Being a long time fan of the Tony Hawk series I was interested to see how Skate looks and plays. I spent some time with the demo for Skate today and I’m still not sold on it. It does look good and controls work for some stuff, but in other areas it is a nightmare. I had no trouble getting through the tutorial and learning to do basic tricks. I was rolling along ok until I had to grind. Doing a grind is pretty easy. Lining it up so you land on the rail is hard. The camera is very low, and it sits behind you and a little to the side. Because of this you can’t see very well directly ahead of you. Especially, since there is not way to adjust the camera angle. This makes it very hard to know when to jump so you land on something to grind. After a while I got the hang of grinding enough to move on in the game. Hopefully they will allow you to adjust the camera angle at least in a way similar to how racing games do where there are 4 or 5 preset spots you can put the camera.

After moving on from grinding I learned to nollie and manual. I was moving along pretty well until I got to where it wanted me to flip into a manual and then flip out of it. After a few tries I was flipping into a manual, but no matter what I did when I flipped out it would tell me I let all 4 wheels touch the ground even when they did not. A couple times I even checked the replay and the front wheels never touched the ground. After trying this for a while I quit the challenge and just skated around. I then went back and tried the exact same thing and got it. Definitely something buggy going on there.

I’m still not sold on Skate. I like that Tony Hawk has some competition, but really they are two very different games. I’m going to wait and see how the reviews for Skate are. If they fix the little issues and make it so I can adjust the camera angle then I might give it a try. If not I’ll just wait for the next Tony Hawk game to be released.