Electronic Arts held an event last week devoted to showing off its big release for January, Skate 2. With the game due out next month, it's probably pretty close to finished and so far, it looks pretty good.
The "grab the world" button lets you skitch a ride.
Beyond that, I was able to just skate around New San Vanelona, the rebuilt version of the city from the first game. While you'll recognize some areas from the first game, like the Matrix Plaza, the old areas have been substantially redesigned. As someone who played an awful lot of the original game, it feels like a new, but still somehow familiar city. You'll also find some entirely new sections of town, like a waterfront, the projects, and San Van Mountain, which sounds like it'll let you gain ridiculous speed as you skate downhill.
Naturally, the game has some control changes that look to nearly double the amount of tricks in the game. Thankfully, these trick changes come in the form of modifiers and additional buttons, rather than just trying to cram more motions onto the already-crowded right stick. So you can use the kick buttons to work your feet into more tricks, the R1/RB button can be used for handplants, grabbing your board before trying to ollie performs bonelesses and beanplants, and so on. The additional trick controls feel really natural.
I have to say, I really appreciate EA's devotion to only releasing shots of this game that feature the fisheye lens.
Add to that an already smooth-feeling 60 frames per second on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and you've got a pretty healthy-looking sequel. I voiced my concerns about some of the challenges in the first game requiring specificity that the right stick on a controller just wasn't made for and heard back that the career mode would be a bit more branched this time around to let players focus on something else when they get stuck on a challenge. While that doesn't seem like it will completely solve the problem, most of what I've seen so far has me pretty excited to see how the final product turns out. Expect it in stores on January 21.
