Skate Demo

For the past 9 years there has been one leader in the skateboarding game market. The Tony Hawks franchise sells well every year and in my opinion they were the best skateboarding games. A few other games had attempted to challenge the Tony Hawk games, but they would never be as popular.

The main reason why people did not enjoy these games as much is because they changed the controls that everyone was familiar with. Before playing skate I thought this would be the same; bad controls that didn’t feel natural like TH. I was wrong. The controls are completely different to what I was used to. Ollie by pushing the right analog down then up then spin by moving the left analog either left of right. At first this sounded weird to me and I couldn’t imagine playing like that, but its so much better than TH controls.

The demo is an amazing sample of the game. The tutorials at the start are perfect for learning the new controls, and the challenges available are not too hard, but challenging enough for those that have played the demo a few times and are used to the controls. Of course, you are not limited to doing these challenges. Once you get past the tutorials (which get a bit tedious after a few plays) you can roam about the suburban skate park, scoring points for tricks, trying to get a long line of tricks, beat your highest jump and just skate for the sake of it.

There’s a part of the demo where you can upload 30 seconds of footage or pictures to the EA server and watch them on your computer. I tried to get this working for about an hour yesterday and still couldn’t get my footage/pics. If this worked it would be the best demo I’ve played.

If you were a fan of the Tony Hawks games you will love this. The controls are more natural, the graphics are amazing. My only flaws so far are the uploading part (which will be sorted by the games release hopefully) and the camera angle is a bit annoying at times. this could be the game that overwrites Tony Hawk as the leading skateboarding game, and thats saying something.