Gamernode: Reviews - skate

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• skate
• PlayStation 3
• EA Black Box
• EA Games
• September 25th, 2007

What also separates it from Tony Hawk is just the design of the environments. For once, we have a city that doesn't have random halfpipes between school buses and giant rails spanning a basketball or tennis court for no practical reason. San Vanelona is a city designed after real cities, and skating there reflects that.
 

The city itself is split into four areas, and it's massive. Without teleporting, it usually takes a little over 10 minutes to get from one side to the other on-wheels. Of course, there are areas which are incredibly difficult to skate through (reflecting the whole realism thing), but unfortunately you can't get off your board to traverse them. It would be nice to have that option when in the free skate mode, but oh well. Maybe next year.
 

Another flaw with skate is just the camera itself. Since the right stick is used for moves, the camera's control is entirely at the whim of the game, and it shows. There's never anything too bad in terms of camera angles gone wrong, but there are plenty of times it will zoom in too far and you'll be forced to stare at your skater's knee or shin as you roll down the street.

One of Tony Hawk's big features this year was the ability to record videos of your skater as you went about doing your business. Skate does this as well, and the online and website integration makes it a blast. I'm sure by now you've seen some skate.reel videos, so I won't bother explaining how they look, but it really needed mention.
 

As a whole, skate is an incredibly solid game for non-skating fans, and for those who love the sport it's the best game to come along in years. The new style of control will be copied by many games in the near future (and possibly Mr. Hawk next year), and EA Black Box deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off so well in their first effort. Whether or not you're a skater, there's no denying that skate is a great game, and a breath of fresh air the skateboarding genre sorely needed.

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