It's a brilliant game. I love the shatter fx, the bouncy cam, the music, and how realistic the skating feels. The story is weird and vague enough to be a snippet out of one of William Burroughs books. The only thing that could improve it is a free skate mode, but if it never gets one, it wouldn't retract from it's greatness. It is Skate 'Story' after all.

Name me another game you can land a 360 inward heelflip inside the belly of a cosmic centipede.

Of the few reviews I've written, this is one I've struggled with the most. The art style and soundtrack are fantastic - the cast and characters are great. However, for a game about skateboarding ... I don't find it fun or enjoyable to actually play. More often than not I'm fighting with the camera or the controls instead of being excited to do rad tricks or land a grind. I'm often fighting to position the camera in a location where I have enough spatial information to feel confident in when to pop an ollie and land the grind - usually shattering into a thousand pieces. The frustration is somewhat softened by the extremely fast respawn time but I've come to think the design was to leverage the fast respawn time to try and soften over the what I feel is a lack of polish with the controls and camera. It's hard to be upset at failure when the setback is minor but eventually it wore on me. If vibes and design can pull you through a rough skateboarding experience, perhaps you'll find Skate Story rewarding. But I don't feel like it landed for me.

Уникальный опыт как для тех, кто не сталкивался со [i]skate simulator играми[/i], так и тех, кто в Томи Хоуке собаку съел. Единственный нюанс в неоднозначной концовке, которая, в целом, не портит и без того сюрную игру. Саундтрек балдежный. Для фанатов игры и/или группы Blood Cultures [url=https://music.yandex.ru/playlists/444e24ac-66b7-4cb5-a318-a2fb04aac220?utm_source=web&utm_medium=copy_link]создал плейлист в ЯМе[/url]. Однозначно рекомендую.

The myriad of possible release version soft locks are fixed, so now you [i]have[/i] to play this for at least one eternity. Which is about 5 hours. That is, if you are into the idea of playing a linear abstract story in 9 chapters that happens to have [b]the most realistic [i]feeling[/i] skateboard mechanics.[/b] (just check if you vibe with the demo, multiply your experience with that by 10) Now that doesn't mean the game has the most comprehensive trick arsenal or complex control scheme. What it does have are trucks that properly react to the situation. They will wobble below you as you push, land or pick up speed, but not just visually. This significantly impacts your steering. (you can tighten or loosen them to trade stability for turning radius) And trick setups that match how you would prepare for a trick in real life. That means putting your feet on specific spots of the board via shoulder buttons (front and back foot to the left or right edge of the board) and then finding the right balance and moment to pop it. It's overall very tactile and strikes just the right balance between arcade and simulation. Easy to pick up like any 3D action game using common dual stick movement and camera controls plus face button actions, but then really hones in on the fine mechanical details of shoulder button modifiers, tapping, double tapping, holding and releasing things in various combinations. Some extra things worth noting: [h3]Difficulty[/h3] The game is, by default, very accessible (apart from fast flashing images, the startup warning is no joke). That means even if you struggle a lot with learning and using all the tricks, you can actually get through without chaining any combos beyond that demo boss fight. Many of the challenges are more of an opportunity to show you what you can do rather than an actual requirement. There are for example speed barriers, meant to teach you how to do a stronger push, but you do not have to ever use one in the entire game. Time limits similarly seem to be more adjusted to the music than challenge. You can often clear the goal bumbling around in just a quarter of the time. Now, if that sounds boring rather than inviting, the accessibility settings on top of this don't just let you increase your health and damage output (or ease up the combo timer and decay), you can also decrease it for more of a challenge among other settings. And there are additional and optional difficultly increases in new game+ runs after the epilogue as well. [h3]Music[/h3] The game is effectively a playable discography of Blood Cultures, perfectly rounded off by John Fio with chill hub area tracks. So if you like what you hear and think you are covered getting just the OST, be aware that nearly everything from the previous Blood Culture albums is used as well. Only a handful of songs from each didn't get a spot in the game. [h3]Art[/h3] I've already mentioned that this is a very abstract story. But it needs repeating. Towards the end the game pursues and fleshes out things you would normally only see in small game jam or free art projects, not commercial products. It's no small feat fleshing out something like that into a big game without loosing too much in the process. With that mentioned, onto some shortcomings you might step away with once you are done with it. [h3]Shortcomings[/h3] First of all, I think that most of these do not take away from the game. In fact, I think this is the first game that I consider [i]better[/i] for these things. Like an intricate painting very deliberately drawn with a very broad brush. For example, the environment often looks kit bashed together. As if you are still playing through grey box prototypes. Often easily revealing where the designed space ends and letting you go outside of it. The ground even has top down level design sketches on it. This gets more pronounced as the game progresses (the demo is arguably the most polished part, as it should be), but in this audio visual style and the context of the story I really enjoy that roughness to it. In a similar vein, while you can manually land in pretty much all grind positions I can think of that aren't dark side, none of them are descriptively labelled like the flip tricks. They are all the same grind trick, for the same score. But it makes sense: This is the highest risk-reward mechanic in the game. You are best of not getting distracted by trying to land specific ones as you learn it. (and it then reaches very high levels of intrinsic reward when you do master doing specific grinds when you want to) And lastly, this is the only one that truly bothers me: Landing in a grind or manual will completely hide the flip trick you performed into them. That is a little frustrating, because the flip trick display is very verbose. Both teaching you all the basic street skating trick names as well as giving you feedback on how well you executed that one - while grind and manual both have no meaningful feedback beyond their name showing up. Still, that being the worst I have to say about it only shows that the right things were prioritised. No regrets on 17 eternities and counting.