Skate re-defined a genre of games in dire need of re-definition. While the most popular series out there was busy running out of good ideas, EA put out a game that ramped up the realism, with one of the most genius control schemes I've ever seen in a game, and somehow made skating for its own sake fun in the context of a video game - something that no one else has ever really been able to do.
Skate 2 is a refinement of the first game. It's laid out better, there are more tricks, more things to do... pretty much everything you'd expect a sequel to that sort of game to be. The few mistakes that were made the first time around have largely been corrected.
So what we have right now in Skate 2 is the best skateboarding game on the market. Possibly ever. It's the little things that make it great. The control scheme and physics in particular are great. It's a game that's easy to pick up and have fun with, but very difficult to master. You don't get a lot of help with the physics. Gravity is your enemy. But the controls are smooth, and with practice, you won't really have much of a problem doing what you want, when you want to do it. It's all completely intuitive, with buttons set up to control every limb of your skater, all of which typically do what you want when you want them to do it, provided your own skill level is up to the tasks. There are a lot of really fun spots to skate. What's really impressive about it is that it's just fun to play, whether you're playing it with any purpose (e.g. career mode challenges) or not. Almost everything is set up to be tricked off of - a wise design choice, even if it kind of cuts into the realism a bit - although now you go about doing so is not always immediately obvious. The city itself feels huge, especially at first, but you'll get a good feel for where you're going after spending a few hours playing.
It's not perfect, though. Most new players will find a lot of the career mode challenges to be very, very difficult, especially when they get really technical. This will be frustrating to a lot of players who just want to skate around, since a lot of things aren't unlocked in free skate until you complete certain goals in the career mode. Luckily, EA has remedied this situation a bit by providing spots unlocked in career mode as DLC, but that just feels like a sort of cheap way to get it, doesn't it? Also, security guards are not a fun addition to the genre. Really, they're not. I really, really hope Skate 3 cuts that element out.
Multiplayer is also fun. My main gripe is that matchups often end up really uneven, and you'll either end up playing against a bunch of people who are much better than you, or completely destroying everyone else in the match. Also, perhaps the instructions need to be a bit clearer, because when I play Hall of Meat multiplayer, there's always some dork who has no idea what he's doing and goes for scoring. Still, when you end up in a good game, you're going to have a lot of fun, and that's really what matters. It's just a shame it's sometimes so difficult to find a good game. I also feel like the game should give players an extra 10 seconds to respond to opponents' runs. The ability to give props or call their run weak or whatever is a nice touch, but it'd be nice to not have to do it while the run is in progress. It's a good idea that I feel could be implemented a bit better.
But at the end of the day, every time I play this game, I find something new to skate and end up having fun doing that for its own sake, often for a couple hours at a time. And really, I feel like that should be the ultimate goal of this kind of game.Get more detail about Skate 2.
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