Skate 2

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Skate 2
Tweet Topic Started: Mar 5 2009, 10:30 PM (3,118 Views)
LK	Mar 5 2009, 10:30 PM Post #1
iminspace Posts: 18,081 Group: Active Ancients Member #794 Joined: July 28, 2005 Gender Male Coins 5	Skate 2 Developer: Black Box Publisher: EA Games Release Date: January 21st, 2009 Genre: Sports Platform(s): Xbox 360, PS3 Rating: T - Teen In 2007, EA, or more specifically, Black Box, wanted to make a skateboarding game that would surpass the likes of Tony Hawk, who has lead the skateboarding genre since it began late in the 90’s. I never reviewed the first game, but it was freaking awesome, because not only was it a realistic skateboard game, but it was a huge breath of fresh air into a genre that was getting stale every year. Skate 2, the sequel to the 2007 game, released on January 21st of 2009, and though it’s not as revolutionary as the first game in the series, it’s still a great game, and better than the past 3 or 4 Tony Hawk games. The sequel improves upon its unique analog stick controls from the first, but the result is mixed because of new annoyances the first game didn’t have, but the sequel does. You play as the same character you play as in the first Skate, but you are just being released from jail as the game begins, because being in jail for no reason makes tons of sense, right? Anyways, your character never talks, but your friend “the mouth” does all of the talking for you, and like the first game, his voice gets terribly annoying after a short amount of time. The game primarily plays like the first one: you gets photos, and videos to submit for a cover on either Skateboard Mag, or Thrasher by doing challenges throughout the city of San Vanelona, or New San Vanelona introduced in Skate 2. You can also do a bunch of other things like competitions, and bonus missions with Rob Dyrdek and Danny Way. The story in Skate 2, like the original game, is ultimately forgettable. For a skateboarding game, it’s okay, but its so cliche, it’s not even funny anymore. The progressions is fine, but getting to the mission in New San Vanelona seems a bit too easy now. In the first Skate you would have to literally travel to a location by yourself, but in Skate 2, you can warp to anywhere you want. Sure, it makes the game more seamless, but it takes away from the exploration part of the game that made the first one so mesmerizing. Skate 2 is also quite a shorter game than the first, and I know I’m comparing the game to the first a little much, but it’s only fair. Skate 2 also plays extremely similar to the first Skate, meaning you use the left analog stick to control your character, the X and B buttons for pushing, the right analog stick for flip tricks, and the trigger buttons for grabs. The flip-trick system with the right analog stick still works awesomely, but I did notice that the window for error is a bit higher, meaning that it’s more difficult to do specific moves than it was in the first game. New to Skate 2 is the ability to do Hand Plants on half-pipes, which was impossible to do in the first, plus the ability to use No Comply’s, and Foot Plants. The move list in Skate 2 is definitely quite a bit larger than the first game, and is a huge improvement overall. All of the mainstays of the series, like its replay editor, is all still here in Skate 2 as well. The replay editor, while still easy to get the hang of, seems a little worse than the one from the original Skate. Changing the camera of your skater seems way more difficult, and there’s barely any filters to chose from. You can address all of this by buying the Replay Editor pack from Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network if you’re really into this kind of stuff, but you’re just paying for stuff that’s already on the disk, which is a shame. Bailing in the first Skate was fun, but after you start crashing, there was no way of actually controlling what your character would do in a bail. In Skate 2, you can actually make bails way worse than they would normally be by controlling your character with the left and right analog sticks. Doing sicker bails will increase your “Hall of Meat” rating, which will eventually calculate into the a new mode in Skate 2, adeptly named “Hall of Meat”. Some of the goals in the Hall of Meat are pretty standard like breaking a certain number of bones in a single bail, but then it gets more advanced like hitting a certain number of items, and getting a certain amount of points in the same bail. The Hall of Meat additions is actually really cool, but damn, it gets extremely difficult near the last parts of the Hall. The online will likely draw a lot of gamers into Skate 2, since all of the online modes the game has are pretty cool. There’s normal modes like S.K.A.T.E. (also called HORSE), Races, and trick competitions, but there’s also free skate activities where you and a bunch of buddies can try to complete a certain amount of quests before the time runs out. I’m not a big online kind of guy, but the online modes in Skate 2 are pretty cool, and I think a lot of people will like them, and will be their time waster for a very long time. One major part of the original Skate that turned many people off was the frustrating difficulty, and in Skate 2, if anything, it’s even worse. A generic mission in a Skate game would be something like, “Do a flip trick onto this ledge, and flip trick out of it.” You probably wont have much trouble with the first quarter to half of the missions, but then they start to ramp up pretty damn quickly. Some missions will honestly astonish you right off the bat, you’ll look at the requirements, and your jaw will drop to the floor, but it’s nothing considering your controller will hit the floor shortly thereafter. The missions in Skate 2 will frustrate you to no end. Sometimes its not bad, you just have to look at the trick list in the options menu, but it should really tell you how to do stuff before the mission begin. Another part of the Skate series that has always bothered me, and is still the same in Skate 2, is the Death Races. Death Races are exactly how they sound: you race against other people on your skateboard. This may not sound like that bad of a game mode, but playing these are the most frustrating part of the entire game. The part that makes the races so freaking frustrating is that if you turn too sharply, you will fall off your skateboard, and wreck pretty badly, putting you way off course. Cars, people, items, ledges, and tons of other things will also get in your way, and you going so fast, that you’ll likely run into them before you’ll even know to get out of the way. Luckily, there’s only around 7 or 8 races to complete throughout the main story anyways, so you wont have to do a huge amount of them. But other than the frustration element of the game, Skate 2 is a pretty tight package. Visually, it looks pretty decent. Sure, it wont knock your socks off, but it’s definitely not a bad part of the game. New San Vanelona is totally different, and is actually an entirely new city altogether, and it looks like a living breathing city should. People will walk around, cars will drive on the street, it will look like people are actually doing stuff, instead of being there for no reason. One thing that did tick me off quite a bit is that the people are programmed to purposely walk in your way, and this is extremely frustrating in timed events. The Audio, while the soundtrack is extremely repetitive, it’s still not bad with a mix of classics, new tunes, and some (c)rap in there as well. The voice acting, is pretty bad. It’ll mostly sound like the pro skaters walked into the recording studio, took one recording for each part of the game, and peaced out; the voice acting is very amateur. The sound effects like the skateboards rubbing up against a railing, or the sounds of the wheel skidding on the pavement, all sounds perfectly real. Overall, Skate is a good game, with tons and tons of things to do, but there is still a lot of similar negatives about the first Skate that are still here in Skate 2, plus more stuff that will frustrate you to no end. Skate 2 has its great moments, but it seems to have a lot more bad moments, than good ones, which will turn a lot of different gamers off. I would definitely recommend Skate 2 to anyone that liked the original Skate, and there’s still fun to be had for newcomers, but I’d have to suggest the first Skate to newcomers, over Skate 2.
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