I never thought I would see the Skate series make a grand comeback, let alone as a free-to-play live-service game. As much as I hoped a Skate 4 would happen, or that the older games might get the remaster treatment, this is not what I wanted. Still, it’s better than nothing right? And I certainly can’t deny that the skating itself is superb. Everything else, though, is more mixed.
The first hurdle we have to ollie, if you don’t count the free-to-play live-service giant hurdle, is that this is an Early Access game that also wants you to purchase a season pass and buy a bunch of microtransactions. That doesn’t leave a good taste in my mouth. In Early Access, all the focus should be getting the game in it’s best possible state, but here the developer’s focus is divided between making the game, and selling you stuff.
Available On: PC, Xbox Series S/X, PS5
Played On: PS5
Developed By: Full Circle
Published By: EA
That’s just the first hurdle…well, two hurdles. There’s quite few more to ollie over. So let’s try to start simpler: in the family of Skate games, where does this one fall? Skate 3 is the most direct comparison because that’s where this new version seems to be drawing the most inspiration, focusing quite a lot on the hilarious ragdoll physics and massive jumps. That isn’t to say you can’t stick to the street skating rather than the massive ramps, but I think the developers are leaning into the wackier antics to help keep the live-service crowd intereted.
The best part of the Skate games was getting to flick your stick. Oh, get your mind out of the gutter, you perverts. The flick-it system is back and as stupidly satisfying as ever, but let’s assume for a moment that you are unfamiliar with it. You see, unlike the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games where ollies and tricks are handled by button presses, Skate uses the right stick. An ollie involves pulling down on the stick, and then flicking it up. A kickflip means angling the flick slightly to one side, while more complex tricks require some finesse to pull off. Grinds are handled by actually landing your board on the object, and grabs are mapped to the triggers.
It’s as good as it has ever been, and it took mere seconds for my muscle memory to kick in. I still boot up the first three Skate games a few times a year for some sessions with my best mate, a tradition we’ve kept up for since the Xbox 360 days, and I easily fell back into the familiar patterns.
Even something as straightforward as a flip trick into a grind then flipping out of it again feels rewarding because it takes timing and precision to pull off. There’s a high skill ceiling in skate that ensures you can have fun sessioning even a simple staircase with a railing for 10 minutes. While this iteration of Skate allows for gravity-defying, massive leaps, I still find the most fun in street-level skating. Sure, a couple of tricks and things are currently missing, and will apparently be added in later, but even accounting for that, this might be the best skating the series has ever had.
That said, the physics can sometimes be weird as fuck, man. Ollies don’t always seem to get the height they should, or your board will interact in some batshit crazy way with the ground/a curb/the edge of something and make your skater collapse in a boneless heap or go rocketing into the sky. As rewarding as it can be, there’s definitely a lot of frustration that comes with it, especially when you are not convinced that you were at fault. If you can roll with it rather than immediately flying into a rage, though, it becomes funny. Plus, it’s Early Access, so things being less than polished is expected.
The original Skate really played into the street skating vibe, giving you a fairly realistic city where you had to work to find spots to skate. It kept the physics brutally realistic, too. By time Skate 3 came around it was still more grounded than the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, but the city was more obviously built around skating and you could pull off some absolutely insane stunts involving huge gaps, absurd speeds and a physics system that was afraid to interrupt you.
This new Skate leans into the absurdity more. You can still keep it realistic if you want, but there’s already people doing crazy rooftop leaps, abusing the skydiving systems, rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog and doing all manner of wackiness. Sometimes it feels less like a game about skateboarding and more like a stunt simulator that just happens to have some skateboards in it. You see, you can climb now and there’s plenty of rooftop action to be found if you don’t mind spending a few minutes clambering up the side of a building. It’s actually a really cool addition as climbing fits nicely into skating culture, even if I wish some of the really tall buildings just had a god damn elevator.
You can also skydive around the place now. Leap off of a building and you can glide through the sky like Batman without the cape. You can cover a lot of distance like this, which is why players have already figured out how to abuse the system to pull off stunts that would make the Jackass cast go wide-eyed. When you combine that with the weird ability to tuck yourself into a ball and roll around (I am not kidding), there’ll be moments where you’re watching other players do anything other than actually skating.
On top of that, the city itself is now a skater’s paradise full of weird and wonderful objects, layouts and rooftop skating spots that reward you for using the climbing system. On the one hand, it means you lose some of the joy earned by finding a spot worthy of a session marker, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of cool shit to grind, manual on over and trick over.
The city is broken into four roughly equal segments, although in terms of overall size it’s actually quite a bit smaller than I had expected. Of course, it might be expanded in the future. Right now, one section is classed as still being worked on, but that doesn’t mean you can’t skate it – there’s just no challenges.
Speaking of which, the bulk of the content is made up by challenges that refresh daily. They come with a variations, but boil down to performing a list of tricks and goals, sometimes in a sequence, other times in a time limit. You’ll earn better rewards if you can pull it all of in one unbroken sequence as well. These challenges are initially quite enjoyable, but they grow old fast, and repeat themselves frequently.
Aside from those challenges, there’s not much else. It’s missing all the classic modes from the previous games like death races, S-K-A-T-E and Hall of Meat. Hopefully these will be added, because right now the game is pretty light on content.
Going back to the city for a second, I did find myself getting bored of the city after just a couple of days, but that’s where the object dropping comes into play. You can spawn in ramps, rails and other bits and pieces with a few button taps, and while you can only place a few objects at any given time, it’s enough to invent some creative layouts. This tool might be the key to keeping people skating, even if it doesn’t seem to be getting used much.
The Online Stuff
As a free-to-play game, Skate is a completely online experience – you cannot play it offline, nor without other players carving up the streets, which is peculiar because your interaction with other players is minimal. They can feel more like skateboarding ghosts inhabiting your world, echoes of sick lines and tricks, than actual people sometimes.
The frustrating thing is that the game’s design fully allows for a solo mode. After all, you can play every challenge on your own, so there’s no reason to have to be connected, except, of course, for all the live-service elements. If the servers drop out or go down for maintenance, that’s you out of the game until it comes back online.
Interacting with your fellow lovers of carving it up isn’t as easy as it really should be. My main gripe is that I can’t just roll-up to an event and hit an invite button. I can drop a signal to people on the map, but they then have to join my party by venturing through some menus. There’s no proximity or text-chat either, so communication has to be handled via the in-game animations and the quick-message wheel. I’m sure it would terrify the developers, but proximity voice chat could be amazing in Skate.
If you do get some people into a party, all you can actually do is the same challenges you’ve been doing the whole time. Nothing about the challenges changes, except now everyone in the party needs to complete them. That’s it. Hardly exciting, is it? There’s only one competitive mode where you thrown down a challenge, but nobody seems to be bothered about using it right now.
The social elements need some work if Skate wants to succeed. Sure, right now people will just hang out and watch each other skate, aided by the ability to spawn in items such as ramps and rails, but the sense of community that exists feel like it’s there in spite of the game’s lacklustre social elements rather than because of them. As I skate around town, I find myself barely paying attention to the background skaters. They might as well be NPCs for all the difference it makes to me.
The Live-Service Bit
Right now, Skate seems pretty generous in terms of its monetization, keeping all of its microtransactions limited to cosmetic items. Even then, you can get an okay selection of gear to wear and decks to shred by just playing, and you have access to all the challenges and the entire map – nothing is locked away. In other words, it’s generous in the sense that if you don’t care too much about what your character looks like, you get a completely free game to enjoy – just hop on and have fun tearing up the city. You never need to pay a dime.
Unfortunately, I foresee my experience in having little reason to open my wallet as a major sticking point for the game’s future. If other players end up like me and don’t see anything of value in spending cash on the overpriced hoodies, boards and hats, then the developers and EA will probably start introducing more egregious monetization methods. Or worse, they’ll just shut the game down.
Season 1 kicked off while I was writing this review, giving us our first glimpse at what the long-term financial model is going to be. It added new stuff to skate around the city, along with the first Skate Pass, a season pass that comes in both free and paid flavours. Initial impressions are…meh. It doesn’t offer anything exciting, so I haven’t bothered to buy it yet. There’s a whole bunch of clothes, decks and other knick-knacks to earn in the Skate Pass by acquiring Ticks, done by completing challenges on the map. But again, as someone with the fashion sense of a slug, the clothes and boards were meaningless to me.
As for the new skateable objects that the season pass added to the map, they’re also mostly just fine. They have an odd patchwork design featuring lots of neon colours, sticking to the game’s overall clean, corporate image. There are some big news ramps, a couple of cool spirals and some other bits and bobs added to the walkway, but after just a few hours, the novelty had already worn off.
All in all, then, season 1 isn’t strong start for Skate. The clothing being offered isn’t enticing and the changes to the city won’t keep people engaged until season 2 which launches in December. Speaking of which, the official roadmap is promising a new co-op mode in season 2, so that could be nice. Season 3, presumably launching in early 2026, will include new modes, too. Will it already be too little, too late by then, though?
And Now, Everything Else
So if I’m extremely happy with the gameplay and can even accept that Skate handles its free-to-play elements surprisingly well (by which I mean, I can have fun skating without paying a penny), why am I still so down on the game? The answer is that everything about Skate’s presentation feels too clean, too corporate, too cringe-inducing. This is a game about skating, a sport that has always been viewed as rebellious and punk-rock and underground, but Skate is Fortnite characters in a squeaky clean city bursting with colour. A city that’s built around skating, where it’s normal and accepted, and everybody does it. It’s all just so wrong, and souless.
Vee is your constant AI companion, a frustrating sound that refuses to shut up and talks to you as if you were a child. If that wasn’t enough, every other companion is a voice over the radio spouting a constant barrage of slang-laden dialogue. I admit, I’m not in the skating scene, so maybe I don’t have a grasp on the vocabulary these days, but it sounds horrendous to ears, like aural rape. At least Coach Dave from Skate 3 was the fun kind of cringe – these idiots can’t claim that. The bigger shame is that it’s actual pro skaters voicing these characters, but instead of getting to be themselves they have to be…whatever the hell these things are.
Evem the joy of breaking bones is gone. Skate 3’s ragdoll system was a massive part of what made it fun, as was laughing at how many broken bones you got from a fall. The new Skate strips this away by explaining how some corporation invented something that keeps you from being hurt, meaning skaters can go bigger than ever without fear. It’s too clean, too Disney.
In Conclusion…
As always, I’m not going to rate an Early Access game. What would be the point, really?
When I’m just skating a spot and trying to get some good footage to show off to my mate or passing the controller back and forth, Skate is stupendous. It really is. This is probably the best skating the series has ever had, and that’s why I am genuinely hopeful that the game can have a future, despite my utter dislike of what form Skate has been resurrected in.
But I’m just not confident that the developers and EA are going to pull it off. The current vision for the live-service elements are weak and I’m not sure the game is going to be able to generate enough money to keep EA sated. That will likely lead down a dangerous road to worse microtransactions and locking away new content to entice people to spend money.
Basically, I don’t think Skate is suited to this style of business model. Perhaps I’m wrong, though. I hope I am, because even if this isn’t how I wanted to see Skate come back, I’m still glad it’s here and that I can while away a few hours shredding rails and finding stupid gaps with my best mate again.