Skate 3 – Review

It’s an easy criticism to make of EA that they churn out “annual” updates of their most popular gaming franchises. Surely if previous games in the series sell by the bucketload, it’s worth re-using the game assets as many times as you can get away with in order to turn a pretty penny? Would you not do the same if you were a multi-billion dollar games company?

A year on from Skate 2, a game that was unfairly criticised as being a little bit too close to the original Skate to justify being sold as a full priced product, we’ve got Skate 3. So any review of the third game in the series should ideally start by telling you what’s changed, what’s different.

Black Box have seemingly thrown everything including the kitchen sink into Skate 3. Lessons learned from the last two games have been honed to perfection here, and although it’s not quite as buttery smooth as the demo would have you believe, the important core gameplay has remained as satisfying and addictive as it was in the last two games.

Obviously you might as well stop reading now if you never had any truck with Skate 1 or 2, but if you loved those, and liked the Skate 3 demo enough then you’re getting plenty of content for your hard earned cash.

Kicking off with another one of those trademark “Skate professionals larking about” movies (which is superb, I might add), the game follows the Skate template of having you set up your character before diving into the tutorials. Jason (My Name Is Earl) Lee is on hand doing a comedy turn as Coach Frank. Don’t panic, this is probably the only time the game edges a little too close to the ‘Jackass’ style stuff that ruined a certain other Skateboarding franchise. Lee at least can turn a trick or two in real life (before the acting malarkey he was a bit handy on a board but always wore a helmet, the big wuss).

After picking your difficulty level (a new wrinkle to Skate – each level basically tailors the gameplay to your ability though even if you’ve been a mondo god at the last two games, Hardcore mode is strictly for those of you pursuing the perfect bail movie) you’re off and running, exploring the vastness of the game’s single player career mode.

The idea is to tour the sunny climes of the fictional town of Port Carverton and its surroundings, picking and choosing challenges, races, head to head tournaments and Halls of Meat sessions to try and build up your reputation as a Skateboarding legend, in order to sell a bus-load of fancy customised decks. Decks become your currency and your experience points combined, so the more you earn, the more in-game merchandise and equipment you unlock and the more challenges you reveal too.

You can choose between cruising the streets and burbs of Port Carverton to find locations the hard way, or you can just opt for picking and choosing what you want to do from a challenge list and map. It’s actually more fun to opt for the latter as you’ll often come across hidden locations, other skateboarders and cool stuff you probably wouldn’t find on the menus.  This lends the game an almost RPG-like feel, but it’s extremely time consuming – Port Carverton is huge, much bigger than San Vanelona ever was.

Most of the previous game modes have been buffed up and expanded upon for Skate 3. Now, simple Own the Spot challenges have opened up into multi-challenge areas that take Skate 3 right back to the sort of stuff you’d find in the early Tony Hawk games. Always with one foot grounded in reality though, you’ll get no ball shagging or bum-jumping here and though some of the moves and challenges might seem next to impossible, Black Box take great pains to point out that you’d be able to perform all the tricks and fancy stuff in real life as well as the game.

The various locations dotted around Port Carverton are challenging and diverse. There’s truly something for everyone and all skateboarding disciplines, whether you’re a fervent bowl rider, kerb grinder or rail jumper.

There are also straight-out race challenges, but they’re trickier than before so before you get comfortable pulling off a “little man” and scudding down a hill at Mach 10, bear in mind that you’ll often need to avoid nasty obstacles, take short cuts and leap tall buildings in a single bound (alright, jump dumpsters in a tidy Ollie) if you’re to win outright.

Putting the excellent and fully packed single player career mode aside, Black Box have put a hell of a lot of work into the game’s online and multiplayer modes. In single player you can build up the perfect Skateboarding team consisting of you and a couple of AI goons. In Multiplayer you can recruit your friends and skate around in a seamless challenge-filled landscape just the same as you can when you’re on your own. EA seems to have tightened up the synchronisation between EA Nation and Xbox Live, so there’s no mucking around with trying to get your accounts to talk to each other – the game signs you in automatically and with less fuss and muss than before.

Online you can build up your team’s reputation just as you do in single player, and you can capture your tastiest moments on video or in photos using the superbly intuitive replay editor. There are already plenty of excellent bail vids and impossible trick movies online. It’s good to see the game building up a community this early on.

There are online VS modes too, so your team can face off against the weedy kids from across the pond. Everything from 1-up skate-offs to full tournaments can be tailored to your competitive needs. The game largely hangs together online smoothly and coherently though there are the inevitable moments where lag can screw things up.

Visiting the Skate 3 website at http://skate.ea.com lets you check out your team’s progress, create custom content like stickers and logos, and manage your pics and vids. Registering in-game automatically creates an EA persona so if you log in using your registered Live or PSN email address and credentials you can get up and running straight away.
Last but by no means least, it’s worth mentioning the game’s park and skate area creation tools. These have been expanded beyond the previous game’s idea of dropping in skateboard ramps and rails. Now you can create your own skate park in certain areas, tailored to your own personal skateboarding style.

Using intuitive controls and slot-together components, you can build anything from a grindfest to a fully-fledged bowl arena then share it with other players online. Skate 3 can eat up hours of your day but when you start dipping into the user-created content stuff, the game’s lifespan extends exponentially.

As I said at the beginning of the review, Skate 3 has just about everything you’d need from a skateboarding game and definitely belongs in your collection even if you think you’ve seen everything with the previous two titles.

The series would need some extensive re-invention if EA wanted to repeat the same feat again next year, but this is easily the best Skate game so far, achieving a fine balance between addictive “just one more go at nailing that ollie” gameplay and a satisfying and long term gradual difficulty curve. Thoroughly recommended for plank stompers everywhere.

Our rating

8/10