2007 was the year the last real
Tony Hawk game came out, and the year the first
Skate came out. At the time, everyone raved about Skate and how inspired it felt in comparison to the last five Tony Hawk games.
Honestly, it's a shame that Activision killed off the Tony Hawk series, because the two games could have coexisted. Like Microsoft's
Forza Motorsport and
Forza Horizon, Skate and Tony Hawk have two completely different goals in mind for the player.
Tony Hawk's games are about doing gigantic combos around the entire level. It's about racking up hundreds of thousands of points, and never thinking twice. The high combo achievement in
Tony Hawk's Project 8 is for getting 500,000 points.
Skate is about trying again and again to hit one single line. The high combo achievement in Skate is for getting 10,000 points.
I've always been a staunch defender of the Tony Hawk series. I even liked
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground a lot. When Proving Ground came out as the final true Tony Hawk game, and the first Skate came out, I was 14 years old. I would have absolutely hated Skate if I had played it in 2007. At the age of 26, however, I had a really good time.
Skate excels when they give you a gap to hit or a rail to grind, and let you do your thing. Photo challenges were absolutely the best part of the game. Every single gap you attempt feels like an actual challenge, and not just a given.
Contests follow this same idea; you're given an area, and told to make the best of it. However, a few contests fell really short for me. In one in particular, I had to trick of a pyramid in one round, and a globe in another. The pyramid was horrible, because the max speed in this game barely gets you any air from it, and the grinds are spaced out awkwardly. The globe just made no sense from a skating perspective.
Another lowlight was a challenge where I had to 360 flip into a crooked grind on a bench, specifically. I simply didn't get good enough through the game at precisely pulling off certain flip tricks. I'd keep executing pop shove-its and bare ollies, even after I'd spent a while in one spot 360 flipping over and over. Thankfully, there are very few challenges that require specific tricks.
S.K.A.T.E. challenges, however, are nothing but specific tricks, and the later ones can get really annoying when you're constantly on the spot, trying to figure out how to do a nollie laser flip in one attempt.
Video challenges were the bane of my existence toward the end of the game, especially the ones in "no-skate zones". Mustering together 5,000 points in 30 seconds is hard enough, but all of the applicable no-skate zones are absolute shit. They must call them no-skate zones because you simply have nothing to skate on there.
Death races are another type of mission, and I had a lot of fun with these. Basically, you just bomb your way down a hill, avoiding traffic and other skaters. It feels so much faster than most of the rest of the game, so it's a welcome change of pace.
Speaking of other skaters, though, my God are they annoying in this game. They constantly appear from the woodwork to destroy your lines. In the final video challenge for Thrasher, you have to get 6,000 points in 30 seconds. I had 5,800 and was about to put the cap on it, when another skater cleaned me the fuck out. I was livid.
In the end, I did all the missions in this game minus seven video challenges. I had a good time for most of it, but the game definitely could have used some tweaks. I missed the ability to get off my board from the Tony Hawk games.