Skate Hands-on

Mar 1, 2007

For three console generations now, Neversoft's Tony Hawk series has dominated all other titles in the skateboarding "genre" of videogames. No other release has come close to dethroning the reigning king, but EA is about to appoint a new ruler. Whereas the Tony Hawk series aims to improve on itself by adding a couple new moves and altering the single-player progression in some way every year, EA Black Box is attempting to do the same thing to skating games that EA Chicago did to boxing titles. And just as was the case with Fight Night, we don't think we can go back to the "old" way after having played skate.

Rather than using the face buttons to perform kicks and grabs, skate makes use of the right analog stick for all of your moves. To perform the most fundamental move in skateboarding, an ollie, you simply press down on the stick and then flick it up. If you start by pressing up and then down, you'll perform a nollie. The longer you hold, the more your skater will set up and the higher he'll go. Likewise, the speed that you flick the stick also influences height. So if you want to perform a quick little hop over a curb, you can quickly flick down and then up to do so.

Most every other trick works off of variations on the ollie. If you want to perform a toe or heel flip, you roll the stick to the left or right at the end of the ollie, much as how you would flick your foot to spin your board. If you want to perform a pop shove-it, you'll want to kick your leg just as much as you jump, so you start with the analog stick to the side and then roll up and to the other side. To keep the board rotating in any of these tricks, like if you want to perform a double-heel flip, you simply keep the analog stick held for a bit longer, and then release to land.

Grabs are implemented with either trigger. Quite simply, the left trigger uses your left hand while the right uses your right. Spins are done by holding the left analog stick to the side, so if you want to perform an aerial trick off a ramp, you simply launch with a move off the right stick, use one (or both) of the triggers to grab your board and spin with the left stick. Once in the air, you're able to use both sticks to further modify your move.

If much of this sounds somewhat complicated to you, you're not alone. While basic moves like the ollie are simple to pick up, the more complicated tricks will take a lot of time and practice to get right. But that's also the point. Rather than earning points towards your skater's ability through the course of the game, you'll become a better skater simply by becoming a better player. Your character will start out as good as he'll ever be, so the game ties your in-game skills to your real-world abilities, which we think is a great decision.

To put it simply, the game is both intuitive and quite difficult. Manuals are done by tilting slightly up or down on the right analog stick, just as if you're trying to balance. While it's possible, landing a trick into a manual is really tough - we managed to do so once in our entire session. That's not to say that it's impossible, but like everything else in the game, nailing this time and time again will take practice. The best analogy we can make is that skate is like playing the guitar - it's easy to pick it up and play the main riff to Smoke on the Water, but trying to tackle a Buckethead solo is an entirely different story.

Something that may surprise you is that, at this point in the development at least, grinding is automatic. All you need to do is to hop up on a rail and your skater will take care of balancing himself. Your moves, however, are entirely left to you, which is where things can get tricky if you want to show off. The reasoning for this is that the developers say that they want the focus to be on the tricks rather than managing a balancing act. Your guy is a skater, after all, so he should be able to hit a five-foot rail without too many problems.

The coolest thing about the game is that the control scheme once again makes skating fun. Simple things like performing a kick-flip down a set of stairs or hitting a rail stopped being fun a long time ago in the Tony Hawk games, but EA has managed to make these feel great again. For roughly the hour that we played the game we simply cruised about in the skate park and just sessioned. We weren't thinking about goals, what lie outside of the park or anything else - we quite simply just wanted to skate, and we can't think of higher praise for the game than that.

The game is still in a relatively early state, so we were limited to an enclosed skate park for our session. What we know of the outside world is that it will be bustling with life, with pedestrians filling the streets and traffic running this way and that. We're told that the design of San Vanelona, which is a fictional city based in part on San Francisco, Venice Beach and Barcelona, will be mostly realistic in nature rather than littered with ramps and such like the Tony Hawk environments are. Again, this plays into the realism that EA is focusing on and encourages experimentation with lines and style.

Should you happen to find a sweet line and want to show it to your friends, skate will allow you to do so in a couple ways. The game features a full replay mode, allowing you to go back in time by about a minute and then play back your efforts at any speed, much like you can in sports game replays. You can mark a section of time and set up camera angles for a saved replay. If you upload the actual save data, others with skate can download them and have full control over the camera, playback speed and such. However, what's cooler is that you'll actually be able to save your replay directly to the web as a video file so that anyone can watch it from any computer. With this, the camera angles, speed and such that you set up will be your final movie, so you're given strict artistic control over your highlight reels.

As for other online options, EA is remaining tight-lipped about what we'll see in the game, but there will indeed be some sort of online play.

We've only seen a very small amount of what's to come in Skate, but we're seriously impressed at this point. Though it may be tough, the game feels extremely natural and subsequently very rewarding. When you nail a triple-heel flip, you feel like you actually earned it rather than having just pressed a couple buttons. We simply cannot wait to hop on a board again.