If you’ve ever wanted to feel like a bad-ass skater without all the physical trauma you’d have to go through to get there, then videogames have provided that exhilarating catharticism for many years, specifically in the king of skateboarding games, the Tony Hawks Pro Skater series. But as fun and challenging as those games were, they provided their thrills through the lens of arcade sensibility, very much epitomising the easy-to-pick-up and play, yet hard-to-master mantra. Various skateboarding games have toyed with a more sim-like and realistic approach to skating, specifically the Skate series and Skater XL. But were these introduced the twin analogue control stick method of gameplay with a slightly higher emphasis on realism, Session: Skate Sim descends into the fray with a full-blown skateboarding simulator experience that you will either love or hate, most likely both at the same time.
Grind or Die
If you thought you knew how to control a skateboarder and could get a BS grind down with ease, then you’re going to have to forget everything you know from skateboarding games past, including years of muscle memory perfection with a controller. Session: Skate Sim brings its own control scheme to the table and it’s not one that you can get to grips with easily. If you thought skateboarding and all its technical effluvia was hard in real life, then be prepared to face that same level of difficulty – and some more – digitally. The road to digital skateboarding godhood is paved with repetition and frustration. It’s one only the most dedicated will stick to.
Before you jump into Session: Skate Sim’s world, I highly recommend running through the game’s tutorial which will bring you up to speed on the basics of skating with this control scheme. It’s a necessity to get used to your stances and how they affect your control and what you can do. Once you’re done with that, I then recommend spending a good chunk of time just skating around the environment to get used to the controls.
Session: Skate Sim lets you control your skater through each foot. So Square and the left analog control your left foot, while X and the right analog control your right foot. X and Square push you while the analogs are there to control your stances and tricks. Manoeuvring your skater is handled with L2 and R2 and believe me, getting used to moving left and right with the shoulder buttons while pushing X or Square and then using the sticks to Ollie or kickflip is not a natural feeling at all. Getting over using the left analog stick to control your direction requires an intense amount of effort.
And that is the overall theme of Session: effort. Well, that and patience. Unlike Tony Hawk, Session: Skate Sim isn’t entirely about throwing down mad lines and linking impossible grinds and gaps together. No, it’s about finding that spot and then taking the time and planning to get that one grind right. It’s about constant failure before success and then some more failure when you want to try something new. In this sense, Session: Skate Sim comes very close to skating in the real world. If you’ve ever picked up a deck in real life and tried to Ollie that curb outside your house, you know just how much effort needs to be put into getting something that simple right. Session: Skate Sim nails that feel down to the core, which is something that you will either accept or abhor. And while the frustration really does mount with each failure, that moment when you get more accustomed to the controls and pull of that BS grind down a handrail really is cathartic.
Work Hard, Play Hard
Like skating for fun in real life, Session: Skate Sim isn’t about hitting up its missions, but rather about freeform skating through its three massive, trick heavy locations. It’s about that feeling of Zen when things come together and your impromptu tricks actually work. Sure, you won’t be linking insane grinds into kickflips into a gap into a manual and then into another grind before a revert. No, that’s the province of Tony Hawk. It doesn’t mean that you can’t perform complex moves, but it’s a testament to the environment design that you can actually see these kinds of sick lines. Session: Skate Sim’s Zen is about that moment when you heelflip into a grind and kickflip out without bailing and feeling like you’ve accomplished something. It’s just a shame that the road to get there will probably make most people quit in the opening hours.
The biggest obstacle for Session: Skate Sim aren’t its stairs or parked cars, but the control system itself and the game’s wealth of bugs and issues.
Even though this is finally out of early access, it doesn’t feel like it’s out of early access. I’ve encountered bugs when you bail, bugs that put you into a permanent manual on the edge of a grind and issues with the control system recognising button presses. Right now this is the biggest issue as I found moments when the game wouldn’t recognise either my analog inputs or shoulder button presses. It’s frustrating enough when trying to do something during an impromptu session, but even worse when it’s happening during the tutorial section and missions. It made clearing some of them. . . painful at best.
That early access feeling is enforced even more once you start to look through the game’s options menu and see the wealth of options and gameplay mechanics that are still in the experimental phase. And while there are many options to customise your game, such as changing the control scheme from left and right foot to front and back – which is a lot more palatable believe me – and even setting up your board and world physics, the game does nothing to tell you about these things.
That lack of information extends into the game’s missions as well. While missions are all about earning you cash and teaching you advanced moves, they aren’t always well illustrated or explained for you to know how to perform a move. And the brief cinematic and explanations can’t be reviewed if you need to step away for a while and come back later.
And finally, there’s the control scheme itself which is, honestly, just terrible. If you choose to stick around, you will get used to it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it gets more comfortable. At least it hasn’t for me. I may be more proficient with it, but it doesn’t feel like second nature. It’s awkward, uncomfortable and downright frustrating, even if you’ve chosen to play in assisted mode.
Session: Skate Sim presents an incredibly high bar to entry. With its unforgiving gameplay and a control scheme that requires a lot of practice to get to grips with, it will most likely put many gamers off from continuing. For those that stick around, however, they will find a game that, despite still needing a lot of work before it could be called complete, will provide you with a great sense of satisfaction once you’ve begun to accomplish its seemingly impossible tasks. Even with my dislike for the control system, there’s a sense of Zen-like calmness just skating around and pulling off tricks that is unlike anything else on the market right now. And that I still want to jump back into the game and continue to trick out around the environment says a lot more about it than my dislikes for its problems do. If you can’t pull out and dust off your old deck from a cupboard, grab a couple of friends and hang out in your local parking spot trying to remember if you really were that good, then Session: Skate Sim is the next best thing. Especially if it keeps you out of the emergency room.
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X and Series S
Developers: Crea-ture Studios, Illogika
Publishers: Crea-ture Studios, Nacon, BIGBEN INTERACTIVE
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