Skate. Is A Return To Form, But Will The Audience Be There To Support It?

The latest entry in the Skate franchise is releasing in Early Access on September 16. Fans have been fighting to have a new Skate title recognized for the better part of a decade, but with a deeper lean into community, live service activities, and seasonal content, is Skate asking too much of its fans?

For the past week, I've had access to a pre-alpha edition of the game and with it the chance to skate around San Vansterdam (San Van), explore the various neighborhoods, and compete in a variety of challenges.

Drop Into Skate.

Before you get a chance to hop into free roam, there's a lengthy tutorial that takes you carefully through just about everything you'll need to know to get your feet on the ground (board). Led by Vee, your sassy AI companion, you'll get to ollie, grind, perform grab and flip tricks, and get introduced to the city and its various activities.

While the tutorial did feel like it dragged a bit for a new player, it's going to be more than worth it to set them up for success as they drop into a world inhabited by other skaters.

Past the Tutorial, there is a story to Skate in the lightest sense. Your challenge completions earn you acclaim, ranking up your standing in the different regions of the world. You'll meet City Councilmembers — who are also skaters — who give you access to more challenges and locations. All of the communication is done over the phone, so expect to hear a lot of voices and not much in terms of world interactivity.

Skating In San Van

The core of the game, skating, is just as good as you'd hope it to be for a franchise that hasn't seen the light of day in 15 years.

After learning the basics, you'll be unleashed upon the open world. A nice mix of realistic environments and skatable locations makes San Van feel like a mostly functional city, but one that is filled with fun lines to put your skills to the test.

As you'd expect for Skate, you steer with your left thumbstick, and how you move your right stick will decide what your feet, and ultimately your board, are up to. Holding down on the right stick will position your skater to jump, and flicking it directly up will cause you to pop an Ollie.

The Skate formula, balancing between sim and arcade, is a delicate line and while there's certainly an art and skill to performing the trick you're after, there's plenty of open space for a beginner to just wildly toggle and still pull off something entertaining.

To get the perfect line, you can use tools to set a mark and return to it quickly, allowing you to perfect your line without having to worry about setup time. When the game, and some of the challenges in it, require you to perform a pretty specific set of activities, the incredibly low time to reset is a godsend for letting you just have fun and not worry about not getting it the first, second… or twentieth time…

If you're someone who loves Skate 3 for its skateboarding mechanics, this sequel really is "all that and more" in terms of allowing you to create your favorite lines, show off with friends, and even cut together footage. I expect once this releases, I'll start seeing clips of crazy moments or simple and perfectly executed kickflips all over my social feeds.

Additionally, there are a number of settings to make the Skate sim experience a bit easier, or at least more familiar to those who might only have arcade skateboarding game experience. Things like holding forward to push, or easier pumping, let you keep your speed up more consistently, so you can nail those tricks a bit easier.

There's a good level of tweaking in the setting that lets you take baby steps, or leap, when you want to push the game further into the sim style of play.

Off-Board Exploration

An interesting addition to Skate is the freedom to explore the world off your board. While you can get off the board and perform simple actions like running and jumping, there's a climbing system in Skate that will allow you to reach new heights.

Look for ways to climb up buildings, and you might find a new place to drop in from, or just a place to test out your diving abilities.

This also means in a quite vertically stacked city like San Van, with building plazas at different heights, you can climb a wall from the street level to find a new skating spot, complete with a variety of grindable art installations.

Customize Your Skater

As you complete challenges, you'll begin to earn reputation (Rip Score) for the neighborhood you completed the challenge in, as well as currency that can be spent at any shop. Each shop has a variety of 'boxes' for you to purchase that could contain different outfit pieces or customizable options for your board, like deck patterns, decals, and more.

These boxes are interesting because while what you get from them is random, there's a small pool that you pull from, and after pulling an item, that is then removed from the pool. This means if at first a box has 12 potential items, after pulling 5 items, if you still don't have the piece you're after, there are only 7 potential items left to pick.

While it would be nice to just be able to purchase the piece you're specifically after, it feels like a balance was struck here to allow players to have a better chance to pull what they wanted, but also still prompt the players to complete more challenges to earn enough to get what they want. There have been countless games I've played where currency just ceases to be important after I pick up the four or five outfit pieces I want.

Live Service All Around You

Something that is extremely clear from playing Skate for even an hour is just how heavily it leans into the live service experience.

Each neighborhood in the world is filled with a few static challenges, but is primarily populated with rotating challenges. Complete all of the challenges, and in a few hours, they'll all be swapped out with new ones to experience. Each neighborhood offers higher rewards and more difficulty, but the cycle is very transparent.

On top of that, each challenge offers just a little bit more reputation and loot if you're playing in a party, promoting getting together and skating with friends.

Something that I was a little bit surprised to see was that there are also daily and weekly challenges for you to complete. Do you want to earn a bit more cash? Make sure you log in and perform 5 Laser Flips today.

These rotating challenges and daily/weekly checklists promise to the player that no matter when they log in, there will be something for them to do. Unfortunately, quantity doesn't always equate to quality. Knowing that each challenge is so replaceable and that there's no 'completion' to be had allows you to progress in the sense of seeing your reputation get higher, but there isn't really a sense of progression in the world.

Skate is back

From my time playing, the skating was smooth, the music was great to jam to, and the casual atmosphere of pulling off a simple and clean line was intact. For fans of Skate 3, you'll be able to hop in and enjoy a variety of familiar and enhanced features.

If you're just here for a chill skate or to play with friends, then you'll have a great time.

If you're looking for real progression or a story that really shows you rising in the ranks, then the heavy lean into live service robs a lot of that from the experience in exchange for a never-ending wave of challenges.

As we get closer to the free-to-play launch, there's a lot riding on the audience to participate and stick around to make the world feel full and entertaining; otherwise, you'll just be skating around an empty city on a hamster wheel.

Skate. was previewed on PC via Steam with a copy provided by the Developer over the course of 9 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.