Giant Bomb Review
55 CommentsSkate 3 Review
4- X360
- PS3
by Jeff Gerstmann on
Skate 3's offline portions feel flat and sterile, but its deeper online focus helps bring more meaning to every facet of the game.
Like Skate 2 before it, Skate 3 opens with a huge accident that leaves your skater horrifically mauled, justifying the game's create-a-skater while still essentially putting you in the shoes of the same skater from the previous game. This time around, you're trying to start your own skateboard company, and each goal you complete translates directly into board sales. There's still a flashy, well-produced live-action intro sequence, but once the company premise is established, there isn't really much of a story. The game gives you sales targets, you meet those targets by completing challenges, which opens up more challenges. Once you hit 1,000,000 board sales, the career is effectively complete, though you'll probably have plenty of goals left to try by that point. It took me around seven hours to sell a million boards. Along with setting up the company, you'll also form a skate team, ostensibly to further promote your line of skateboards. As you hit sales milestones, you'll customize more skaters for your team, and some of the goals have you skating as these guys for billboard photos and the ever-present team video.
The idea is solid, but there's little followthrough on the career mode's team concept. Most of the photo goals for your team are simply "take a picture of your skater." It's up to you to decide what the photo looks like, so if you want a shot of your guy standing there, looking dumb, that's totally fine. The filming parts for your team video are similarly empty, with simple goals like "perform any five tricks." The billboards show up around town, but the skate video you're supposedly shooting along the way never seems to surface. Also, even though you're building a new and huge skate company, you never really directly see anyone buying your boards. The sales number just increases every time you complete a task. It all feels like it would have benefitted from more of an actual story. Instead, playing the game alone feels more like a lengthy tutorial. You'll meet pro skaters along the way, but even these interactions feel a little flat, and the only justification for performing their tasks is to unlock additional shoes and other custom gear for your skate team to wear. But if your skate team is representing you, then why would you want to ride someone else's board, right?
All in all, "owning" the goals is way, way easier than it has been in the past. If you want to get trickier, you can attempt to "kill" most of the game's goals. The criteria for killing a goal gets way more specific than the owning instructions, and this is where you'll have to be able to pull off blunt slides and other specific tricks to proceed. Even these feel a bit easier. If you've been banging your head against the past two Skate games, you might find that the game is a bit too easy now, but it really feels well-tuned and designed to make sure that you're always making progress. The game never really restricts how you attack the goals, so you probably won't get hung up on one specific goal and have nowhere else to turn. Of course, if you're really stuck, you can always turn online.
The online side of Skate 3 is clearly where the developers spent the bulk of their time. The online play weaves in and out of the career mode, with most of the game's goals being offered in a cooperative online form, as well as their offline counterpart. So if you're really stuck on something, you can always call in a little help. This is most effective during the "Own the Lot" goals, which gives you a list of objectives to complete in and around one specific area. So if you can't pull off a 360 flip to save your life, get a posse together and handle it that way. Cooperating on photo goals also lets you take more creative photos, since you might have up to six players in the shot, if you time it right. All in all, the most interesting thing about the way the online is built is that it really feels like a game that rewards community effort, rather than just setting up a spot for experts to tear your punk-ass apart at every turn. Of course, that side is still in there, too.
For the most part, Skate 3 performs well and maintains a solid framerate. But it's also a much cleaner-looking game than its predecessors, at least by default. From the outset, Skate 2 defaulted to a low, realistic camera angle with a fisheye lens that made the entire game look like a filthy skate video. In Skate 3, that fisheye is off when you first fire it up. While you can turn it on, the framerate feels a lot less smooth, which I didn't find to be a trade-off worth making. The other instance of sketchy frames is in the game's new park editor. You can build terrific skate parks and share them online, but these areas don't run especially well, even when they're empty. Once you fill them up with custom parts, the issues become even more noticeable. Granted, these are pretty limited cases, and unless you get way into the community's created parks, you'll rarely notice any sluggishness.
Though the career mode itself isn't especially thrilling on its own, the online focus makes everything in Skate 3 feel like a bigger deal. If you're strictly a solo player, you'll probably find Skate 3 to be a sterile, temporary environment that doesn't feel as inviting as the previous game may have. But if you've even dabbled in the online world of Skate 2, you'll surely enjoy what Skate 3 has to offer.
