Game Reviews

After an absolute age, EA’s wheelie classic is back with great handling and a whole world of slightly jarring niceness.

Few people are saying this out loud, but the new Skate game is essentially an MMO. That’s not what most people want at the moment, by the looks of it, which may explain why few people are saying it out loud.

Skate review

And there are good reasons for this! The broadband connection is a pain, the free-to-play model makes people fret and, with EA, there’s always the strong chance that a world you’ve grown to love will simply blip out of existence one day because the share price sneezed.

But there’s also something really interesting about doing this with Skate, and that’s because MMOs are often RPGs, which means that they frequently have to deal with an odd little conceptual nailbomb. It’s the apocalypse, or something like it. The land has changed and we all feel it in the earth. Enemies are on the march. And you’re the only person who can save the world. But also: there’s a queue. There’s a queue to save the world, and so you eventually join the world-saving quest queue waiting patiently behind a dozen other Chosen Ones.

To put it more broadly, in an MMO, everything’s important but nothing’s really urgent. That’s kind of weird when we’re dealing with an RPG or some kind of cinematic narrative. But throw that state of being into a skating game where nothing’s urgent and only the smallest details are important, and you have something potentially fascinating. It’s like the moment in Below Deck when you realise these people are all dressed in navy epaulets and are chattering urgently into earpieces and talking about rank and all that jazz, but the only mission, per se, involves making sure the mimosas keep flowing. It’s almost Star Trek, but there’s little to no chance of the Romulans turning up and blowing a hole in the hull.

Here’s a Skate trailer to show it in motion.Watch on YouTube

As for what Skate definitely is, it’s the latest installment in EA’s beloved skating series, but it’s set in an always online open world in which you’re chucked in with 149 other skaters and allowed to explore the city of San Vansterdam, which we will get to in a moment. San Vanderstam is carved up into different areas, and the Early Access build has a spine of semi-narrative that takes you through them in turn as you learn what’s what.

You progress by taking on missions, and also by accessing challenges scattered across the map. A lot of these challenges refresh throughout the day, because this is, whisper it, an MMO. They’re simple multi-part fun. Often you have to collect things in a line, and trick as you do so. Sometimes you have to hurl yourself off a building and do interesting things as you plummet to the earth and crashland in a dumpster. Sometimes you have to simply own the spot, by tricking, earning points, getting air. All of this comes with nice tools for capturing video of what you’ve just done, and with a simple drag-and-drop system for adding ramps and rails and whatnot which other players can also have fun with. You can make your own spot and 149 other people might want to enjoy it too! That is lovely stuff.

Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

At the heart of everything is the Flick-It system, which I love very, very much. It comes in a range of flavours here depending on your familiarity with it or your compulsion to become familiar with it through effort, but essentially, you flick the right stick – bear in mind I’m someone who has to have L and R written on their hands during swimming lessons, so right and left are fairly mutable terms to me at the best of times – in order to pull off tricks. There is such a gorgeous elasticity to this, and a quiet physicality which means you feel some kind of genuine connection to the neat footwork unfolding on the screen whenever you do something cool. There are also expanded moves like grabs and spins, all of which fold in with Flick-It very sweetly.

Gosh it’s a gorgeous thing. And to highlight just how gorgeous it is, and how gorgeous it remains in this new version of the game, I’m just going to tell you about manuals. Manuals are – and pardon my short-hand, I am no kind of skater in real life – manuals are essentially wheelies on a skate board. You push down on the back of the board and the front goes up. I have never manualed in real life, but I manual whenever I can in skating games, and Skate’s take on this is glorious. It’s because you pull back on the right stick, which is fine, but there’s this sweet spot you have to find. Pull back all the way, until stick clicks against housing, and you will not manual. This is because manualling is a butterfly thing, and it responds to tentative movements, to a feeling out of precise spaces. So to manual, you pull back on the stick and find a space precisely within that empty area between the stick being in its standard position and the stick being all the way back. It reminds me in some complex, the-details-are-invisible way of safe-cracking. I love it. And I love Flick-It.

Flick-It brings the game to life, and has kept me playing through challenges that don’t have an enormous amount of variation to them and through a city which I love, but which I also know is a touch antiseptic and safe. I love San Vansterdam because the starting area at least is clearly inspired by places like Downtown Los Angeles – there’s that smooth concrete and stone, that sun-bleached horizon, stand-ins for things like the ARCO Tower. I love Downtown Los Angeles because it feels dreamlike if you catch it at the right moment, like it’s both heavy and tangible and barely there at all. But it’s a world away from the kind of spaces Tony Hawk would take you, for example, and to a lot of people its particular character may come off as a lack of character in general.

Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

Even so, San Vansterdam is a city in name only, and really a beautifully spaced-out skating park filled with lines and jumps and grinds that I am still discovering. I love skating with strangers here – there’s part of the campaign that forces you to pool with other players, and it worked perfectly for me and I lost a few hours to it. But I also love skating alongside strangers. I’ll come to one of the bespoke skating parks and see dozens of people skating and jumping and grabbing and spinning and pulling off the kind of tricks and chains of tricks that I can only dream of. But it makes me feel a part of something, and I love dropping out to the map and seeing an area where spots are moving back and forth, and then heading to that area and seeing that they’re people! I love dropping into spectating mode and watching people trick and grab and twist.

Onto the payment side of things! Skate has loot boxes which so far it’s rewarded me with for completing missions, and you can also pay real money to buy cosmetics. I have to be honest, I find this side of things quite unexciting, but it feels as if Skate does too. You can play without paying a penny, anyway, and no tricks or challenges will ever be put behind a paywall. It’s all hats and trousers and that kind of thing in the store. It feels like a deal I am happy with?

Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

I love a lot about Skate, then. More, I suspect, that a lot of people. But even I can sense that there’s something missing here. How can I explain this? Okay: don’t get upset, but Skate is perhaps the least cool game I have ever played.

And I mean this in the main as a compliment. Skate isn’t trying too hard, and it wants to be friendly to a large audience, and I suspect it’s also made by people who have lived enough of their lives to know that you miss out on important stuff in the pursuit of being cool for the sake of being cool alone. But Skate is set in a city that everyone loves, a city that’s basically designed for skating, and that means that some of the punkier side of skating – the repurposing of an environment that is built as if you don’t exist, or don’t matter – is absent.

Image credit: Eurogamer / EA

Skate is almost punishingly nice at times. Do the slightest thing on a board in this game and the voiceover buries you with the kind of cardboard love bombs you might expect from a large language model. I like people being nice to me! But I also know that real skating, which I have never done, has an aspect that is not coming across here.

Skate accessibility options

Vibration toggle, FOV and camera shake sliders, three levels of control presets, Flick-It sensitivity slider, toggles for pushing and maintaining speed, grind assist slider and toggle for friendlier wipeout threshold, flip tricks catch assist toggle, auto curb pop toggle, auto mantle and auto wallrun toggles.

Or is it? Skate has parkour, which is clumsy and slow and I kind of love it. You can get off the board and climb skyscrapers to find stunt spots or just a great area to hang out in, like an abandoned swimming pool, waiting for you in the sky. And because you can get off the board, loads of players have discovered that you can jump and roll and basically barrel your way around the world without skating at all.

I have seen this a few times, mostly in the very early days of the game when it was still quite hard to get online, what with the queues and everything, so I stuck around quite a bit on each visit. And what I realised was that people have found a way to push against the design here, just as skaters once found a way to grind hand rails and turn ornamental planters into jumps. This suggests to me, along with the plans to do something Fortnitey with the game, reworking parts of the city on a seasonal basis, that the story of this new Skate is not yet fully written. It is only Early Access, after all. I think I’m probably going to stick around to see how it all turns out.

A copy of Skate was provided for this early access review by EA.

Source link