I heard so many good things about Skate, read some reviews and decided to pick it up. I shouldn't have, the controls are wonky, as is the camera (which seems to switch to inverted controls occasionally) and the game automatically moves to towards rails, making lip slides a pain to land. 1 push gives you a crawling speed that matched by a snail and saying that, most 'missions' start you very close to the piece to be skated making it hard to get the speed you want. Vert skating is from what I've found almost impossible. You can't pump from what I know therefore making airs a rare occurrence. You can drop into bowls by getting off your board and pressing Y on the edge of the vert, but riding into one sends you flying down to flat. The story is pretty bland, you start off I assume skating for some sponsor, bail hard and end up starting your own board company. It's your job to do these missions to have photos taken for magazines or billboards, videos taken for skate parts (which skip to you doing a trick not the whole line. I watched as the game loaded the next trick which was almost seamlessly right after the first). There is no depth, no characters to like or hate, you just skate and do the missions for promo material. The camera up high is fine, it's where I'm used to it from most 3rd person games, however the low variant of it is horrible. It's hard to line up where you're going. I should note; there is a fish-eye lens filter which you can turn on and off too, I assume this is for recording parts. The controls are interesting for sure, but at times provide a frustrating experience. If you're coming from THPS it's going to be a shock and you'll find it hard to get used to them. Overall I think the game is interesting, the sounds are great, music is good and landing a trick feels fantastic because of the realistic 'slamming' your board to the ground. The UI could use some work as the controls. If you are a fan and played the Tony Hawk games, I would stay away from this as it's a huge shock and generally not as fun to play, especially if you skateboard yourself.
