Skate first launch impressions: By chasing live service, EA’s reboot forgets what made the original series so beloved

The first red flag for the Skate reboot was when, upon opening the game, it asks if you’re familiar with Skate 3.

Not Skate, or Skate 2, both much better games, but Skate 3, a game which enjoys outsized prominence in the history of the Skate franchise for a few reasons. Firstly, for a while now, it’s been the most easily accessible entry in the series, having been backwards compatible on Xbox platforms for some time.

Secondly, Skate 3 became a viral hit years after its first release, thanks to the likes of former YouTube titan PewDiePie making videos highlighting the game’s wacky physics.

While that wackiness seemed to earn the game an eternal afterlife and popularity, which in many ways directly led to EA trying to do Skate again, it was the worst entry possible to spark this fire. In the years since, TikTok has exploded with videos of players attempting to do speed glitches in the game, clear impossible gaps, and stretch that original, clunky engine to its limits.

The thing is, Skate was never, ever about that. While there was always nonsense of the periphery of the games like the Hall of Meat mode, which would see you attempt to dislocate every bone in your body in the most entertaining way, that was a side show. Grounded, realistic skating was the main event.

So you might be asking why virtually every social media video of the new Skate features characters literally flying across the map, or climbing the sides of skyscrapers. So am I.

Firstly, the positives. The flick-it system is back, and still feels great. I was instantly able to Nollie 360 Flip without any issue. It’s still a game that feels incredibly fun to play. Rolling around the city, pulling off random tricks, finding lines, and spending an hour nailing a specific spot is very satisfying, and is one of the last remnants of the game that still feels like it was made for skaters.

Similarly, the soundtrack is excellent, mixing well-known artists with independent bands that have fewer than 10,000 Spotify listeners. You can collect new music around the map, which is a nice touch, too. Skate and Skate 2 were excellent vehicles for zoning out and listening to a diverse mix of metal, punk, and hip-hop, and the new Skate maintains that.

That’s what Skate gets right. However, the rest of the game around it has big issues, and turns its back on the core of the fan base that demanded the series return in the first place.

Skate is set in San Vansterdam,  which is made up of four districts, teeming with areas to skate. But what San Vansterdam isn’t teeming with is life. There is no atmosphere in the city. The streets are virtually empty. There are no pedestrians, only cars. There are no cops.

No security guards are trying to stop you from shredding. It’s an utterly soulless, sterile world. The only other people you see are other players, practically all of whom are wearing the same clothes, leading the game to feel less like Skate and more like a Fortnite lobby.

There is virtually no single-player “campaign” to speak of. You compete in events to earn more reputation in a specific area of the map. This reputation score leads to cosmetic rewards. The fun characters, and more importantly, the real skaters of the first three games are entirely gone, replaced by disembodied heads that bark orders at you.

It means that Skate feels like the multiplayer portion of a real Skate 4, without the badly needed single-player offering. Yes, it’s free-to-play (though you can spend plenty of real money on clothes that would have just been unlocked traditionally, for free in the old games), but that doesn’t excuse the vacuous world, sterile environments, and strange lack of focus on the art of skateboarding.

This means that travelling between events is very quiet, and almost creepy. You don’t feel like you’re skating through a real city – it’s a Hollywood set, but all the extras are on their tea break. It’s little wonder that players have already resorted to forward-rolling at top speed to get across the map, rather than skate through a silent abyss.

This isn’t Skate 4. It’s barely even Skate; it’s a modern-day Need for Speed with kickflips. The soul is gone. The city is empty. There’s no story, no characters, and no character. The Spider-Man abilities feel cynically included to generate TikTok clips, rather than something anyone who has so much as stepped on a board would enjoy.

This may be exactly what that group of people who came to the series via Skate 3 wanted, an infinite stunt factory that allowed for constant nonsense and viral clips, but those aren’t the people who were blowing up EA’s official Instagram with cries of  “SKATE 4 WILL BRING MY FATHER BACK” for a decade.

Perhaps it’s quaint and niche to want a game that would offer a bustling city, a decent single-player campaign, and much more heart, but it’s not here. It plays like Skate, it even sounds like Skate, but I don’t recognise this game, and I doubt many hardcore Skate fans will either.

There is room to fix it. Adding NPCs would go a long way. Scaling back the insane flying, rolling, and general nonsense movement would be another. The art style is a much larger issue that it seems like we will just need to get used to.

It’s hard to overstate just how many of the game’s tone issues would be fixed by paying 15 real-life skaters to serve as the in-game mission givers, and to add some grim around the world. There’s a world where Skate is for skaters again, but it’s not today.

The second question the game asks you when you first boot it is whether you care about skate culture. Presumably, the answer Skate is looking for is ‘no’.