Skate

I am sure you are all vaguely familiar with who Tony Hawkes is, even if it is only because his name is currently attached to one of the largest and most repetitive game series still alive today. I was actually on board with the first 2 Tony Hawkes games in the series but by number 3 it was getting a little silly and before you knew it there was an annual release of a brand new game in the series. When Tony Hawkes games first emerged onto the scene it was the kind of thing that ate it's shitty competition for breakfast and the series went crazy and rampaged through the market unchallenged like a financial Godzilla. Anyway after what seems like 20 Tony Hawkes games (each becoming successively less to do with Tony) the skating genre seemed at an end when a game called Skate swept in and pulled off a perfect nosegrind across the top of Tony Hawkes gaming grave. The thing about skate is it actually reinvented the genre with a cool new control scheme. Instead of being able to pull off rediculously impossible combo's by just mashing pre-memorised button combinations like a speedy robot you have to stick with tricks and combo's that are far more in the realistic side of things. This is done by simply replacing button mashing with stick flicking but that simple idea was actually quite a huge step. It feels more natural and it gives an appropriate difficulty level to the harder tricks. That said it can be extremely hard to differentiate certain tricks with similar stick motions and I'm never completely sure if it's my fault or the games. I've also heard some criticisms regarding product placement in the game but for me it seems like a good thing rather than a bad one. The game is supposed to be a realistic skate game and picking and wearing skate brands only seems authentic rather than an act of selling out. I'm not sure exactly how to wrap this up. If you're even mildly interested in skating it's worth a look, especially if you thought the first Tony Hawkes game was original and exciting at the time.