Skate preview: Skating better than ever in a slow live-service

There’s one simple thing that’s always drawn me to Skate over other skateboarding games: the control scheme. It’s just something about how my brain works that means I can wrap my head around the idea of flicking the analogue stick to jump or flip a lot easier than I can remember a whole series of button presses, like in the Tony Hawk games.

The series’ Flick-It control system is as strong as ever in this new entry, with a few tweaks that make it feel better than ever. Some of the previous games could be frustratingly unforgiving when it came to how precise your movements needed to be, but here it’s a little looser in a way that helps the game flow better, while still allowing for great mastery. There’s even a simplified version of it that you can use while you’re learning the controls before switching over to the full version.

In fact, there are small quality-of-life improvements all over when it comes to game feel. Snapping onto a rail is more reliable, as is hopping off of one; doing board grabs and spins in mid-air feels more responsive; and the improved parkour system means finding cool spots to skate or stunt from is easier than ever.

Speaking of, stunting is a much bigger part of the game this time around. While the early access launch version of the game won’t have the classic Hall of Meat Mode, where you try to break as many bones as possible, it does have stunting challenges where you’ll need to throw yourself off of tall things and on, into, or through objectives on your way to splatting on the ground. Stunting works as part of your combo-meter this time too, so even if your cool skate combo ends with you smashing face-first into a moving bus, you’ll still get some points for that.

While the game feels great, I’m not yet convinced that the world feels as great to skate in as previous titles. The open world is divided into four districts, with three being available at the early access launch, and during my time with this preview, I only got to explore the first one, so it might get better. However, I did feel the world wasn’t giving me as many cool skating opportunities as I had hoped. There are some good areas with cool things to grind along and fling myself off, but there’s a lack of cohesion that means I can’t really combo between them.

The same goes for the challenges. There are some fixed challenges and some that refresh every day, where the game will pick a spot and challenge you to complete a few objectives there, usually around getting a high score or performing specific tricks. These are alright, but they started to feel very samey, very fast, and since this is a live service game, if you want to progress to unlock the other districts and all the cosmetics, you’ll need to do a lot of them.

I found the basic progression system to be quite off-putting too. By completing missions and challenges, you earn a basic free currency that you can use to buy cosmetics. However, the cosmetics are separated into crates in groups of about 10-12 items, and when you buy a crate, you’ll randomly get one of the items in the pool. You can’t get duplicate items, and you can only spend the free currency on them, so it’s not quite a loot box system, but that nicety is very much undercut by the fact that to unlock the other districts, you need to unlock a certain amount of cosmetics, which just turns the whole thing into a grind.

It means that Skate has fallen into the traps that I was worried about when I found out it would be a live-service game, where grinding the progression system seems to take precedent over having fun — and bear in mind that this preview version doesn’t even include things like the Season Pass or in-game store, which I expect will make this issue worse.

That said, in terms of pure game feel, this has all the makings of a top-tier skateboarding game. I had a lot of fun just riding around the city, hopping onto whatever looked grindable, flipping over cars, and launching myself off of big drops. The core of what people love about Skate is here and better than ever; you’ll just have to deal with some annoying packaging.

Skate is set to launch in early access on September 16, 2025 for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One.

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