Skate 2 review (X360)

EA is certainly one company that knows how to milk a franchise. Sometimes the annual releases is a good thing when it allows it to respond to fan feedback rapidly and improve the game quickly. Sometimes there's nothing much to improve or the improvements take more than a year to realise but the publisher still goes ahead and release a minor improvement anyway. Skate 2 has come along about a year and a half after the original so hopefully this marks something more significant than graphical tweaks.

Time to step-up

When Skate was released it marked a significant competitor to the skating market leader Tony Hawk. EA has stepped up and left alone the bits that made this offering unique while tweaking and enhancing the rest of it. The city is now larger and remodelled from the first game. In the single player mode you'll learn that the city is being run by a private firm who like architecture that is especially skateable but dislike skaters. They provide a private security firm to catch anyone trying to skate their city and put caps on rails to prevent grinding.

You'll learn how to deal with these impediments during the course of the game. As you're trying to get around the city you find that you now have the choice to ditch your board and walk around. This uses similar controls to being on the board and consequently feels a bit weird. It's useful for setting up lines into stunts to for moving with more precision. You also have the option to teleport to a challenge area. This means that you can progress the story challenges faster but it does mean that you won't be exploring the sprawling city so you'll miss out on discovering the new spots and ad-hoc challenges.

Just kick and jump

The basic controls that made the first Skate game so popular have remained in place. Most tricks are performed with the right analogue stick. Pull back and push up to ollie, up and then down to nollie and a variety of other moves to perform flips and flicks. New moves have been added into the mix so you can now perform hand and foot plants, hippies and tweak and grab during grinds.

Some of the moves do feel sluggish like taking the board away during a jump. You can do it, but really you need to get a significant amount of air time to have any success with it. Sometimes the scoring seems a bit random as well with tricks that are simple to perform getting loads of points and more complex moves getting very few. While you're skating you'll feel the environment changing beneath your board. As the dynamics of the board change the sound effects change as well and the combination really makes the game feel more realistic.

Setting the environment

While you're off the board you can move scenery around. This involves walking up to an object and grabbing it. While dragging you can rotate the objects into position. They aren't locked in place however so other skaters in the area can collide into them and knock them out of position. This helps you to adjust the spots and set up bigger tricks and is essential for completing some of the challenges in the single player game.

The single player story mode plays out in a fairly disjointed fashion. There's no RPG element so your character starts the game as good as they're going to get. The story element is just a series of set-piece challenges. Some of these are free to enter like the magazine photo shoots. Completing these earns you some money which you can spend on extending the skate park and entering the other challenges like high score competitions and street races which require an entrance fee. There's very little progression to be had beyond occasional tutorial hints to help you get to grips with the controls.

Doing a little DIY

If you get bored of the spots on offer to you in the city you can always build your own. This allows you to move all of the scenery around and create a new spot. You can then set a scoring zone somewhere in the spot. When you skate it you create a high-score and you can then share the spot online to challenge others. They can then attempt to beat your score and rate the spot. You can then sort the created spots by rating and find other spots to play.

While you're skating around you can be creating movies of your exploits. This is similar to the first game but gives you more options with the camera positioning. You can use a fixed tripod camera that will automatically track your skater and you can use a floating camera which you can place at any angle around your player. Film effects are no longer included out of the box but are available as downloadable content.

Let's ride

As well as sharing your DIY spots with others you can play various multi-player modes. These take the form of various party games like high scoring challenge, copy the trick challenge and online modes allow for co-operative spot challenges. The co-operative challenges include having every grind a rail at the same time or having the team beat a cumulative high-score. The multi-player party games add an extra dimension to the game but really this game is about high scoring and beating that challenge. These are basically tweaked versions of the challenges available in the single player story mode so once your confident there you can take your game online.

That's gotta hurt

Another new feature added to Skate 2 is the Hall of Meat. When you bail from your skateboard you can gain points and achievements from your crash. This is based on how far you fall, how hard you hit and how much style you fall with. This becomes another high score challenge as you get up some speed and collide with the curb to rapidly dismount the board. You can use the controller to pose and direct yourself as you glide through the air. Although you are sometimes trying to get these points it can be quite frustrating when you're in the middle of a challenge and you're sent sprawling.

This is fine when it's your own fault but sometimes the scenery works against you. Litter dropped by pedestrians can jam up your trucks and throw you off. There are a few challenges where you have a skate through a busy cross-roads to build up speed to hit a ramp. The cars going through the crossing are timed fairly randomly but too often they hit you as you're going through. It would be good if the cross-roads was either closed or if the traffic could be timed so that you can get through.

Let's go skating now

So Skate 2 is this year's entry from EA into the skating arena. It's a definite upgrade on last year's effort and fans from last year will be pleased to see the controls remaining largely the same. This means that fans from the first game will be able to pick it up quickly with the new moves giving them something new to learn. The animation for the skater and the environment make the game engrossing and realistic.

That said, this isn't a perfect game. There are some annoyances with the traffic and the ability to place the scenery. If you're a fan of the original or a fan of skating games in general then this might be a title to go for. This is a step up from last year so if you were on the fence then this might be time to take the plunge.