Camden Dickinson

i feel like videogames are lacking a really good skating game ever since skate 3. this game does a good job stimulating the reality of skateboarding but at the cost of doing all the fun activities and extreme tricks you can do in skate 3. the story is that you skate in an abandoned city which i think is cool but it could be the excuse of not wanting to have the hassle of programming ai and other important aspects like traffic. when you go to the map selection you can see the different skateparks you can go to, however at the top it says skateparks and cities. this leads me to believe that they will add more cities in the future and i beg for them to have a bustling urban feel to them. now lets get into the mechanics. there are different difficulties that you can skate at, the lowest isnt realistic at all and gravitates you to rails and edges to grind and the tricks are heavily assisted. the harder modes are more realistic in my opinion because you have to spend time getting all the hand movements down for trick and not just flick your sticks around in easy mode and get a backside 360 treflip. a couple other things to mention are the fact that there are no extreme tricks you can do unlike skate 3 with coffins and miracle whips, half pipes and quarter pipes are broken and you will bail every single time, wall riding doesn't work half of the time, and 50% of the rails and ledges are so broken that your character flies across the map when trying to grind especially when doing 50/50 grinds. now what i love about this game is how the controls work, you use your triggers to steer which means both of your thumbs are free to navigate around the analogue sticks and the buttons to have full control over your board. you can get more technical with how you push the board too, "A" pushes ur right foot and "X" pushes your left foot, so you can skate regular and press "X" to push mongo if you wanted. most everything is just the same as regular skate games though thats why i think they should come up with some very unique and original idea that could save the skating genre and resurrect it back from the early 2000's. all in all i would give this game a solid 6/10 right now because its still a new game in development and i think it has the good fundamentals to be a great game.