- Title: Skate 2
- Publisher: EA
- Developer: Black Box
- ESRB Rating: “T” for Teen
- Genre: Skateboarding
- Pros: Great gameplay; nice graphics and sound; has real skating attitude; online play
- Cons: On-foot stuff is awful; move-specific challenges
Skate 2 returns you to San Vanelona after a five-year stint in prison, and the city has changed dramatically. A natural disaster destroyed much of the city, but a company called Mongocorp rebuilt it. The company is apparently bipolar, however, because they built the city with more quarter pipes and ramps and rails than ever but also put anti-skater blocks and guards at all of the best spots. Naturally, it is up to your character to hook up with all of your old skate buds, reclaim the spots, and make New San Van the skate paradise it once was.
You do that by impressing pro skaters and completing challenges or winning competitions so you can make money to buy new equipment and even properties. There are race events, “Own the Spot” events, photo shoots, and more to keep you busy. A nice touch is that you can use the map screen to warp directly to challenges and spots and other areas of interest, which keeps the game clicking along at a good pace.
San Van is surprisingly alive. Or, rather, alive in the sense that drunk braindead robots are alive. There are cars driving around, other skaters, and regular pedestrians. Unfortunately, the AI is pretty terrible. Cars will run into you and then when you respawn they’ll run you over again. Other skaters are oblivious and run into things constantly, even in competitions.
Gameplay
For the most part, the gameplay is pretty much like the first Skate. The controls are the same, but you now have about double the number of moves. The biggest and most important new additions are the ability to get off of your board and walk around as well as the ability to move objects around. Unfortunately, the on-foot controls are complete garbage. Your character controls like a tank and gets stuck on stuff in the world pretty much constantly. Moving objects around is more interesting because it lets you tackle challenges in unique ways. Say you want to do flip tricks over a set of stairs, but you can't clear the gap. You just move a table to the top so you can trick off of it to get more airtime. There are a lot of times like this when you can figure things out for yourself, which is very cool.
Skate 2 offers online multiplayer at the press of a button similar to Burnout Paradise or GTAIV. You can jump right into an online session for freeskate or challenges and it is all seamless and smooth. You don’t have access to the entire city online, as it is broken down into smaller chunks, but that helps keep the focus on sessions at cool spots rather than having people spread out. The game also offers offline multiplayer, but it is “pass the controller” turn based challenges rather than splitscreen, which is disappointing.
Graphics
Graphically, Skate 2 is pretty impressive. The city looks great, and depending on the lighting can be pretty darn realistic looking. The skaters are also nicely detailed, and the animation is smooth and very good.
Sound
The sound is also very well done. The sound effects for each surface you skate on all sound great. The voice acting isn’t stellar, but the story really isn’t the attraction here anyway so it doesn’t matter. There are more than 50 songs included on the disc, but you can also always listen to your own tunes on the Xbox 360, which is what I recommend.
Bottom Line
