Making a new Skate game is one of those tasks that sounds like an easy win on paper, but it’s a delicate balancing act in reality. Fans of the cult skateboarding series have been calling for a new installment for well over a decade, so much so that it became its own meme. While that means there’s a built-in audience eager to return to the series, passion can be a burden. If you don’t bring the series back just right, you’re bound to piss off the very people who you’re trying to cater to.
That’s the tricky situation that EA’s new Skate will need to grind over if it’s going to be a success. Launching into early access on Sept. 16, the reboot is both a triumphant return for the series and a radical departure. While signatures like flick-it controls return, those staples are placed within the context of a full-on live-service game complete with daily missions, a battle pass, and microtransactions. It’s a whole new world for Skate – and one that developer Full Circle is taking a big risk with by releasing it in an early state.
Ahead of its release next month, I’ve had significant hands-on time with a pre-release build of Skate. My hours spent skating around San Vansterdam reveal a strong core foundation, but one that’s still surrounded by scaffolding. That’s sure to come down piece by piece as Full Circle shapes the experience with its community, but the online reimagining is going to need a full attitude adjustment if it’s going to fit in with the cool kids.
It doesn’t take long for me to get my sea (or street) legs in Skate. That’s thanks to the return of the series’ signature control scheme, which has players performing tricks by twisting the right joystick into shapes rather than hammering a controller’s face buttons. That has always been what sets Skate apart from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and it’s a tactile joy to return to here. The core skating remains as fluid as ever, letting me trick around the city naturally.
There are plenty of opportunities to put that control scheme to good use too. This version of Skate drops players into a true open world, divided into four quadrants that unlock through the main story. The general flow of it all is that I bounce around between set story missions that tutorialize different pieces of the game, from learning how to grind to dropping custom parts on the fly. In between those, I’m free to track down challenges scattered around the city, each one containing a few sub-objectives. Completing those will eventually unlock new areas of the city, but they’ll also award me in-game currency that I can use to unlock clothing and customization options.
It’s a smart flow, one that almost feels indebted to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as much as previous Skate games. It has that same pull where your eye is naturally guided from challenge to challenge. The comparison may sound like a stretch at first, but it starts to feel more sensible when I learn how to get off my skateboard entirely and parkour around the city. With that power, I’m able to scale tall buildings like Nathan Drake and seek out high points I can caveman off of. Between that and my ability to quick drop skating obstacles anywhere, it feels like no piece of San Vansterdam is off limits.
But that parkour addition is the first indication that players should really take the “early” in early access seriously. Compared to the fluidity of skating, movement feels stilted at present. That’s especially true for diving, one of Skate’s oddest additions. A sort of slapstick riff on Assassin’s Creed’s leaps of faith, I can hop off a building and into an exaggerated nosedive. If I execute it just right, I can glide just a little bit to give me some extra mobility. I imagine that the real point of it is to enable more accurate drop-ins from high up, but it all feels a bit too stiff at the moment. Instead of feeling like a useful trick, it makes Skate feel like Goat Simulator as I dive into a dumpster and watch my ragdolling body bounce back into the air. These physics led to a lot of instances where my rubbery body twisted into a balloon animal upon hitting a rail the wrong way.
Even the soundtrack feels like a work in progress. It features plenty of cool cuts from the likes of Sunny Day Real Estate and Cloud Nothings, but it’s also overloaded with dull unlicensed songs that make it hard to clock the attitude of it like you can in any given Tony Hawk game. The closest parallel is listening to a college radio station full of blog rock songs that are just sanded down enough to make the airwaves. If there’s anything I need to see in future updates, it’s the ability to create custom music playlists so I can curate my own sound. That seems to be where Full Circle is heading for with its first eclectic array of genres and bands on offer. More songs will be added with each season, and I can only hope that growing pools helps drown out the filler.
Whatever the vibe is, it’s certainly not punk – and I’m not just talking about the music.
That feeling starts with the visuals, which look a bit lifeless at present. Everything is brightly lit and devoid of grit, a major departure from the edgy feel of the first two games especially. Full Circle says that the visuals are as subject to change as anything through early access, but I don’t imagine we’ll see a radical overhaul. After all, the sterilized look makes sense with the story Skate tells, as San Vansterdam is a former skating paradise that’s been taken over by a soulless corporation — of course you’d have a squeaky-clean “city of the future” kind of vibe. It also makes sense that I’d interface with robotic NPCs (some quite literally in the case of the drone companion that guides me to story missions), but it does leave the world devoid of personality as it stands.
I could get down with Skate as a work of corporate satire if I felt like Full Circle had a long game in mind here that would reveal itself across seasons. But right now, it feels a bit like the studio is trying to have its cake and eat it too. It both wants to lampoon megacorporations that co-opt skate culture, but it also exists as a live-service game that features cosmetic “Product Boxes.” The skating challenges feel like they exist as a means to get me more clothing; it’s less like I’m at the skate park and more like I’m shopping at Zumiez.
That’s the part that has me more curious about how Skate will sit with fans. Sure, it brings back the core dual-stick skating experience, and it hasn’t missed a step in doing so. Its 150-player servers and seamless multiplayer integration that lets me teleport straight to anyone give it serious social potential. And the park editing tools seem powerful, letting players turn a vanilla city into a blank canvas to place jumps and rails upon. But the counterculture attitude that makes skating so cool is absent in a squeaky-clean, free-to-play game built to alienate as few people as possible. The only way it’s going to outrage parents is if their kids are spending too much money in it.
All of this comes with a fairly large early access caveat, and I get the sense that Full Circle will lean on that heavily out of the gate. It’s all a work in progress and everything — right down to the attitude — is subject to change. For now, Skate has the basics locked down. That’s enough of a proof of concept to sell the series’ return. But if it’s going to work as a live-service game, it’s going to need some new tricks down the line.
Skate launches into early access on Sept. 16 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
