Tony Hawks has been nearly unrivaled as far as the skateboarding genre goes, and any other attempts have failed miserably. Now in its 9th rendition, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is still running strong and the most recent entry, dubbed “Proving Ground”, was starting to run slightly stale and repetitive. This gave EA’s Skate an excellent chance to take the Hawk’s crown by providing an all new but different type of skate-boarding experience.

Gameplay:

After watching the long yet slightly entertaining opening titles, It will take you straight into the Create-A-Skater mode, you can’t be a pre-made skater, but with the create mode available to you why would anyone want to? You get your basic body type (Fat to Skinny) and then some more detailed face options like jaw, eyebrow’s etc. Think a slightly toned down version of a WWE Smackdown’s create mode. You’ll then get to pick any of the hundreds upon hundreds of excellent shirt designs. It might sound like a weird thing, but you will want to go back into this mode just to change your look due to the amount of good designs on offer here. You’ll then get to do the same to your board with even better options. Deck, Wheels and even your Trucks can be picked separately. After that you then get to tune your board to suit your play style.

Once done you’ll be thrown into a tutorial and you’ll soon learn this isn’t a Tony Hawk’s Clone. First off, the camera isn’t simply behind your character its low down from the point of view similar to a skate video. This already gives it a very different look and feel. You’ll then notice the controls, Instead of the ‘mash the controller’ button combos that Proving Grounds uses, Skate makes the action realistic and simple with its ‘flick it’ controls. Similar to Fight Night, you’ll mainly be using the analog sticks. The left one controls your body and the right controls your feet. Flick it down then straight up to Ollie. Flick it down and to the right to Kick Flip. Flick it down and around to Pop-Shove it… You get the idea. There's a lot of combinations of these you can use, you can also do them the opposite way around to do them as a Nollie. This bridges the gap between an actual skater and someone who is just picking up the game, as you end up learning what each trick looks like as they mimic the flick it command. It also makes it feel like when your doing a trick, your actually doing a trick, it really does a good job about getting you more involved in the game.

‘Flick-It’ lets you do flip tricks, for grab tricks you can Ollie (using the flick it controls as it’s the only way to Ollie) then while in the air either trigger with grab, left trigger for left hand, right for right. This again feels really intuitive and natural once you’ve got the hang of it. To Push off the ground (go forward) press A or X, one for each foot, is simple and makes sense and after 3 pushes your at top speed. Manuals are performed by slightly pulling back on the right stick or pulling forward for a nose manual and again (To quote JK) it feels just like it should. Grinds are also very different than Hawk’s, as instead of pressing a button you have to actually line up your jump and land on a rail or ledge, No Button presses just skill and accuracy needed here. While on a rail you can control your feet (Right Stick) to altar your type of grind mid jump or even mid grind. At the risk of sounding repetitive this again works excellently.

As soon as you start you can’t pick all of this up straightaway but that’s just another thing that makes it just like real skating. There are no stats in the game, there are no locked tricks. Everything, trick wise is unlocked at the start. So you could start off by doing complex ‘360 flips’ or ‘360 Shove-Its’ but that’s very unlikely. This means you’re only limited by your own skill. The game has a weird way of letting you try things in your own time, yet this is just like real skating, there is always a ‘Trick Book’ in your menus. Skate Control’s to really make the game what it is, without them it wouldn’t have much to it to be honest. They really provide the game with a sense of achievement every time you master a trick.
Now anyone that is used to Tony Hawk’s, would be thinking, how can I do 20 x Kickflip combos? Well the answer is you don’t. Skate takes its influence from actual skating and makes it realistic so if you hit a good grind, then land it into a manual and then somehow flip trick into another grind then you’ve just hit an excellent combo. Talking of which, combos don’t happen that much in the game, the game focuses more on ‘Lines’ meaning you can hit a trick skate for a while hit another trick and carry on. Obviously if a lot of time happens between tricks then your line will end. This is a good idea and keeps the action relaxed and thought-out compared to button mashing.

In-between completing various goals you can change your outfit, buy new gear at the local shops and generally free skate around the open world of San Vanelona. Free-skating sometimes is more fun then the actual career, mainly due to the well designed city, as you can just sit back and go anywhere with out any loading times between areas. There are four main areas each with their own hidden spots and unique features.

There are only two problems with skate. If you see a nice ‘spot’ that you want to hit something cool on then you can set a session marker, basically a checkpoint that you can jump to anytime. The only problem is you don’t have to get too far away from the checkpoint before you have to sit through a very long loading screen to go back. This breaks up the gameplay a lot and is really the only flaw to free skating.

The second flaw is that you can’t get off your board, if you want to try to grind down a long rail you can’t just get off your board and walk up the steps you would either have to some how grind up it or try to find a ramp somewhere. It’s a shame that they couldn’t put this feature in as it would have made the game a lot easier to play.

Graphics:

The aforementioned camera angle of skate really helps the graphics shine and gives it a very unique look for what is a very unique game. Buildings and objects all look very good. The random skaters you’ll see just skating around the city all look very good, graphically and animation wise as does the character you play as. Each trick looks very smoothly animated and dynamic, this helps with the realism of the game.

Even the menus look great in Skate, with most things having a constantly moving white edge to it, very punk rock/skate-ish. The menus do look nice although they’ve used the same style for a few of the cut scenes, here they just look weird. Especially compared to the real-action intro movie you get. After that I expected the whole game to be like that but that’s not the case. This really didn’t stand out as a bad thing just a bit odd.
Another thing is how the final goal, The X Games, looks very different. Instead of having the same look and feel as the rest of the game, instead of having the same announcer, they have a special X Games HUD before goals and a special X Games announcer both looking and sounding like the real X Games graphics presentation. This adds an extra little bit of realism to the game and is very nice touch.

My only problem, as I see it, with the look of skate is that the game is also has very washed out colours and overuses the light bloom. When you hit a good line and go into 3x multiplier (the highest multiplier you can get in a line) the screen goes very colourful and is a good idea and looks great as an effect, but once its gone it returns to the washed out colours and looks odd again.

Sound:

Every grind, every trick and every push sounds spot on. The clang of board on rail, the scrape of the board grinding on a ledge, the swoop of a quickly pulled off flip trick and the whooshing wind noises that get louder the faster you go, all sound great. There is one nice spot in the game that has a very steep hill and the wind sounds you can get out of that sounds just like riding a bike down a hill.
The sound track covers everything from Electronica to Hip hop and Rock to Instrumental. Not all songs are great for a skating game but most of them have a place on a nearly perfectly fitting sound track.

Longevity:

The main goal is to score magazine covers, work your way up get sponsored then finally skate at the X Games. You will do this by doing 3-6 different goals that range from hitting a set line or combo, scoring the most in a competition (called Jam’s), winning a ‘deathrace’ or even recording some footage anywhere in the level with some rough pre-set goals. For each goal you get, you get more ‘experience’ or ‘rep’ that goes towards either of the two magazines. There is Skateboard Magazine for which you’ll be doing normal goals and there is Thrasher Magazine, who you will be doing deathraces and crazy gaps. Each goal is for either of these magazines. Once you have filled up your experience bar you’ll get to do a photo shoot, which takes you to a set place in the game and lets you approach it how you would like, but it also gives you set objectives, they could be anything from a vague ‘do a flip trick’ or as accurate as ‘do a 360 flip’. When the game gets accurate it’s not as good, as it can be quite hard to pull of any of the more complex tricks on cue. Anyway, once you’ve completed the challenge you’ll get to pick one of the photos to go into the magazine, you’re then presented with a magazine page with your chosen photo in. You will then get some more goals and get to work towards the next shoot. You start off at the bottom but work you way up towards a cover shoot.

Once finished you get to skate at the X games and then the game is effectively finished, apart from the fact that free skating is a lot of fun and also after the X games you can go back and visit any unfinished challenges for achievement points and for personal pride to finish the game 100%. There are also 20 hidden spots around the city that have set point targets to beat. For example beat 600 points on a ramp, it’s simple but its fun to find them all and some are pretty hard. You’ll be rewarded with an achievement once you find and beat them all and there are also online leaderboards for each one to boot.
At the X Games you get to ride the ‘Mega Ramp’ or ‘Big Air’ then later on in the game you also unlock the mega-mega ramp. Basically they are very big ramps that let you do flips off it and I’m not talking board flips I’m talking actual body flips, which is as far as the realism gets broken. The mega ramp is a lot of fun and will give the game a lot more playing time because you’ll be playing around with what you can actually pull off on the thing. It’s a nice climax to the game and gives you something to play around once you’ve finished the core. This with the fun of free skate and the extra goals will give the game a lot more play time offline.

Skate also has a motto that reads ‘without footy its fiction’ basically meaning without any proof that you’ve hit that Triple Kickflip over a set of stairs and actually landing it then you’ve made it up. Makes sense well that’s why the in game replay editor is there you can slice up, slow down, change angles, apply filter effects to any of the last 30 seconds (appox) of gameplay. Once your done you can then upload your videos (and even photos) online, these then can be viewed by anyone online through the game or even viewed online at a computer. Then people can leave comments and rate your footage, post bails, post nice tricks and post nice lines, what ever it is, you have the freedom to do and then share it with the world. This is a real innovation and takes what Halo 3 started and makes it accessible outside of people who own the game. Hopefully we will get to see this in more games in the future.
Talking of online features, competitive online is also present giving the option to try spots against over people or engage in games of S.K.A.T.E. both are good but not great. You can also free skate with your friends online this is a genius idea because if you know somebody who is into the game as much as you can you just skate around the city for hours at a time without actually doing anything.

Overall:

Has EA beaten Tony Hawk’s? Well it offers a different experience and it will hopefully push THPS to be a better game for next year. But personally, after being addicted to Skate, I can’t see going back to Neversoft’s title unless they mix it up a lot more next year. Talking of which, next year will be very telling as Skate 2 (not yet announced) could be brilliant if they improve on what they’ve started here.
Innovation is Skate’s key, despite not having every trick and a few minor graphic issues. What Skate brings to the genre is a totally different perspective and it pulls it off incredibly. It offers a lot to do and you’ll have a big smile on your face while doing it. With excellent controls, innovative online features and lots to do Skate is the thinking man’s “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater”.