Fifteen years following the release of Skate 3, EA is once again giving this old skating series a shot, this time upping the ante in more ways than one.
Set in the massive open-world city of San Vansterdam, populated by players and NPCs alike, skate. is dropping players into a huge sandbox and allowing them to play and express themselves however they see fit. With tight and intuitive controls, weighty physics, and comic ragdolls, skate. is shaping up to be this generation's go-to skating experience, but not without its set of caveats.
A fresh coat of paint — an all-too-recognizable vibe
For those who have had the pleasure of playing old Skate games or have watched the ancient practice of Let's Plays from historic YouTube giants around 2010, you'll know exactly the kind of vibe this franchise has. Physics, ragdolls, and realism (to some extent) are the name of the game here, and skate. has plenty of them.
Set in a huge fictional city called San Vansterdam, skate. has a lot to offer. From incredible verticality where the sky is the literal limit to tons of grounded, varied locations, no bit of San Van ever feels the same. It's Skate to its core, allowing you to go wherever you want and do whatever you want, clearing pre-set challenges scattered throughout the world to increase your reputation, or freestyling across the city streets (or skyscrapers).
From the very moment you're dropped in, you're given the option to stick to Skate 3's recognizable control scheme or switch to a more modern set. For the sake of the preview, I stuck with the OG, as it proved very intuitive even to this day.
The gist of it is: you move with the left stick, and perform tricks with the other. Keyboards decidedly cannot be used to play this game, as even starting it up is greyed out if you don't have a controller plugged in.
There is a lot you can do both on foot and with a skateboard, much like in the older games. You can sprint, climb, jump, and basically even fly without as much as touching a skate, providing you with a lot of options and varied gameplay (which the game itself emphasizes during its early stages).
The core focus of skate. is its Flick Trick system, tricks performed by dragging the right controller stick in various patterns. You essentially draw the trick you want to perform, and you can see this “drawing board” at the bottom of your screen. It's so intuitive I cannot even express it and makes performing even the wildest tricks “easy,” though mastering the game is still quite the ride.
There are a ton of tricks in the game already, with the developers hoping to add more tricks, especially those from older Skate titles.
All in all, skate. preserves the core identity of Skate to a significant degree. However, its cartoonish art style and direction are decidedly different from that of the older titles, which were more gritty and realistic.
I'm not too big a fan of this new style, but it grew on me with the gameplay, which is conditioned by the weighty, realistic physics system of the game as it adds an extra layer that is otherwise missing from its art.
Live-service model and appalling decisions
EA is going for a semi-MMO approach for this upcoming skate. title. That means that the world is hosted on a massive server where dozens of players will play simultaneously and be able to meet each other throughout. However, if you're not a fan of seeing other faces around or challenging them to a skate-off, you shouldn't worry—the game's AR system can be utilized to remove just about everyone from the world, including both NPCs and other players, so you can do your thing away from stranger eyes.
It is also a live-service title, with a free-to-play model, allowing everyone to drop in and play however they see fit. The developers told us that this opens the game up to as many people as possible, new and veteran alike, to come in and try things out and perhaps even leave feedback that could end up influencing the game's development.
The early access free-to-play approach, the devs argue, allows them to essentially co-produce skate. alongside the community.
But that comes with a downside: skate. is going to have microtransactions, and while that's completely fine and dandy given they'll only be used for cosmetics, the philosophy has already made its way into the game itself. Completing challenges and racking up your reputation grants you various currencies that you can spend on store cosmetics. The only issue here is that you cannot choose what cosmetic to spend your coins on.
Rather, you open loot boxes with various cosmetic collections contained within, meaning you cannot decouple the free-to-play experience from the premium one. I found this mechanic appalling, to say the least, and felt it was gearing players towards spending money on premium loot box purchases by “warming them up” to them through free-to-play cosmetics.
The overall gameplay wasn't affected by anything I wore, however, so it does remain a purely cosmetic system, albeit one that I couldn't help but feel was predatory in nature.
All in all, EA's new skate. is as much skate as the previous titles, though with a more cartoonish art style and online multiplayer approach. All the crazy sandbox shenanigans are still there, allowing you to skate and crash to your heart's content with realistic physics, virtually no skybox, and verticality equalled by few other titles.
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