Review-Like Thing: Skate (Patreon)

Note: It feels a little weird to call this a full-on review since the game isn't quite available yet, but I also don't know that I have much confidence that they'll turn this game's issues around in the three weeks they've got left until Skate's early access launch. Hopefully I'm wrong, but I'll probably update this to something slightly more formal as we get closer to the game's release.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Skate is back and it’s… well, it’s in “early access,” OK? With any luck damn near everything I have to say here will eventually be obsolete and what I’m playing will be replaced by a much better “final” game. But right now, the version of the game that EA has finally chosen to ship out to the public is a limp, sauce-less, shell of a game that offers up a list of uninspired challenges in a connected world where you’re either seeing no other players at all or a zillion of them cramped into the same space, trying to skate the same pool that you are. But before you completely dismiss it, there’s just one catch: it still plays like Skate.

The right analog stick is still used to perform tricks, the triggers do your grabs, you can push with either foot, all that stuff. It feels fine, it feels true to the franchise, and though some other games have come along in the years since Skate 3’s release that have attempted to ape various parts of this style, none of them do it quite like this. Honestly, before we get into the rest of this thing, I feel I should say that if that knowledge does anything for you, you should probably at least download this thing and play around with it for a bit. The Skate game plays like a Skate game.

It’s everything else that’s the problem. And, like, I think I mean literally everything else. Skate opens with a drone camera robot thing named Vee yapping at you constantly about what to do next. The robot passes you off to various humans, but ultimately these are just different voice actors telling you what to do for a few missions. A lot of the line reads oscillate between lifeless and sickeningly perky here, like the sort of thing that should’ve been caught and replaced by now. It’s like listening to a corporation’s overly friendly customer support hold message over and over again. Are they even human voices in the first place? I honestly can’t tell. One character occasionally drops little hip-hop references, but it feels like no one told the person producing the dialogue that it was a reference, so you get a lifeless little “know the ledge” here and a “microphone check one two, what is this” there that feels like no one else involved in the production of this game knows what that’s from, but that’s what the script said, so dang it, they’re going to read it anyway. I don’t know, it’s just bizarre.

The game presents you with sets of challenges that make up “tours.” The first one serves as a sort of tutorial, getting you used to the idea of using session markers to respawn in the right position, how to perform some specific tricks, how to edit footage (which the game continually refers to as “footy” before spending yet another sentence reminding you that footy is short for footage), how to plop down ramps and kickers in the world to give you some additional things to trick off of, and so on. This first tour also continually refers to you using your “Skater Eyes,” which the game’s captions continually capitalize like it’s some sort of in-game system, but as far as I can tell it’s just referring to you… looking… at the world? To see ledges and things you might want to use for tricks?

There are also additional goals—usually basic “own the spot” challenges that ask you to do three or four things in one small area to succeed or similar—that pop in and out of the world on daily timers in at attempt to make the world feel like it is changing or alive. The rotating challenges don’t accomplish this whatsoever, but it’s nice to have other things to do, especially because the tour progression will occasionally go completely cold and the game won’t tell you what you need to do to actually move forward (the answer seems to be “go do other challenges for awhile until the next brain dead voice pops up and orders you to go somewhere else”).

Much has been made of Skate being a free-to-play, always online game, and this is maybe one of the more baffling things about the way Skate is built. While it’s a connected world, there isn’t much to do with other players. Challenges refer to an additional bonus you can get for completing them in co-op mode, but you seem forced to pair up with players you know, as there’s more or less no communication happening amongst players in-game. That is, if you can find any. Outside of the small play area’s few key spots—the in-world version of the game’s store, for example—other players are few and far between, and they often just pop in and out of the world. Sometimes you’ll see them skating through the air, tricking off of objects that aren’t there, which I assume means they’ve dropped some ramps and things down into their version of the world that you can’t see or use? At one point I found an icon that appears to be some kind of actual multiplayer event, but attempting to join it caused me to fall through the world and it eventually despawned completely. Cool.

The whole game is kind of a buggy mess, though I’ll give the caveat here that the game isn’t technically “out” for a few weeks, even in early access. Right now only people who participated in Skate beta tests over the last couple of years have it. While EA has said that the current build is the first early access version, hopefully they are still working on it. I’ve had situations where placing ramps and other objects completely breaks, preventing the objects from spawning in the world. I’ve had the “stunt” UI get stuck on after a stunt mission, resulting in a gigantic target being drawn on the ground under my skater’s feet. Add in a crash or two and the way other human players occasionally just spawn in, spawn out, or skip around the world and you’re left with a game that just doesn’t look like it’s ready for actual paying customers, early access or not.

As for its free-to-playness, Skate is a game full of paid cosmetics that go on characters that aren’t cool-looking enough to bother dressing up in the first place. It’s a game with a track of free cosmetics that all come out of blind boxes, so as you earn your “rip chips” you can eventually progress through the random boxes until you maybe get an item you want. I don’t know, the whole lack of soul thing made even the simple pleasure of unlocking a pair of camo pants feel like a pointless endeavor. Later updates will bring in things that sound a lot like a battle pass equivalent and, well, more clothes and licensed boards and stuff.

Skate feels like someone built a brand-new mall and forgot to invite the stores. It’s this lifeless, soulless little city built for commerce with some pools and ramps and ledges and disembodied voices and a soundtrack half-full of royalty-free junk and… not much else. None of it feels especially steeped in anything resembling skate culture, though I will admit that I’m not exactly keeping current in that department, myself.

If you’re the exact sort of person who has been recording and posting clips of Skate 2 and 3 for the last several years, then I guess none of this matters. You can still set up some neat lines and do tricks and “post” “footy.” But if you liked the part of Skate 2 and 3 that were actual games with actual progressions, this thing is an absolute bummer.