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Skate

By Tenacious Moses
March 05, 2007 15:27 PM PST
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The camera is low and fish-eyed, trailing only a few feet behind a lean skateboarder tearing up a vicious line in San Vanelona. "Express Yourself" by N.W.A. plays in the background, and that's exactly what Skate allows you to do.

The purpose of Skate is to simulate the feeling of skateboarding through an innovative control scheme that captures the essence and attitude of real-world skateboarding. It's not the anti-Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, it's a totally different way to play the game of skateboarding.

First off, where is San Vanelona? It's not a real place. Like Tony Hawk's Project 8, Skate takes place in a fictional skate mecca that's based on three major cities: San Francisco, Vancouver, and Barcelona. Although we didn't get to see the entire city, the layout and size of the skate park we were placed in showed much promise for the rest of what is sure to be a skate heaven.

Flickit and Stickit

Control wise, Skate is so radically different from the Tony Hawk series in that it's actually like learning to skate. What EA's Blackbox development studios calls "Flickit" controls, we call complicated yet rewarding. Every trick will be available to you from the beginning, but learning to pull-off and land those tricks is what makes Skate's so-called "intuitive" control scheme so rewarding.

The tricks are all mapped to the analog sticks. The left analog stick controls your direction and the right analog stick controls what your feet and board are going to do. An ollie is simple enough, pull the right-analog stick down and quickly shoot it upward to lift your skater in the air. Flip tricks, however, are when things get a little more complex. Pull down on the right-analog stick again to squat, then release and flick the stick to the left or right, depending on your stance. It's intuitive for sure, but for something as difficult as skating, intuitive is not always easy going when you get into the deeper elements of the game.

Manuals are performed by easing upwards or downwards on the right-analog stick, and grabs are initiated by holding down the left or right triggers, which controls your hands. We found keeping momentum to be the most difficult aspect of the control scheme as you consistently need to keep pressing the A or X button kick-off when you're low on speed. The learning curve is very steep, but the payoff is well worth the sweat and tears.