Skate 2

2025-09-27
The fun of Skate--at least for me--is the creativity of it. You find a spot and you try and come up with the perfect line. Yeah I'll ollie off this and then board slide here then manual off onto this platform and nollie laserflip off of it. Sick.

But the career or campaign or whatever the fuck you want to call it wants you to do some really specific shit in a specific order in a specific place. Do this grind on this thing and this flip trick here and then manual on this thing in this direction. Mess up one of those things? Do it over. And over and over. It feels like skateboarding reimagined by a German. "Jawohl, ich werde Kickenflippe hier, mein Herr." Nevermind trash like the actual mini-game of S.K.A.T.E. which has you doing tricks and then watching an AI do the trick OR even worse being forced to watch an AI do a trick and then you have to copy them. I already have to watch LLM agents write code at work, I don't need to watch a clanker try to kickflip a stair set. Fuck that, man.

And yet if you ignore all that dogshit and compare Skate 2 to Skate 1 you realize it improved in all the right ways. Yes there's more tricks, yes you can get off the board, and yes the physics for wiping out are comedy gold and the pinnacle of the series. But the real big reason Skate 2 improved is the map, San Vanelona. Skate 1's map is fine, but sparse and a little flat--both in verticality and flavor. San Vanelona meanwhile has everything, it's got huge hills, tight skateparks, big pools, boardwalks, mountain roads--and yet it all kind of fits together realistically compared to Skate 3's map which goes a little too arcade-y like we're regressing into Tony Hawk territory.

Want a good Skate game? You'd be hard-pressed to pick a bad one. But, because of San Vanelona, if you want the best one, you probably want Skate 2.

2024-05-04
This is an impossible game to review. In short it's more Skate but you can get off your board and it has a bigger, more interesting city to skate around in. And that should be great, right? Yes BUT it's 2024 and at this point I played the shit out of Skate 1 when it came out like 20 years ago AND I've played a bunch of Skate 3. I love the core skating in this game BUT the actual structure of the game is horrible.

The fun of Skate, at least for me, is the creativity of it. You find a spot and you try and come up with the perfect line. Yeah I'll ollie off this and then board slide here then manual off onto this platform and nollie laserflip off of it. Sick. But the career or campaign or whatever the fuck you want to call it wants you to do some really specific shit in a specific order in a specific place. Do this grind on this thing and this flip trick here and then manual on this thing in this direction. Mess up one of those things? Do it over. And over and over. Nevermind shit like the actual game of S.K.A.T.E. which has you doing tricks and then watching an AI do the trick OR even worse being forced to watch an AI do a trick and then you have to do it. Fuck that, man.

Back to why this is impossible to review then. I can't delineate between how much the game improved the core formula and how much the structure of the game--which I might have entirely ignored when I was younger--sucks the fun out of it. I guess ultimately this rating will be bullshit either way. It's a better Skate but I hate the campaign.