Skate 2 Hands-on Preview

Multiplayer

Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper skateboarding game without some decent multiplayer games and again the good news here is that EA has focused on correcting the issues that Skate 1 had first, rather than just piling on new features and seeing what sticks.

Chatting to the developers, another thing that was obvious was how closely the dev team worked with the Skate community too, listening to what complaints and praise they have to share and thinking about how that can be incorporated into the Skate 2 experience.

It’s that closeness and willingness to listen which has actually resulted in the début of one of Skate 2's best features – the hall of meat!

Anyone who has played the first Skate will tell you that although the gameplay was good and the graphics excellent, one of the things which really made the game interesting for a lot of people was the ragdoll physics that affected the skaters and made some of their bails into...compelling viewing. You could end up with some very uncomfortable looking falls if you messed up a trick and in the course of our demonstration we say our fair share of faceplants and treeings.


What’s interesting though is that in Skate there was lots of information gathered about each and every bail, such as how many bones were broken and so on. What there wasn’t though was anything meaningful to do with this information...until Skate 2 introduced the Hall of Meat mode.

Hall of Meat is essentially a turn based multiplayer game similar to the PC Dismount freeware games in that the aim is pretty much solely to cause as much damage to your skater as you can. You start in a set position, you have about twenty seconds and your score is presented as your hospital bill – the more bones you break, the better.

Admittedly, there are a few issues here in that the game is still presented without any blood to speak of, but that doesn’t matter too much. Self-violence like this is empathic; you can feel the pain without seeing the pain and you’ll have to trust us when we say that you will feel the pain. Once a pro-failer gets the controller then you’ll be white-knuckled, groaning and recoiling from the sympathy pains.

Unfortunately, Hall of Meat was the only multiplayer game mode we got to go hands-on with and although it is made all the cooler by the addition of victory poses and dives that you can put your character into as they career through the air, it probably isn’t wholly representative of the full multiplayer experience.


EA has mentioned the usual array of other multiplayer modes, each of which should be playable either on Xbox Live or locally and which include the likes of a HORSE variant and the usual score-based matches, but since we haven’t even had a chance to see them in action yet it’d be purely speculative to comment on them. Still, if they’re shaping up nearly as well as everything else we’ve seen, then we’re sure it’ll be awesome.

Impressions

Keeping it simple, it’s fair to say that we liked Skate 2. A lot. An awful lot actually and it really did surprise us exactly how much fun we were having despite our ineptitude and the fact that we were bailing out faster than a sailor in a sinking ship.

Skate 2 isn’t an easy game to play at first, but it’s unfair to put the fault on the game there because the reality is that it’s difficult to play not because it’s badly designed or unintuitive, but because we’re just so used to playing Tony Hawk games instead. It’s like playing an FPS game using a non-inverted mouse and then moving to play a game which demands the mouse must be inverted. Neither view is wrong really, but getting used to it can be a bit difficult.

That said, it takes on an hour or two to get over this hump though and once you’ve done it the game rapidly opens itself up to you as an inventive and interesting take on skateboarding as a game. The ability to get off the board and move the furniture around also busts the entire experience wide open and gives players the chance not only to make their own tricks, but to actually enjoy the process of doing so and to be able to explore and pursue new goals as they do.

There are definitely a few bugs and issues to be ironed out in the build of Skate 2 that we played, but it’s remarkable how the game is still hugely playable and enjoyable already. The best thing though is that it’s obvious that it’s only going to get better from here.