First off, sorry about not posting for a while. A wonderful cocktail of coursework, exams and illness (along with laziness) prevented me from doing so.

Skate 2 is the latest in EA’s skateboarding franchise. Whilst this game offers little difference from the last, it’s still a solid game, with only a few problems.

In case you didn’t know, the Skate franchise’s success is based on it’s utilisation of the right stick. The right stick is used to do all kick based tricks (ollie, nollie, kickflip, pop shuvit etc), and the left stick is used to direct the player. This system works really well if you are allowed to just go around and “jam” (def: do whatever you want), but when the game forces you to pull off certain tricks to progress, it can get tricky, especially since there are literally about 30 tricks mapped onto the stick, which isn’t the most accurate input in the world.

You won’t have had to have bought the first Skate to understand what’s going on in Skate 2. The near complete lack of any story means that you can just pick this game up straight away. However, the lack of story really put the game on a downer for me, the thing I loved about Tony Hawk: Underground was its great, if tacky plotline, and although the Skate series has improved on the Tony Hawk gameplay formula it’s still a big ol’ shame to not have any real substance behind the gameplay.

The online is a big improvement over the first game, and pretty much the only big difference between Skate 1 and 2 (along with on-foot “gameplay” which I’ll talk about later). There’s all your normal online skating stuff like S.K.A.T.E, which works like H.O.R.S.E of basketball fame, a Hall of Meat mode, which challenges you to get the most bail-points, and a few other standard modes. But the cool thing for me was the spot downloader. If someone online made a “spot” (a place to skate) then you could play it and try and beat their score. The beauty of this feature is its competitive nature; if anyone takes my Cougar Mountain high score, they're dead.

The gameplay of Skate 2 is both its main good quality, and main downfall. When your stringing together quad-kickflips over a staircase, its amazing, but when you get told to do a varial heelflip 360 over a security guard infested staircase, you want to throw the game out of the window. Seriously, at times the game is unnecessarily hard, and not in a good way, in a; why didn’t it register that I did a heelflip instead of a pop-shuvit way. Add onto this, the game’s terrible on-foot controls, which feel like they were made by a five man Soviet game development group coming straight outta Vladivostok, then you get a teeth grinding, frustrating  (at times) game.

Overall, if you’re a really zen person, with massive amounts of patience then you’ll enjoy this game, but if you’re a hot headed idiot with uncontrollable thumbs, like me, then give this game a miss.

6/10

Matt

Labels: Matthew, Matthew Meadows, Review, Skate 2

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