skate.

2025-10-12
For as bad as the vibes are with the "I'm Vee your virtual assistant" and the nouveau corpo-is-cool facsimile of skater culture. For as bad as the soulless f2p core of the thing with its battle pass and map full of rotating challenges for grinding and its endless array of bars and meters whirring and filling and pinging and dumping myriad, arcane currencies in your pocket. For as stupid as it is to patch out the glitch that lets you fly--not only the most fun thing to do, but also functionally alleviates the tedium of climbing buildings--yes, because apparently aping Ubisoft's map wasn't enough they needed fucking the AssCreed climbing too.

For all of that it's still more Skate. Or "skate." or whatever. Christ, I forgot about the name. Ok, no, I'm not getting tripped up by that. This is the paragraph where I tell you it's actually still good. Because it is! It feels great in that arcade-y Skate 3 way, it's got a whole map full of new shit to skate, including a whole level of verticality, which while a little tedious is overall a fun way to heighten the density of the world. Even if maybe the interconnectedness of it all suffers heavily as a result with the constant hopping off the board to climb this or that. The verticality is especially fun with the new slam challenges where you can superman off skyscrapers and try to dunk your immortal meatsack character into dumpsters or weave them through gaps.

It's that core of skating to explore, hitting lines, and doing challenges that I'm here for. And for the 6 hours it took me to finish the interminable tutorial--with it's torrent of annoying bullshit dialogue buzzing in my ear like severe tinnitus--and do most of the challenges on the map it was bliss. I thought I'd just pop in and see what the fuss was and then for 2 days after work I just binged it. At the end of the day I think I was expecting a train wreck, and for all the many ways it is a "Look how they massacred my boy" sequel, if you tune out the f2p faff and the tinnitus and listen closely you can still hear that core mechanical heart of Skate is still ticking away like trucks rattling rhythmically over cracks in the sidewalk. For $0. That's pretty cool man.