Some improvements on Skate 2 but not as great as I hoped for.
So naturally, I was extremely excited about this release of this game. It somewhat lived up to my expectations but I feel some of the new additions are a bit sloppy
Firstly, the multiplayer system is very disappointing. You can only have a maximum of 6 players in a game at once. They had really bigged-up the "team" portion of the game but now it turns out you can only play 3 vs 3 team games anyway. I've become a member of a team I'm very happy with and there were 6 of us online last night. We would have absolutely loved to do a 6 vs 6 online game but we had to wait until 3 members went to bed before we even got started with any competitive play. They have also removed the "Online Freeskate Activities" that existed in Skate 2 (there were 149 of them if I recall correctly - so this is a huge removal). You can now complete the career challenges online instead but you'll probably find yourself doing most of them in single player anyway.
With the removal of the freeskate activites that means that there are less than 100 challenges to complete overall. Whereas there were over 200 in Skate 2. I killed all these activities within 3 days of buying the game.
One thing that I do like is that fact that you can now go back and "kill" each of the challenges, which I suppose kind of doubles the amount that there are. However, if you are experienced with the game, you will find most of these very easy challenges anyway (there were only 6 which I even slightly struggled to kill on normal difficulty.)
The addition of the "hardcore" and "easy" difficulties are excellent. Easy mode will be very good for beginners to the game - I'm sure we all struggled to get used to the unique control system used in the series at first. Hardcore difficulty is great for the more experienced players such as myself.
The other big addition that they have made is the skate.Park creator. This is a very welcome addition to the series and will definitely kill a few hours after you complete the game. However, you are very limited on the amount of different ramps that are available and you will often find yourself frustrated that you need a certain item which simply doesn't exist. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 was released 10 years ago, and I feel the level editor on there was just as good as the one featured in Skate 3.
The new city is fairly good, probably about the same level of fun as San Vanelona from Skate 2. There are some quirky additions but overall it's kind of similar.
Although this review seems somewhat negative overall, I would still recommend the game if you enjoyed the earlier titles in the series. Just don't have too high expectations.