Skate is a fun game with fresh ideas
The Good: The new Flick-it control system makes it feel like you are really doing the tricks - Ok Graphics, but still almost everything on the Xbox 360 has good graphics - You can share your footage with everybody, well everybody that can access EA Skate's website.
The Bad: Some challenges in the career mode can be very difficult - In some Jam sessions online you are placed in a small area with 6 other people and expected to win - Sometimes the loading screen can get a little annoying.
The story begins with a cut scene of a skater getting hit by a bus, which leads to surgery, and then the customization of your character. If you are a female, you will be a little disappointed because you don't get to choose your gender. You can ONLY be a male. As for customizing your character you have quite a few options varying from your appearance, hand gestures, the clothes you wear, etc... There are many skateboarding brands to choose from, such as Alien Workshop, Plan B, Flip, Enjoy, etc... After you are happy with your character the surgery begins. After that you are off to rehab where you learn how to do a variety of things such as flip tricks, timing, grinding, and other skills needed to complete skate. After you complete those challenges the city San Vanelona, is yours to skate. Watch out though because there are security guards. Your goal in career mode is to get on the cover of the best to skateboard magazines, Trasher, and the Skateboard Mag. Throughout the game you will unlock locations such as the X-Games, and the Plan B Warehouse. You will also have many challenges to do such as Jam sessions, photo shoots, best trick contests, so on and so forth. There are also hidden spots in the game where you have to find and beat the high score there to OWN the spot. The maximum number of sponser in the game is four which is the deck, trucks, shoes, and wheels.
Graphics are good. With the new Flick-it control system you can have fun pretty much anywhere in the game, for example you could spend hours grinding the same bench over and over just to see what you can do. As I listed before there are several different challenges in the game. Some of them are easy, but some of them are very difficult to do, and can take quite a bit of time to do. The most difficult one being a 360 Flip to a FS Crooked grind by Rob Dyrdek. The easy challenges in the game however help to balance it all out. The more you play the better you will get and the hard challenges will not seem so hard anymore. Another feature is being able to upload skateboarding footage onto Xbox live so others can see it. There are a few options to edit your media, for example you can change the speed of the footage, the camera angle, and the appearance.
The sound on Skate is pretty good, such as the noise for the powerslide, the flipping of the board, grinds, and the voice acting. Bailing on the other hand sounds like somebody smashed a watermelon with a sledgehammer. The game has a soundtrack and it's pretty lame. Luckily when you get tired of the soundtrack you have the option to turn it off.
There are ranked, and unranked matches. There are three online modes, which are Races, Freeskate, and Trick Events. For races there are only two options Deathrace, and Spot Race. A deathrace is were you race through markers to the finish line, usually down steep hills, which is what makes it fun. Spot races are where you have to do a certain trick in the mark to move onto the next one. Freeskate speaks for itself. As for trick events there are four options to choose from, the first being Spot Battle, which is where you have to get the most points on that spot, another is a Jam session, where you are placed at a location, you are given a time limit and you have to try to get as many points as possible until the clock runs out. The other two game types (in the trick events) are SKATE, and Best Trick. The Maximum amount of players in a room is 6. But that's not all you can do online, as I wrote before you can view and rate other peoples footage. If you get tired of skating, you can watch other people play on skate tv. You can also look at the leaderboards, and see where you rank.
Overall Skate is great game, I do think it is better than a 7.5, that score was pretty harsh. If you are a fan of skateboarding games, then EA's Skate is a MUST have.
