Review: Skate 3

Posted by Connor On May - 17 - 2010

“Skate” is the skateboarding series that overtook the subgenre of sports games, knocking Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater out of the public eye. (They also helped to do that themselves with their latest failure of a rebuttal, Tony Hawk: Ride.) With its very advanced and refined Flick-It control scheme, it eliminates the button-mashing trickgasm that once was skateboarding video games. Precision and skill overtaking randomness and luck, it gives users more control, and… Well, they like it. In fact, they love it. The Skate series has been highly praised for its addictive gameplay.

Well, EA Black Box put out another game in the series just a bit ago, and I’ve been playing it almost nonstop. In this review, I won’t compare it to the previous two Skate games too often — I don’t want to dwell on minor things, or isolate anybody who hasn’t played them. (Plus, they were very similar and I find my memories of them blending together.) So I’ll just review this as if it was a brand new game in a never before seen series.

The game starts up with a pretty nice video (not a cinematic, an actual live-action video) of skateboarders building things and creating skateboards. It’s pretty neat, and is a nice start to the game.
The cinematic ends with your character taking an incredibly harsh fall off a huge ramp, and opening his eyes to the idea of starting his own skateboard company.
You are then introduced to Coach Frank, played brilliantly by Jason Lee (of “My Name Is Earl” fame, who actually turns out to be a retired pro skateboarder). In his knee-high socks and short-shorts, you can’t take his character seriously, but he runs you through the motions of hopping on your board and banging out some basic tricks.
After learning the ropes, you can compete in a various number of challenges. Each completed challenge equates to sold skateboards for your company (sometimes in ridiculous numbers for the challenge completed), which help you achieve landmarks in sales and new challenges along the way.

In the photo challenges, you are given a very good control of the artistic direction of the shot. You can manipulate many controls, even depth of field, to get the desired shot on the billboard, magazine cover, or whatever.
Unfortunately, if you want to share your creation with the world, you’re gonna have to shell out $10. Yes, $10 of your real money. I despise when developers do this, but Black Box has chosen to release DLC that could very well have been included in the initial release, right alongside the game. For $10, you get the ability to share any photos, videos, and skateparks you create with the community. Something that very well could have and should have been included in the game.

However, I digress. As I furiously mentioned, you can create skateparks in this game. It’s pretty sweet… They give you a lot of control with what to do, and I’ve found myself able to build up some pretty hot spots. It’s much more satisfying to pull an awesome line off when you create a spot just FOR that line.
However, I only find myself messing around with the park editor every now and then. Most of the time, I like to find ways to make due with what the world throws at me. Either way, both ways of accomplishing awesome tricks have their own sense of creativity, and that’s what I love about this game.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Tony Hawk. THPS (original for N64) is one of my favourite games of all time. I had some great times with it as a kid. But the series is unable to keep up with the immense momentum that EA has kicked so hard to achieve with Skate. Everything you do feels like you actually did it, because it takes some now-how in the controls. Sure, you can randomly flick around the right stick, but that’s not NEARLY as satisfying as going and intending to do a specific set of tricks, and then flawlessly pulling them off. (And even if you don’t want to buy into EA Black Box’s profiteering to share your videos of these sick tricks with the world, you can just show them to a friend or two when they’re next to you.)

The campaign mode always finds new challenges to throw your way. I’ve found myself struggling for a while, not knowing how to do something that a challenge requires. I then go to another challenge and end up accidentally figuring it out, only to go back once more and defeat it with my fist in the air. It’s a great feeling to overcome challenges in this game.
Playing online is a whole other story entirely. My favourite game mode, by far, is S.K.A.T.E. This is very similar to HORSE in basketball, in that you have to set a specific trick (flip only, no grind or grab), and everybody else has to mimic your trick to avoid gaining a letter. Five letters and they’re out of the game.
It’s a ton of fun playing with other people, and it also leads to learning new tactics and tricks. Every once in a while I get bored with the missions. Hopping online for a while fixes that right up.

A great new addition to the series that I’ve been dying for since the beginning is the ability to do a darkslide grind. This is when you flip the board upside-down, onto the grip tape, and grind on that. A flip is required to get out, and it’s a lot of fun to pull off, especially at long distances.

All in all, this game is awesome. If you’ve played and enjoyed any of the earlier iterations, I highly recommend you pick this one up. I wouldn’t even bother renting, it’ll turn into a purchase.