skate. nails what matters most

Skate 4, or as it’s officially titled, “skate.,” has been one of the most anticipated game releases since it was announced five years ago. This fresh take on the series comes with new features, new locations, and a new art style. Ahead of the open beta, I spent some time in San Vansterdam, experiencing everything that skate. has to offer.

skate., like its predecessors, is entirely designed around the flick system. Nearly every trick in the game, whether it be a flip, grind, or grab, begins with the player flicking the right analog stick on their controller. It’s this core design that made the original trilogy of Skate games such an enjoyable departure from other dominating titles in the genre. As someone who put way too many hours into Skate 3 over the past 15 years, I’m glad to report that skate. feels just like the games that came before it. That feeling of weight and responsiveness with every input puts you in total control of everything your skateboard does.

By default, skate. has an on-screen graphic that shows your latest flick input and its corresponding move. It’s great for learning how to master simple tricks, or identify how you’re screwing something up. The veterans of the series can easily disable this in the menu.

skate. is set in the fictional city of San Vansterdam. This urban setting is littered with ramps, half-pipes, rails, and other mundane pieces of architecture that form a skating playground. As you explore the map, you’ll find various challenges that can be completed for experience and currency. Challenges are timed and task you with multiple objectives, and your final rating depends on how many of them you complete in the time allotted. For example, one challenge might require you to do 10 flip tricks and grind for a total of 30 seconds in an area. Another challenge may simply task you with reaching a certain score total before time runs out.

When you complete a challenge, you’re treated to a victory screen that informs you of all your gains from completing said challenge. This is where the live service elements of skate. start to shine through, and it’s what I think will be the largest point of contention for fans of the series.

skate. is a live service, free-to-play, always online video game. It’s a departure from previous games in the series, that would let you enjoy everything the game had to offer (outside of multiplayer) even if you weren’t connected to the internet. This means that you’ll commonly cross paths with other skaters as you explore San Vansterdam. It also allows the game to rotate challenges on a daily basis. While many of the challenges in San Vansterdam are static, several are only available for a limited time until they rotate out.

With the free-to-play live service model, skate. also leans into cosmetics and microtransactions in a way the previous games didn’t. There’s an in-game store where players can spend real money on in-game currency to buy different gear for their character and cosmetics for their skateboard. There’s a separate currency that’s earned from playing the game and completing challenges that can be used at stores like Extravert to buy mystery boxes of gear. These boxes are tied to different themes and will yield cosmetics of different rarities. Yes, skate. has tiered gear like an RPG: uncommon shoes, rare shirts, legendary shirts, and so on. That said, these items are all entirely cosmetic and do not affect your in-game performance.

I actually quite liked playing dress-up in skate. There is a lot of gear that you’ll just naturally unlock through playing the game. After every few challenges, I’d jump into the editor to change up my fit, doing my best to tie it into the design on my skateboard. That said, I grew a bit tired of the full-screen takeovers that would happen after every challenge, showing me experience progression, and going through my rewards one-by-one. It didn’t help that this would happen several seconds after the challenge ended, meaning I was already in the middle of doing another trick when it popped up. I think a subtler pop-up in the corner of the screen would be more appropriate.

The live service format also means that skate. is a living, breathing game that will evolve over time. The developers made it clear to me during a private Q&A that future seasons of skate. will bring new music, features, and even tricks. For example, fans of the Darkslide may be disappointed that they can’t do the move when the skate. beta opens, but it’s already on the list of confirmed additions for the season 2 update.

Despite all of the changes that come with the switch to a live service model, I was impressed by how much core Skate DNA remained intact. You can still pull up a replay of any trick you do whenever you like. You can drop ramps and other obstacles into the open world for yourself or other players to use, and you can still bail from your skateboard and intentionally throw yourself into the concrete at terminal velocity, though the game no longer shows an X-Ray of your bones cracking and breaking like in the other games.

Another new gameplay element in skate. is parkour. Players can no climb ledges and scale buildings Assassin’s Creed-style to literally reach new heights as they explore San Van. There are several areas that can only be reached by carefully scaling the exterior of a building, adding a sense of verticality to this new take on the franchise. I spent half an hour climbing the tallest building in the city, and proudly placed a session market on the roof once I finally reached it. The parkouring mechanics in skate. feel… fine, but they didn’t do much to disrupt my enjoyment of the beta.

There’s a lot of elements about the skate. that I probably won’t make my mind up on until I’ve sunk dozens and dozens of hours into the experience. Still, during my time with an early build of the beta, I couldn’t get over how good it felt to just, well, skate. I found myself mindlessly gravitating towards half-pipes, grinding on street curbs on my way to objectives, and going for personal high-scores whenever possible. The vibes are certainly in the right place, so here’s hoping the folks at Full Circle Studio can stick the landing.

This preview is based on an early build of skate. provided by the publisher.