Skate 3 Review

Developer - Black Box

Publisher - Electronic Arts

There was a time where, when people mentioned a Skateboarding game, the first name that came into everybody's heads was Tony Hawk. The games were pure arcadey fun with ridicolous tricks that defied the laws of physics being performed consistently throughout. The games quickly became more popular than he did, and Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 on the original Xbox is still one of my favourite ever games.

Nowadays however, those games have been getting worse every year, and now EA's Skate is the king of Console skateboarding. The first game added realism to the genre, there were no more ridicilous tricks, instead you had to take your time and master pulling off each move. It was much more of a simulation to the sport that we had seen before. Skate 2 improved on nearly all of the bad points of the first game, and for me was one the most fun games I'd played last year.

Skate 3 is more of the same except this time instead of trying to become a Pro, you have to establish your own team and start a Skateboarding business.




Career

As said above, in the Career Mode, you have to establish your own team and start a skateboarding business. This is done by completing various challenges which instead of being rewarded with money, you are rewarded with Skateboard Sales. The games tracker has set milestones with 1 million being the amount you need to earn to officially complete that goal. Each milestone unlocks things for your team, you start unlocking Skaters, that you create, who 'work' with you in competitions and in getting your name our there on Billboards and in Magazines. You also unlock your own Skateparks and gear.
There are 160 challenges to complete throughout the game, and you must 'Own' or 'Kill' each one. Owning a challenge requres you to beat the basic goal shown to earn the stated amount of board sales, 'Killing' a Challenge means you have to do the goal from 'Owned' but with a added requirement such as peforming a certain trick, or earning a set amount of points while doing so. Killing challenges are relatively easy at first, but towards the end of the game they become much harder to complete and become more a case of trial and error.

The challenges in the game are split into catergories with a style/theme for each one, the catergories are as follows:

* Team Challenges - These consist of mostly placing a camera somewhere and do any trick to make Ad Photos and Billboard Photos, and then pulling off a set number of tricks for the Team Film. These are all fairly easy because theres no required trick to perform.

* Deathrace - One of the most fun aspects of the game. This is basically a checkpoint race mode, where you skate downhill as fast as possible while going through rings. Usually you vs 3 AI Characters,

* Film - These requre you to perform certain tricks in certain areas that are required of you by the cameraman. These can range from things such as making a huge gap, or keeping a line of tricks going on certain objects.

* Getting Started - These are the mission at the beggiing of the game, that give you a basica knowledge on tricks ect and just generally getting around.

* Hall of Meat - Another one of my favourite modes. In this you basically have to bail from your board at a large height, and complete goals along the way, such as breaking 10 bones, landing on chosen objects and reaching a set score threshold.

* Own The Lot - This consists of 6-12 challenges in a set area of the game. They start off easily with things like grinding a rail, making a gap, manualing down a ramp, but by the end you have about 5 minutes to complete 10 goals and these can be very had and frustrating and require multiple attempts to complete.

* Own the Spot - Throughout the game you will find areas that look good to skate. These are called spots, and when you find these spots you just have to perform a trick to pass a pretty simple score amount to 'own' it. There are 16 to find throughout the game.

* Photo - These require you to completecertain tricks which will be photographed and publushed by Skateboard Mag or Thrasher

* Pros - There are Pro Skaters throughout the game that you will meet and they will ask you do do certain tasks, these can be anything from simply following them to a location, or beating them in 1 vs 1 comps.

* Team Promos - These are basically the same as Team Challenges, but there are a few challenges where you have to beat other teams in races or street comps etc.

* Street Contest - These are competitions which are usually 3 rounds, and the person with the most points at the end wins. They range from Longest Grind, Best Trick and Best Air.

* Training - It's pretty obvious from the title what this is. At the start of the game you are given basic lessons from Coach Frank which teach you the simple stuff you need to be able to play. After completeing these you unlocked more advanced tutorials which teach you how to pull off some of the harder tricks in the game.

* Tranny Contest - These are contests focusing on Pools, Half Pipes and Big Air Tricks. It has the same outlay as the Street Comps.



Two new difficulties have been added this time around, Easy Mode and Hardcore Mode. Easy mode is best suited to beginners of the series, You need less pushes to increase your speed, you gain more height and the flip tricks are performed much faster. This mode will also suit the players that want to just rush through the game to get as many achievements as possible from it. Difficulty doesnt affect achievements so there's nothing stopping you at all. Hardcore mode is much more of a simulation for skilled and experienced players. You have to perform tricks with pinpoint accuracy or you will bail everytime. You require alot more pushes to increase speed, and your grinds seem to end alot sooner than they do on the easier difficulties.

Multiplayer

Almost all of the Challenges in the game can be played online, and they are all persistant to your single player career. Complete a Challenge online, and you've completed it offline too. This can come in handy on some of the harder challenges at the later stages of the game, as you can get a friend from your Skate Team to help you complete the goals.

There are 3 new online game modes too which are "1-Up", "Domination", and "Own The Lot". In 1-Up a team is given a set amount of time to earn as many points as possible, then the other team has to try and beat that amount, the rounds continue until one team finishes with less points that the other and earn a '1', this keeps happening until one team spells 1-Up and loses.
In domination teams compete to 'own' as many spots as possible within the time limit, the most spots owned wins.
And finally in Own the Lot, the goal is pretty much the same as it is in the single player mode, but the winning team is the one who completes all of their goals first.

There's also the usual Freeskate where players can go around doing anything they feel like doing.

When joining multiplayer sessions I found myself being matched with people who were much better than me. It seems that most of the community are hardcore players who use the game as a portal to meet up and play and chat etc. It's quite daunting to get into a game knowing you are new to it, and knowing that everyone else is a hell of alot better.


The achievements for the game are mostly simple. It's possible to easily get 600gs from the game. But with a bit of persistance you can get alot more. I personally at the time of writing this only need to 'own' 5 more challenges to get another 130 points from the achievements. However the probelm is that these challenges are 'own the lot's' which due to the time they take to complete have turned unlocking it into too much of a grind and made me lose interest, even if there is a nice reward at the end. The main Achievement that I believe most people will stuggle with is the one requiring you to 'kill' 80 of the games challenges.

Another problem I have with the game is that the AI is pretty bad, there's been multiple times in competitions where my AI teammate has literally finished with 0 points, or a very low score at best, leaving me to do all the hard work to try and actually win. They also tend to want to ride straight into you and knock you off the board while you are performing high scoring tricks. While doing some of the Pro Challenges where I had to follow them, I noticed that they tend to fall alot, leaving you waiting around for them to carry on with the goal at hand.

I've also noticed there is a distinct lack of story to this game. From what I remember of the second game, the story played a big part in it. You had to do certain tasks for certain Pro's and then you'd meet up again later on and carry on with them, it had a real sense of progression. Whereas this one is just skate to point A, complete challenge, skate to point B, complete Challenge etc. You can even just fast travel to every challenge and complete them that way.


The Good

Good Voice Acting from the Pro Skaters and a notable performance from Jason Lee who is the titled character in 'My Name is Earl'
Lots of tricks to master.
Co-Op Challenges
Hall of Meat and Deathraces are just as fun as they were in Skate 2.

The Bad

The lack of any noticable Story.
Bad / Almost useless AI
Becomes a Grind towards the end
Daunting Online play.

Overall this is still a good game that is true the series. The main problems with the game seem to be that EA have decided to release a yearly update to the series, so rather than adding lots of new features, they just slightly improve on certain things, but then take away some of the fun parts, like the amount of Deathraces available. It's still a very playable game, and the average achievement whore will enjoy playing through it to earn some easy achievements, But if you've played Skate 1 and 2, there's not much difference in this slightly rushed version and it may leave some fans very dissapointed.

I give Skate 3 a respectable 7 out of 10.

Firstly I must see this is a great and comprehensive review.

But sadly I truly suck at skateboard games and it becomes truly awful just falling over all the time.

The Tranny competition sounds good though, we should enter some members!

Cheers Kent.

Maybe we could get Niteowl to be the judge. We all know how much he likes his ladyboys