subway station, but realize you have to go back, pull out your map, scroll through to see where your objectives are, go back to the station, and travel there. This may seem like a simple inconvenience, but it’s really annoying. The third way to travel in this game is via session markers. These are kind of like checkpoints. You can place one down anywhere in the fictional town, and then travel to that spot anytime you want. This is nice if you want to nail a spot and have to try over and over again, but it’s not good for getting from point A to point B. More like from point A to point A.
The third thing that is bad about this game is half-assed skater selection and voice acting. I don’t know about you, but I have never heard of any of the skaters here before. Now, I’m no skating fanatic, but I’ve watched the X-games enough to know the bigger names in skating. They might as well have been made up characters. I probably should be more lenient, considering Tony Hawk probably has a lock on most of the big names, but if you’re going to have a skating game, you should have at least one popular skater to be the face of the game. Also, if you’re going to get a bunch of no-named skaters, at least try to get some acting talent out of them! All of the lines said in this game sound monotone and uninspired. I have a feeling the skaters were just given a script and told to say all of the lines on it. No context, no situation, no effort.
The final thing I hate about this game is the in-game advertising. Now, for a sports game, it’s normal to have in-game ads, and I’m fine with that. You can buy clothing in the game with real skate companies’ logos and such. Fine. But this game just takes this to a new extreme. After you complete a specific one of the missions, it literally says “Go to www._______.com to see more videos…” That’s just unacceptable and stupid. You can’t just yell out “Hey! These people paid us money!” You have to be more subtle about it, at the very least. You’d think EA would have enough money left over from Madden sales to take this crap out of their game.
The graphics and sound in this game are acceptable. There is some clipping with the clothing while skating, but everything else seems to be pretty solid, which is nice. The camera angle in this game really allows for an outstanding view, and the graphics do it justice. The sound effects in this game are great, too. Everything sounds like it should, and the sounds even change with the surface you’re riding on. The music in this game only comes on when you’re in a “skating hotspot” where you can rack up a lot of points. This feature is nice, but not really important, as you will learn where all of these spots are overtime.
All-in-all, this game is really good. I have been a Tony Hawk player since the first one on the N64, and going from the arcade style of Tony Hawk to the simulation style of Skate wasn’t as hard as I thought. Even though there are a lot of thing that irritate me about this game, I still like it. The game and I have a sort of love-hate relationship. I get really frustrated whenever something goes bad, but I just can’t put the controller down. Call it obsession, but I just can’t put it down. In some ways, this is the first worthy competitor to Tony Hawk's monopoly over skating games. It’s just to bad the game doesn’t live up to its gameplay’s potential.