While we didn’t dislike anything it did, the game didn’t drag us back in. It’s just not bringing anything new to the genre nor is it really improving anything. There’s nothing groundbreaking here and the game lacks the instant impact and appeal of other skating games but if you approach Skate City as having its own pace and feel, it isn’t an unenjoyable game. The minimalist feel gives the game a ghostly emptiness making skating feel like an lonely pursuit. You’d think that Barcelona would look suitably different to Oslo but it seems as though most of the game is either set in a park, subway or very empty street. Each city kind of looks the same though and there’s not much in the way of detail. It’s a million miles away from the Thrasher/Skate or Die vibe of the Tony Hawk series. The presentation combines a soft, minimalist 2.5D look with a selection of lo-fi beats. But it’s reasonably addictive and gives you a reason to keep playing. That’s no surprise given Skate City‘s mobile roots. So really, this is quite a simple game in terms of its structure. There’s not a huge selection of looks available but it was nice to dabble. This is used to unlock the other two cities as well as stat upgrades (for speed, ‘pop,’ balance and spins) and a range of customisations which let you change your clothing and skate gear. Also, OlliOlli had a tendency to get punishingly difficult which this game refrains from.īeating challenges will earn you ‘SC’ which is the in-game currency here. Skate City feels more realistic though, giving you the resistance of skating and physics rather than letting you pretend you’re a superman. That game was a lot more intuitive and familiar in terms of its controls and it was faster and more flowing. The comparison to OlliOlli isn’t in Skate City‘s favour though. It can be a struggle but progress is easy enough to make, even if some of those three star ratings will be harder to come by. It’s not trying to copy SKATE or Tony Hawk and so you’ll need to reprogram your brain and muscle memory a little. We’d much rather that all tricks were on one stick as that’s a lot more intuitive and the lack of speed you have does make it all feel a bit stilted initially but this isn’t a criticism as such. Most of the difficulty comes from the slightly tricky control set up. It’s a simple enough system to understand and the difficulty comes from being consistent rather than it asking you to juggle any particularly difficult tricks. There isn’t much else to say about the gameplay itself. Oddly the combo system is limited to a 4x multiplier which seems like an unnecessary choice but it does keep the overall difficulty in check rather than expecting you to pull off insane 20x combos like OlliOlli does. There’s no Tony Hawk grind acceleration here. Between tricks you need to pump your speed up for momentum too. You can flip out of a grind with any trick or just press X (or O) to exit it. Do that near a grindable surface (a bench, rail or planter) and you’ll go into a grind. You just push these in a direction and that’ll give you specific flip trick. Ollie based tricks use the left stick while nollie tricks use the right stick. On the street, the controls do take a lot of getting used to. Each challenge has a three star rating too which gives you plenty of reasons to play them over and over. They can be pretty inconsistent in terms of their difficulty but for the most part they’re okay. This can range from simply getting a target score, nailing tricks that are called out, comboing grinds and manuals or races. Here you’ll get a short amount of time to complete a task. You press X to push forward.Įach city is broken down into 21 ‘challenges’ which act as the levels. Here you do all of your tricks using the left or right sticks while the shoulder buttons control spins and the triggers are used for manuals and for balancing out grinds. Instead, Skate City drops you into the first of its three locations, Los Angeles, and uses its first few levels to explain the controls. To be fair, skating games never got past the ‘we need to raise money, let’s make a skating video’ scenario anyway. We love Roll7’s iconic games and so we had high hopes for Skate City. Originally released as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2019, it is a 2D skating game that has some initial similarities with OlliOlli. Skate City is, as you can probably guess, a skating game which comes to us from Canadian mobile game specialists Snowman. In PS4 / Reviews tagged arcade / minimalist / skate / skate city / skating by Richie
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