Skate 2 Video Game Review

February 11, 2009 on 8:47 pm | In Video Games | 1 Comment

Recently, as many readers of the magazine will hopefully have noticed, we here at ToyFare have been slowly dipping our toys into the enormous ocean that is the video game world. One thing holding us back? Neither Justin nor myself actually owned a 360 or PS3. Well, I got a 360 recently (Justin’s super jealous) which has opened up the floodgates for potential video game reviews. First up on the list is EA’s recent Skate 2 release, which has been a whole lot of fun.

I’ve been playing this game for about three weeks now. I’m not all that great at it, though I have mastered a few tricks pretty well. The great thing about the game is that you can basically ride around and do whatever you want. There are missions and tasks of a skateboarding variety that you can teleport to or skate across time until you reach it, but they can be completed at your leisure. So, if you want to just skate around doing kick flips over steps for two hours, it’s no problem.

I’m a big fan of the teleport function. You’ve got a task menu that you can access whenever you want that tells you what’s going on around town. You’ve got events that help your skating career (your character has just been released from jail and doesn’t speak for some reason), races, trick competitions and the like to choose from. After scrolling through, you pick what sounds good and BAMF there you are, like Nightcrawler. You can also leave a marker in a particular place so that, if you’re trying to do rad tricks from the top of a big hill, you don’t have to keep running back up the hill. You just hit a few buttons and automatically return to that place. This really helps when you’re trying to claim an area, something I have yet to do because I’m not really sure how it works.

You also can’t really lose. Well, not in the long run at least. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do certain tasks, failed and then left, but there’s no real penalty, you can go back whenever you want (at least that’s been my experience so far). Also, this is the first game that I don’t mind playing even though I’m not that good at it yet, especially if it involves spectacular crashes (there’s actually a combination of buttons you can press to completely bail out, which I accidentally press way too often). Also also, I haven’t gotten into the online capabilities. I know they’re there, but I’m having too much fun trying to do something for the 200th time.

Okay, well, that’s not completely true. There are some incredibly frustrating moments I’ve come across when playing this game. There doesn’t seem to be a simple way to switch which direction you’re heading in or if there is, I haven’t figured it out yet. There are also some amazingly poorly planned spawning locations, like at the very edge of a hill in front of water. You can’t get enough speed up from where you are to get over the water so you have to backtrack, even though a few minutes ago, when you wiped out, it put you back at the beginning (this was in on of the pro challenges I had a lot of trouble with).

All in all, the good way outweighs the bad and I’m still playing the game (I’ve quit simpler games that are WAY less frustrating). So, if you’ve always wanted to play a skating game, but the Tony Hawk ones have gotten a little crazy looking lately or you’re just a fan in general, I’d recommend grabbing yourself a copy of Skate 2.

–TJ