Skate City Review – A Chilled Out Ride!

In Skate City, you challenge yourself by taking to the street flipping, grinding and sliding your way through Los Angeles, Oslo and Barcelona. The bigger and riskier tricks that you land, the more points and rewards you get. These rewards help upgrade your skater to pull off even bigger and riskier tricks! The game is very simple in its gameplay, with most of the tricks being located on the two analogue sticks. This is quite a cool idea, most inputs are very simple, being able to flick either analogue stick in any direction to do a trick. However, this is where the issues start to become apparent. You can never be entirely certain that you will do the exact trick you are attempting when adding any variations to the tricks. Adding the frontside/backside variations half the time might end up in completely different tricks. This can become frustrating when trying to do a certain trick over a certain obstacle for the endless skate mode. 

The basic tricks work really well, but anything beyond that can become a little muddled. If you are just wanting to have some fun and do random tricks in the endless skate mode, this won’t really be much of an annoyance. However, the moment you decide to try and achieve all the goals for each city in Endless Skate, or attempt to complete the challenges, this will become frustrating quite quickly. 

GAME MODES

There are two main game modes in Skate City, Endless Skate and Challenges. Endless Skate, as its name suggests, is a continuous run of laps around a chosen city. It features some trick challenges and photoshoots that award SC, that is the game’s currency. Challenges is where you will find the bulk of your SC earnings coming from. Each challenge has 3 objectives that are tiered by difficulty. This mode features a variety of challenges including Races, Running from the Police and Callouts. These challenges are really helpful for learning the mechanics of the game, with one challenge in particular teaching you the button inputs for certain tricks. I would definitely recommend focusing your time early on in the Challenge mode before tackling the objectives in Endless Skate.

GAME DESIGN

The minimalist design of Skate City is gorgeous! The aesthetic in this game really does help to set the tone, giving it a really relaxed vibe. Each city looks unique and has its own challenges that are tailored to it’s design. Each city provides a decent variety of obstacles that really fit in with their environments, and never seem out of place. It feels as though you are actually skating through a city. Rather than a skate park with a city aesthetic to it, and that is fantastic!

The music is a highlight of this game! Instead of the punk, rock and rap music that has become almost synonymous with the skateboarding culture, thanks in part to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, this title opts for a more chill EDM vibe.  Featuring a mostly lo-fi style, the soundtrack really sets the atmosphere of this title. This relaxing electronic music fits so well in Skate City!

DECISION

Skate City is definitely worth checking out! It is by no means the perfect skating experience, but it is a great game to chill out to. If you can get past some of the slight clunkiness of the combos, this title will definitely impress in some areas. With a great aesthetic mixed with some fantastic lo-fi vibes, this is one of those titles that will help you relax!

By Samuel Incze

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Snowman. The Beta Network uses affiliate partnerships, however, this does not influence reviews or any other content published. The Beta Network may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links that are on the website.