Well, I tried to like you skate. I really did. But in the end, you just left me yearning for my days as a youth and thrashing the church steps in my old hometown.

Let’s start with the good, shall we? Skate is a beautiful looking game. The tricks were realistic enough to bring back memories of pulling my own method airs oh so many years ago. The buildings and the scenery were beautiful to look at, and even better to skate! The trick system was actually quite good too, once you get the hang of it. Pulling nollies and flips became second nature when I was just zooming around town looking for a nice long rail to 50-50. Although, I wish they would have let me pull off a darkslide as that’s one of my favorite grinds. But it was still so much fun to have a skateboard game where I could actually envision myself as the skater. I was truly immersed in this game, and that rarely happens!

Now the downfall….It was a little too realistic. The game shows you in a third person form, looking up from the ground. This is bad because a skater needs to be aware of his surroundings. Whether you’re trying to get a good angle for a grind or if you need to see if traffic is coming before you grind out into the street, you need to know what’s going on around you. This hindered a lot of tricks and force you to bail. A lot. I really would have liked to change the camera angle so it’s over the shoulder, or even be able to look freely left and right. If they wanted a game so realistic, they should have taken all the aspects that one has when they skate. Many times I would skate to the top section of some stairs and have no idea how they curved or if there was even a break in the steps so I can time my landings. I felt cheated by the “unknown” and it really detracted from my gameplay.

Another thing that frustrated me where the difficulties of the missions. Quite a few of the accomplishments that you had to do seemed so outrageously difficult that I just gave up. Once again, a lot of this was attributed to the poor camera angle selection. If I was able to actually see where and what I had to do, I’m sure it would have been a lot easier to judge without taking away from the difficulty of the tricks. Instead, it just frustrated me to the point of shutting the game off and playing Zuma. Another issue I had was trying to pull manuals. This was a necessary trick you had to use for some of the missions, yet it was so difficult to pull off that it wasn’t worth the 15 minutes I spent trying to accomplish this.

Another downfall of this realism is the fact that you cannot get off your skateboard! I found it infuriating that they could make a game so real to play, yet, you couldn’t walk up a hill or climb some stairs. Seriously, it would take 5 minutes to skate up a hill that you could have easily walked.

There were so many neat features to this game (being able to upload tricks and pictures to the online server for the world to view was really cool). But it became undone by it’s own desires to be real, that it ultimately doomed this game. Too much went into the concept that it degraded the gameplay to such an extreme that it wasn’t fun. Maybe they’ll make a second one that’ll really give the gamer a chance to explore and thrash without worrying about getting hit by a car that came out of “nowhere”.

So my vote for this game is 2/5. I’m glad I only wasted a rental on this and not the full $60.