- Designer:
- Scott Blackwood.
- Developer:
- EA Black Box.
- Platform:
- Xbox 360 (Multi).
Safety first, that's my motto.
The first Skate, released in 2007, was a revelation — it turned the skateboarding game on its head, reinvigorating a genre that seemed doomed to consist of nothing more than increasingly tired Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater sequels. The analogue controls of Skate were fluid and intuitive and, combined with the open game-world, helped propel the game to the top of both sales charts and critics’ year-end lists.
Here, then, is its sequel. And, let’s get it out of the way early: it is a good game. But it’s also basically the same game. There are new features, of course, which range from the good — footplants — to the atrocious — walking. This latter surprised me, since you’d think Black Box would have learned from THPS‘s continually poor off-the-board controls that an engine designed for skating will never be good at walking.
Skate 2 is just Skate with some added bells-and-whistles which either add very little or outright detract from the experience, the career-mode is flat and unengaging (and lazily implemented: if you play a female PC — which will grant you an achievement on the 360 — the game calls her “him”, even though it tries to be vague with pronouns), and the graphics have taken a turn for the worse (gone are the cool visual effects that used to kick in as your line-multiplier increased).
Daniel Boorstin wrote that the modern American tourist expects “that a nearby vacation spot can give him Old World charm, and also that if he chooses the right accommodations he can have the comforts of home in the heart of Africa”i. As I was writing down my notes for this review, I wondered if that was my problem with Skate 2, also. At it’s core, it is still a very good skateboarding game, and maybe I was expecting the same thing Boorstin’s tourist does: for the game to be both innovative and familiar, to be ground-breaking while at the same time remaining the same. I think, however, that there’s more to my dislike of the game than that. Playing it, I couldn’t overcome the feeling that it has no reason for existing other than making some more money for EA. It feels so superfluous: if you’ve played the first Skate, there’s nothing in the sequel that warrants a purchase. The new stuff is either inconsequential or poorly implemented, and the old stuff is the same, only slightly worse: the graphics are a bit flatter, the world is a little less interesting, the controls are a bit sloppier, the replay editor is crippled until you pay to uncripple it, the frame-rate problems a bit more prevalent, et cetera.
Whether the problem is with me or the game, the fact remains: I just don’t like Skate 2 very much. The skating is still fun, but at the end of the day, I’d rather play the original Skate. Basically, I think Black Box has the same problem Neversoft had with THPS all those years: a great, innovative game is very hard to follow up. But where Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 was a slightly-improved THPS1, Skate 2 is a slightly worse Skate 1.
- Boorstin, Daniel J. (1992 [1961]). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York City, NY: Vintage Books. Page 80. ↩
