Skate

"Tony Hawk, Goodbye."

Alright, this game is awesome. I've played Tony Hawk games before, and they were pretty good, but this game blows it out of the water with ease. It's just, awesome. So everybody, say goodbye to Tony and say hello to Skate.

Story 9/10

So it starts out you skating, and you're doing really good, then you go down a staircase and get layed out by a bus. The ambulance comes, and to my suprise it was Danny Way and P-Rod driving the ambulance, then you take a drive to the hospital and shows you all the pro skaters that will be in the game, such as Rob Dyrdek and Big Black, John Rattray, P.J. Ladd, and many other great skaters. So they operate on you and you enter the style you skate in, and edit your apperance, you can make yourself fat, skinny, muscular or non-muscular. You can edit your face, like hair color and beards and such. You recieve your board, and start skating. There is a tutorial entroducing you to the new FlickIt controls, and then you go on to the rest of the game. There is two different magazines that you will complete tasks for, Skateboard Mag and Thrasher. You'll complete more and more tasks for the magazines, then you'll have a photo shoot while you're skating so you can be on the cover of whichever magazine you are doing tasks for. When you finish both magazines by getting all the covers, you'll go to the X-Games. Other than the main tasks you do, there are others, such as Pro Challenges where pro skaters challenge you to do some type of line of tricks, then once you complete the pro challenges, you unlock them so you can play as them in freeskate mode, unlock them so you can play against them in Pro S.K.A.T.E., and unlock their board sponsor, like Baker, Enjoi, Plan B, Real, and a few other major brands. You'll also get truck, shoe, and wheel sponsorships too. There's also another thing called Own the Spot. It's where they give you an area to skate in, and you have to get so many points in a trick or line in that area.

Gameplay 9/10

The gameplay is great. The new FlickIt controls are one of the best features of the game. You use your right stick for the flip tricks, grinds, and postioning of your board in the air. The left stick is used to rotate and direct yourself. The left and right triggers are used for grabbing your board, in air or on ground, whichever one you prefer. The combo system is pretty good. The more points you get off of a trick or a line will define which multiplier you will get. x1.5, x2, or x3. So for example let's say I did a trick and it gave me a 1.5 multiplier. I would have about 3-5 seconds to do another trick or combo to allow me to get more time to get a line or trick to replenish the time to keep the multipler going, or get a higher level of points to go to a x2 or x3 multiplier. The larger the multiplier, the more time I have to keep the multiplier going and multiply my points. The way you move around is realistic, like if you went very fast at a ledge or wall, you would wreck. If you went slow enough, you would stop and go the other way (fakie). This game also has ragdoll physics, and that makes the wrecking more realistic, and more entertaining to watch yourself wreck. The game isn't really that hard, just that it is more complex as far as the control features, so it'll take about 30 minutes to get used to it.

Graphics 10/10

The graphics are great. If I didn't have an HDTV it would still be exceptional, I mean, it's an Xbox 360. It's very detailed, the sidewalks, ramps, and even your board. Say you went around skating around San Vanelona (the area where you skate in) and went and did some grinds. Your board would have actual marks as if you really just grinded what you just ground. San Vanelona is very detailed, and very large too. If you went from the starting of it, the very corner, going as fast as you possibly could, not stopping or wrecking, it would take you about 15-20 minutes just to get to the bottommost place at the end. Even the places you can't go are detailed like the rest of the city. One of the best, if not the best, gaming enviroments I have ever played any sort of game, I mean ANY sort of game.

Sound 10/10

The sound in this game is crystal clear. You hear the other skaters around you as if you were really there, doing tricks, bailing, and even talking. It has the skater's actual voices whenever you hear them talk to you or anybody else. There are people standing on the street that stop by and talk to each other. They actually have an intelligent conversation, and sometimes they get into a verbal fight. You could skate around and whenever you see people having a conversation, you could go by them and listen to their conversation. Whenever you knock somebody over, they make noises as if they were really being knocked over by a skateboarder skating. The voices are as clean as the voices and sounds in the cut scenes. The game has a nice soundtrack too. I don't remember all of the songs and bands on there, but there's some Nirvana, Band of Horses, and some Dead Prez. It doesn't just stick to one genre of music, it has rock, rap, and a really nice playlist to skate or play the game to.

Replay Value 7/10

The replay value isn't that good, but you'll most likely won't be replaying it if you go through the game and complete it completely, so you have got everything that you possibly could. The online is probably good, but I don't have LIVE so I wouldn't know.

Buy or Rent

Definetly buy. I really enjoy the game, even after I beat it, you can rent it if you want to, it's just whatever. If you're a hardcore skater-type game fan, then buy it whenever you can. If you're not, buy it whenever you can.

The camera angles are kind of hard to get used to in the starting, but you get used to it later in the game, and now I think they are pretty good camera angles for skating games. They're down at waist level and about five feet behind you, and a little off to the side so you can see the things in front of you, but the faster you go, the more the camera zooms out so you have enough time to interpret your surroundings.

Overall 9/10

The game overall is the best skating game made yet in my opinion. The controls are what intrested me the most to buy it. They just seemed good and more complex than other skating games, and I thought it would make the game easier to do what you wanted to. And it did. Well this concludes my review, hope this helped you with your desicion to buy the game or not.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/06/08

Game Release: Skate (US, 09/14/07)