More waiting than skating.
Skate 3, released about two years after the release of Skate. This immediately tells you something. The developers did not spend enough time polishing this game to make it worth while.
I am a huge fan of Skate, and even Skate 2 was alright but had similar issues to Skate 3 due to pushing the game onto the market too quickly.
You will constantly be flustered by:
-pointless load screens
-pedestrians
-skater Ai
-an additional online lobby for initiating your selected challenge (which includes load screen)
-unless "board sales"
-dumb challenges where you literally take a picture of your character doing nothing (and you have to do this for each member of your Skate team, expect to spend 30 minutes taking photos that you can't review later)
-Stiff ragdoll physics
-annoying voice announcers
-worst soundtrack yet
-very frequent and long challenge timer countdowns between online matches
-being forced to watch the same opening video between each online match, even if you already failed it 100 times.
-poorly constructed user interface, sometimes you can press B to back up, sometimes you NEED to press A
-EA Skate custom logos rarely worked as intended.
-create a park not worth the time investment.
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HOPE YOU LIKE LOAD SCREENS.
The main attraction for Skate 3 is Online Team play with friends. And this is the most unattractive and annoying aspect of the game. If you play with 3 other friends, you have a total of 3 minutes to complete the challenge you choose. If you complete it immediately, you can not reset your session marker so you are forced to wait around not skateboarding. If 3 out of 4 of your team completes it, you ALL have to do the challenge over again. You need to wait through a 15 second countdown, a 10 second load screen, the challenge video, and then another load screen between every attempt. Not to mention you often have a 6 second load screen every time you reset your session marker.
You can select hardcore, normal, or easy. You might as well select easy as it makes it easier to olley high and land tricks if you don't land smooth. You don't receive any point penalties for selecting easy. Online mode allows any difficulty combination between players. Why give your opponent the advantage?
The only positive aspect to this game is the new attractive environments.
If Skate 4 comes out before 2012, it will probably be even worse. Please EA, spend some time on your next title.