The last couple of years haven’t been that good to Tony Hawk’s exploits outside of skateboarding: the first two Skate titles ollied his video game empire face-first into the concrete, and he blew his only chance at recovery when his salvation, the abysmal Ride game and its ill-conceived monstrosity of a peripheral, was enjoyed only by a bulldog on YouTube.
With the release of Skate 3, however, things may just be looking up, and my main reason for thinking this is that when I sat down to write this review I found that most of it had already been written for me.
By me.
You see, Skate 3 is so remarkably similar to Skate 2 that you’d be forgiven for reading that review and mistaking it for this one; heck, there are even many drastic differences from even the first game.
The mechanics beneath the superfluous story are essentially the same, with a variety of goals such as 1UP, Deathrace, Own The Lot, and Photo/Video Shoots driving the single player game forward. The ‘flickit’ control system remains largely untouched saved for what feels like a bit of fine tuning and a handful of new tricks, and the audio and visual departments feel quite copy/paste from Skate’s previous outing: not necessarily a bad thing, but also nothing ‘gnarly’.
The few additions that are present though are quite well implemented, the most obvious of which being your team of skaters which can be built from both human and AI buddies. As tasks are completed more slots for these teammates are unlocked, and, as your team grows, so does the number of challenges you’re allowed to participate in. Skating in a posse with your friends online is definitely awesome, but there’s too little variety for it to be a wow-I-really-need-to-buy-this-game feature.
This is somewhat more fleshed out by the “skate.feed”, where replays and other content can be shared with your friends, but options to post to YouTube or Facebook might’ve been a more practical choice.
The park editor feature also makes a return, and while this too has had a facelift it’s still a time consuming and often finicky process that not many skaters will bother with. Fortunately the city is huge with more than enough areas to grind and grab one’s way through, so unless you’re a truly patient and dedicated Skate-r the most you’re likely to see of the park editor is the quick tutorial.
Speaking of which, there’s an excellent tutorial system featuring Jason Lee as Coach Frank, a redneck skater who teaches you the ropes while passing typically hillbilly comments via a voiceover and during loading screens. This drastically lessens the steep learning curve, something that’s surely welcome for those new to the series, and if this hand-holding isn’t enough players can switch between Easy, Normal and Hardcore modes to alter their skater’s speed, rail ‘magnetism’, air time and more.
On top of that, if Hardcore mode still isn’t breaking enough of your bones, you can further risk life and limb with two difficulty options for every challenge: ‘Owning’ a challenge is a basic pass, but ‘Killing’ it involves far more specific tricks and many, many visits to the ‘Restart challenge’ option. A nice touch for the especially sadistic.
Overall, the third instalment in EA’s line of uber-realistic shred simulators surpasses its predecessors and no doubt ranks as what could easily be the best skating game available: the gameplay is as realistic as ever, and the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality that the second game so successfully implemented still holds firm.
Unfortunately though, there’s so little in the way of new additions, and even less in the way of the innovation that the series so boldly pioneered, that I can’t help but think that Tony Hawk is smugly oiling his trucks knowing there’s a good chance that the Skate franchise’s proverbial skateboard may be on its last set of wheels.
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