Finally there’s a major contender to the crown that Activision’s Tony Hawk’s series has worn for what seems like aeons, unsurprisingly from the games publishing giant’s nearest rival, Electronic Arts. It’s not that many of us haven’t enjoyed this phenomenally successful skateboarding series, it’s just that it seems like Activision has become complacent in recent years and has let the last few games slide. Packing it full of frivolous features has detracted from the original skating experience and you could argue that two big reasons that American Wasteland and Project 8 still sold in such huge numbers was because of the series’ reputation and because Activision had the monopoly on the sporting genre. By that we mean Tony Hawk’s competition wasn’t anywhere to be seen within this Solar System. At the very least EA’s Skate has forced Neversoft to pull its socks up and put the sick back into Proving Ground, and at most? We think Skate’s classic 360° ollie to kerb grind could best Proving Ground’s uber-trendy triple-flip stalefish grab.

Skate is a straight-up, no frills, skateboard title that’s more hardcore than anything we’ve seen for a while. Its gameplay hails from the early days of Tony Hawk’s on the PSone, before grinding across rooftops and electric high-wires became commonplace. It certainly captures the raw skateboard experience effectively, which can be mainly accredited to its focus on realistic skateboarding and the innovative control system.

Trimming the fat out of contemporary skateboard titles, Skate grounds its tricks in the Flickit system that comprise three basic moves: the ollie (or the nollie), the heelflip and pop shove-it. All of these are controlled with the right analogue stick that represents the position of your feet. So holding down and flicking upwards will result in an ollie, down and diagonally to the right a pop shove-it and down and rolling around to the right a heel flip, while holding left or right on the left analogue controls spin in either direction with either trigger for grabs on their respective sides. Chains of any of these techniques will result in more sophisticated tricks. It’s a fairly easy system to pick up too, which rapidly proves very difficult to master, but not prohibitively so. The subtle difference between the pop shove-it and the heelflip does mean that you’ll sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between the two, but despite making many abortive and painful attempts to chain tricks together, you’ll be powerfully motivated to keep trying till you get it right, and this where Skate’s emphasis on realism kicks in.

Rather than allocating points towards increasing your character’s ability to execute any of the skateboarding techniques when you complete a challenge (as per Tony Hawk’s), your character remains just as capable of pulling off a 720° heelflip to crooked rail grind to manual at the beginning of the game as he does at the end. Instead it’s up to you to develop your skills as a player and your manual dexterity with the pad, with no help from the game as the challenges become increasingly difficult, apart from the sound advice from the various NPC’s you’ll meet.

It’s a refreshing change from the norm and thoroughly rewarding, as it means any impressive tricks or particularly creative stunts are derived from all your own hard work, rather than mashing buttons that have been mapped to specific techniques.

Most of the skills you’ll learn will be picked up from roaming around the open-world environment and Skate encourages this by packing the city with an abundance of activities. If you’re not embarking upon the challenge thrown down by an NPC or hunting around for new skateboarding ‘spots’ to mark on the map, you’ll simply be practising your skills between objectives. But there is a point to it all, and it’s more than simply impressing other gamers online with a video of the air you caught with a particular stunt.

Your character begins as an unknown skateboarder with some talent and a bent on grinding his way to a pro skateboarding career. After being nudged in the direction of a few challenges, it’s up to you where you want to go, which competitions you enter and how far you’d like to take your skills as a player. The further you progress, the harder your skateboarding adversaries are, so invest time in practising before moving on. Eventually you’ll attract interest from The Skateboard Mag and Thrasher magazine, which will improve your standing in the skateboarding community and could even bag you a sponsor.

It takes a long time just to get this far in Skate and beyond that there’s still masses to do and explore within the city. We played for a good five hours or so just to get a picture into our first mag and all of this felt like hard work. That’s the essence of Skate: nothing comes easily and at first it can be a little frustrating, especially if you’re coming from a Tony Hawk’s background where any of the basics virtually work themselves, leaving you to focus on the really pretty stuff. EA Black Box has provided no such buffer in Skate, you’re expected to nail walking before you run and this has resulted in a game that could be considered a microcosm of a real skater learning the tools of their trade. It’s a tough, but highly rewarding experience that we’d recommend to any PS3 owner.

Ben Biggs