The death of the increasingly bland and simplistic Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games are nigh! How do I know this? Because I finally got a shot at .skate via the demo on Xbox Live this morning and let me tell you: it’s a doozy.
Hypothetically, if I was playing both a THPS game and .skate for the first time, I don’t know if I would have liked .skate better. Although, that’s not really the point. This game is for all of us who got tired of THPS four years ago, before even the Underground games got started.
Newcomers to the genre can make their own decision, but I can tell all of the people who are tired of 400,000 point combos that .skate is an amazing breathe of fresh air to the genre; a perfect counter balance to the ridiculous ease of THPS. Skating around and doing ollies among other normal things is easy, but to execute even a mid-level trick like a tweaked 360 grab takes serious practice.
Grinding also adds a nice little bit of realism to the genre. Rather than pointing in a direction and pressing Y as in THPS, magically aligning your board and body in position, .skate requires you to already be in position, and then manually modify the angle and placement of your board before landing to execute specific grinds. Quite the chore to be sure, but the satisfaction that comes from actually performing a series of tricks that you planned out ahead of time is well worth the labor.
.skate is due out on September 11, and I for one am now very much looking forward to that date.
