Skate changed skateboarding games forever for me. Skate ruined the THPS series for me, those are no longer skateboarding games to me, they’re just skateboarding themed score-attack platformers to me now. It’s been difficult to find anything to fill the Skate-void since the Xbox 360, but this game does the trick. First things first, this game has a lot of rough edges: graphics aren’t great, off board stuff is super janky, there is some onboard jank here and there as well, trophy progression is broken for quite a few trophies, and the animations aren’t always the greatest looking. Admittedly, that seems like a lot of stuff, but the game is so much fun to play if you are looking for a game that feels like skateboarding. There is so much more required from the player mechanically in this game to pull off tricks, and it feels so satisfying when you’re able to do it after trying over and over. To give you an example, in Skate, to do a kick flip you would flick your right stick down then diagonally up and to the left (regular footed), and your avatar will do a perfect kick flip that they will catch and land all on their own. In Session, each joystick controls a foot so in order to do a kick flip you have to flick the right joystick down and then flick the left joystick diagonally up and left after your tail hits the ground, but you’re not done there, you also have to time it and flick the right stick again to catch the board before you land. This gives even simple tricks like kick flips some real depth and difficulty in Session, because the timing is based on how fast you flick the left stick, faster flicks will make the board flip faster so you can do double, triple, and quadruple kick flips and a slower flick can make a nice stylishly slow kick flip. This trick system combined with a physics system where angle, speed, and timing are all integral to being able to connect with a rail or ledge make Session’s gameplay feel incredibly deep. The game also has a large number of settings that you can tweak to make the gameplay more like a sim or more like an arcade (essentially easier or harder) based on your preferences. It can sometimes take 30 min - an hour just to do a flip trick into a grind on a rail/ledge, completing a line can take well over an hour to perfect and it feels so damn satisfying when you do it. This game makes you feel like you actually achieved something through persistence and practice. I’m 39 years old and have been working a manual labor job since I was 18, so skating is a lot harder on my body than it used to be and it’s risky for my career to try certain things; this video game is the closest thing I have found to giving me that feeling that skateboarding does.

The best skating game there is. Better than skate, better than Tony Hawk. And yes, this game has less content than those games. But the gameplay is just miles better, it feels like you are the Skater. Everyone who doesn't like this game is a diaper wearing noob. This game is peak skating

This has to be the most love hate relationship with a game. Half the time it works as intended but the other half is game breaking glitches