Matthew Myers

Boring. The attempt at a unique physics engine and the incredible soundtrack are almost worth two stars, but every other aspect of this game is awful. The graphics are ten years old, the environments are empty voids, and the ever-present graphics clips during collisions is embarrassing for a genre that lives or dies by collisions. The single worst element, however, are the bails. Bailing is a huge part of skating in reality, and there was minimal effort to emulate anything remotely close to a bail. Even THPS3 & 4 did this well almost twenty years ago. In Skater XL, your character lifelessly falls like a cardboard cutout surrounded by a symphony of dead silence. No crunchy sound effects, no voice over, no flailing body as the skater tries to recover the trick. Terrible game, terrible experience.