Okay first, I recognize how late this review is. I've been eyeing this game in the bargain bin for years now. I was aware that the reviews for this game are good not great, so I was sheepish about it. After the failure of other games in this genre though, added to my hankering for another skateboarding game, I decided to dive in and try.
Let me just say that my standard is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. That game is very old at this point but I don't see why modern games should be judged against anything less than that game. I have to say that I am getting frustrated as game after game by all these companies do not realize what made THPS3 so great, and fall into the same traps over and over.
Here's what defines THPS3: FLOW! The skating should flow seamlessly. It's about the interaction between the skater and the world. All skater games at least know enough to translate every day locations into skate parks, but they fail in how they approach the skaters' abilities.
Let me get specific about the biggest source of poison by far in the series, something so prevalent because on the surface it seems like it is only good. I'm talking about the ability to reset and go back to the start of a challenge and immediately try again. This has been in every skateboard game since THPS4, and was no doubt added because the gamers requested it. In THPS3, if you failed a challenge you were stuck on the other side of the park and had to skate back if you wanted to try again, and usually the time limits made doing this very obtuse. However, it quickly became apparent to me in THPS4 that this ability wrecked the flow. In THPS4, the ability to go back and try immediately meant that the challenges increased to bizarre levels, and so all of a sudden the core gameplay of skating games was that you just hammer that challenge over and over by constantly resetting to the start point. The flow is gone. Say hello to the brute force method. It's freaking awful.
In Skate 3, brute force is the only way to do anything. They even have a method of doing it anywhere by giving the ability to set teleport points. A lot of challenges are so easy they are insulting, and a lot of challenges are very difficult and you just hammer away at them. There is precious little middle ground. Making things worse, this game uses a very different method of control than what I am used to in Tony Hawk Pro Skater. You use the sticks to do the major moves. I hate using them for jumps. This game is crying out for a jump button. But in general, this game has an admirably realistic skate boarding gameplay to it, and I liked it at first, but this is a game in a Tony Hawk style world. There is no flow in how you skate. In Tony Hawk, you make massive chains and you do ludicrous moves all over the place, with unrealistic abilities none greater than the infamous grinding which was just pure fun. Realistic grinding takes a core gameplay mechanic out of the genre imo. I don't skateboard myself. I don't want a faithful recreation of it.
Anyway, this review is a lot longer than I intended for such an old game, but I just had to say it. I lament the loss of this genre. I hope to see a game where this huge focus on realism is abandoned and that they seriously look at bringing back the gameplay of THPS3. A lot of the supposedly negative elements of THPS3 are deceptively necessary for this genre to function. Get rid of the teleporting and challenge re-setting. Bring back the time limits. Don't trust a gamer to consciously understand what they want. The sequels to THPS3 are what taught me that lesson.