by: John Olin

January 19, 2009

The champ is back in town from the original Skate after getting out of the slammer, with a bizarrely entertaining real-life opening video, and a completely new, less skater friendly city to roam around in. I had previously ignored the debut of Skate, opting for the kind of skate games, Tony Hawk, but it turned out to be a bit of a stinker, especially compared to EA’s first try at the skateboarding genre. Since the revival of the Tony Hawk series doesn’t happen until the end of the year I figured I would give Skate 2 an honest chance.

If you have ever played a Tony Hawk game, get the game completely out of your head, this game comes closer to a simulation than the Hawkman’s quirky action/adventure exploits. This is especially true if you are part of the school of Tony Hawk, and even more true thanks to the fact that Skate 2 tries to ground itself in reality, meaning you can't bust out two 900s, grind a power line, and then keep going in mid-air for two minutes. If you can get over this, or if you just never played a Tony Hawk game then the right analog controls should be fine for you.

As good as Skate 2 is, the controls will make or break the purchase, and even when you understand the concepts of the controls, you don’t get them down for quite a few hours of playing. At the core, they are easier to understand than past skating games; press A to gain some speed, press one way on the right analog to get ready for the trick, then make a motion in another direction to do the trick just right, so that you don’t bail out and get a face full of pavement. This makes simple things like grinding an entire stairwell’s rail a huge accomplishment, just as it would be in real life.

In Skate 2, there are plenty more tricks than there was in the first game, giving you pretty much the entire breadth of what you would expect to be able to do as a professional boarder in reality. The biggest additions are variants of tricks in the previous game, as well as handplants (when you do a one-handed hand stand on a lip of a pool while holding the board with your other hand), and the hippy jumps. The hippy jumps are particularly fun to do, because it requires you to jump over an obstacle, while your board goes under it, and then landing back on your board. All of these advanced tricks require more than just the right analog, so you will use RT, LT, and RB to grab the board, grab on to the lip of pools, and pressing some of the face buttons will let you do the occasional random move like hippy jumps and coffins. The controls are definitely something to overcome, sometimes being to sensitive and not giving you enough breathing room to accomplish advanced goals in the game, but a suggestion to my “420 friendly” readers out there, it is much easier to understand and get used to while inebriated. You also have the ability to get off your board and move obstacles around this time around, and it is definitely useful to move things around, but you can’t really move around well when off your board, meaning you can’t jump over a fence to get to that sweet pool and get some air. It also can be very unresponsive between getting on and off the board, so either the controls are unresponsive, or to sensitive.

You start out the game creating your skater male or female, however you feel, and they are customizable all the way down to their shoes and the wheels of your board. Once you are done you are unleashed on the beautiful city of New San Van, complete with cascading mountains, a big GTA sized city, complete with a dam, mountains, and an incredibly detailed cityscape. Topping it all off are plenty of cars to dodge or skitch behind, and characters and environments accentuated with stylized dramatic lighting and shadows that gives it a nitty-gritty feeling.