The new Skate made me want to skate, but it also made me want to get my camera and shoot – and it's all thanks to its new, living city
The new Skate game is free-to-play and pretty much massively multiplayer. It’s a cross-platform live service game to its core, and it drops you into a shared open-world map with up to 150 other skaters. And, as you might expect from all these things being name-checked, my first half hour with the game involved trying to understand a muddle of regular unlocks, an in-game currency, a levelling system, a fast travel system and various other bits of UI shenanigans.
Please note, EA has been clear from the off that the game’s real-money shop will only ever let players pay for cosmetics, which is great. The team’s promise is that you will not be able to buy power or pay to win. Even so, the onboarding still involves trips back and forth to an unlock shop, albeit one with a clever name I won’t spoil. It involves lots of freely dished-out in-game currency spent on boxes that, once opened, contain new clothes, skateboard art, levelling points and the odd new ramp or whatnot to drop into spots. But a lot of it went over my distracted head. It’s Skate, but even when you’re dealing with just in-game currency, this really isn’t the skating part.
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Luckily, none of this matters. Skate’s trajectory for me at least involved half an hour of muddling through all of this stuff before learning that the game, as is so often the case with skating, is a two-step affair. You move around the level – in this case an entire open-world city called San Vansterdam – completing challenges to unlock missions that take you out across the sights and introduce you to a council of skating elders who run the place. But what you’re really learning, what I’m really learning, is to step away from all that and just enjoy freeform skating, with the flips, grabs and other tricks the legendary Flick-It system is so good at conjuring. All of this unspooling in a bright, cheerful world that’s perfectly made to be skated over and under, around and around. I was learning to leave the game stuff behind and just play.
To this end, Skate is a game that wants to distract you. It wants to trick you into finding your own path through it. This clicked for the first time when I left behind the AR trail that lead me to the next bit of official business and just started to climb. The new Skate has a lot of off-board stuff, largely revolving around gentle parkour. There was a building behind me at the time – a huge tower with a Miami white facade and grass sections growing on it. These grass sections had Zigzag metal planters set through them that looked pretty useful. I climbed for a few minutes and suddenly I had what I didn’t know I had wanted: a view over a huge stretch of city. Then I pulled up the map and saw there were some stunt challenges nearby. So off I went. The pleasures of distraction!
