In competition, players can drop out freely-whether by choice or by bad connection. On top of the technical issues, the team events are also fundamentally flawed in their design. If not for the many technical and UI hiccups, Skate 3 would be worth it for the team play alone. Moreover, the clan-like team features are as deep as any of the best clan features in any console game ever made. In theory, the combination of individual and team-based competition overlaying the offline world is a wonderfully ambitious idea. Long load times, a clunky menu system, framerate dips, lag, and frequently dropped connections make playing online almost more trouble than it’s worth. Unlike its nearest analogue Burnout Paradise, dropping in and out of the online world isn’t seamless. When it doesn’t, it’s a frustrating mess. Any challenge in the offline mode can be played online, and most challenges also can be played in teams of three-on-three, with full-featured clan support organized by branded teams. While annoying in any game, it’s especially unforgiveable in a game like Skate 3 that puts so much weight on technical precision.įortunately, the real sell in Skate 3 is the introduction of a huge online feature set. It looks great when the framerate peaks, but its dips come unexpectedly and always at inopportune moments. While the folks at Black Box have attempted to kick the framerate up to 60 frames per second, aiming so high does little good since the framerate is highly unstable. Graphically, too, Skate 3 is a step backward. If you don’t already know all the various movesets, there’s nothing to ease you in. But there’s no gradual build-up in difficulty that encourages you to move from “owning” to “killing”. Most of the challenges also feature two ways to win you can either “own” a challenge by doing a general task at a given spot, or you can “kill” it by doing a specific trick in a specific spot. The adjustable difficulty setting is kind to newcomers, but the tutorial doesn’t teach you enough about the basics to invite new folks completely into the skating fold. I kept waiting for a moment when the challenges would finally give me free reign to score however I wanted, but instead it just got more and more narrow. For example, in many of the jam competitions you’ll only be able to earn points by doing very specific trick types on very specific objects. Worse, challenge areas themselves are so limited in where and how you can accumulate points that you’ll never spend time scoping out sweet spots for the kinds of tricks and lines you really want to do. As a result, the city of Port Carverton never feels like a real place, and there’s no sense of it being a skater’s sandbox. There’s no advantage to traveling from point to point yourself-no secrets, no alternate challenges, nothing. Just select an event from a list and that’s it. The quick travel system obviates the point of traveling the old-fashioned way, so you never get a real feel for the new locale. ![]() Skate 3 is an open-world game in name only. ![]() Ambitious online features have been introduced, but the promise of Burnout Paradise-style online play stumbles over an awkward menu system, long and frequent load times, and a painfully unstable framerate. A nearly identical trick and combo set makes its return from Skate 2, but some core changes and oversights make this iteration the least worthwhile of the three. ![]() Thankfully, the Skate series hasn’t quite jumped the shark yet-even though one of your tasks in the game is to do exactly that-but it’s clearly gearing up for a grand leap into oblivion. That Skate 3 resembles the Tony Hawk games might not seem like such a bad thing if it weren’t for the fact that it resembles the forgettable late games in the series rather than the outstanding earlier ones. For all of the series’ original freshness and innovation back in 2007, Skate 3 has succumbed to the same decay over time that the Tony Hawk series has. As if obeying its own universal law of thermodynamics, entropy has set in the Skate universe.
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