Recent reviews by c r a b

Do I enjoy this game? Yes. Was I disappointed by various aspects of this game? Also yes. Do I recommend it? That depends greatly on who you are and what you're expecting.

First things first, if you're expecting a faithful continuation of the soul of the Skate series, this isn't it. It's free to play, live service, and always-online with a season pass and premium currency. I suspect that was the only pitch that would've gotten the suits at EA to cough up the funding for another Skate, so considering the current state of gaming, I'll take what I can get for my Skate fix. That said, I wanna get into some specifics:

Monetization: As far as free to play games go, the monetization isn't too egregious. No gameplay is locked behind a paywall (so far), every purchase is purely cosmetic, and the amount of items you unlock in normal gameplay is more than enough to deck yourself out with cool stuff without spending money. It isn't even much of a grind to get the free items, even at the higher levels.

Gameplay: The skating itself has never felt better. It definitely leans more towards the more arcade feel of Skate 3 vs. 1 & 2. Despite that the controls are tight and responsive, and everything translated beautifully to the new engine. For me, whatever the rest of the game is like, if they nailed this, I was gonna play. The challenges can get a little repetitive after a while, and there's no campaign beyond the very extended tutorials. I assume this will change as they start up the season schedule, but for now content is somewhat limited. Considering the previous games had decently long and entertaining campaigns with tons of personality, it kinda hurts coming from that to a few tutorials with the most cringe "hey fellow kids" dialogue you've ever heard. That said, there's more than enough fun to be had just screwing around in the open world. Which thanks to the one new mechanic, parkour, is more fun than ever. You can climb, vault, dive, dropkick, etc. It's pretty fun to mess around with the physics of it, and it comes in handy for getting up to spots for crazy drop-ins and stuff. One of the most efficient ways to get around is fast traveling to the top of the highest building, and spread eagle diving down to wherever you wanna go. Doing trick shots with your body has never been a bigger part of the game (despite hall of meat itself not being present, presumably for age rating reasons), for better or worse. I like it, some may find it annoying.

World Design: The world is pretty big, definitely big enough to get lost. It's some mix of San Fran and Amsterdam. I don't see the Amsterdam much, though, other than one canal. There's tons of variety in skate parks and spots, lines set up by objects in the environment absolutely everywhere you look, and gratuitous ramps placed all over, posing as parts of the environment. For example: a stained glass church with the inside converted to a skate park, with an open window you can fly through by using the side of an adjacent parking garage as a ramp. On top of probably 30% of the roofs in the city are crazy ramps and drop-ins, and you can string together some absolutely insane stuff flying from building to building. There's also 3 "community parks" which change every 24 hours, and spawn with some crazy ramps, bringing a bit of freshness to things. They're ugly as sin though and have floating objects, which bothers me. All this to say, gameplay wise, the map is a paradise. Aesthetically... it's very bland, sterile, silicon-valley corporate... pretty much the antithesis of how a skating games world should feel. There's very little detail or life to the city and it just leaves it feeling like a Roblox city or something. Generic city #21840 type-beat. It serves it's purpose, I just wish it had a lot more personality.

Graphics/Art Style: Oh boy... so, I get what they were going for by doing a simple art style. Easy to render, quick load times, and low file sizes to be able to be on all devices. I just cannot get behind a Fortnite looking art style for a Skate game. It just feels wrong. Skate is supposed to go for gritty realism, yes they started moving away from that a bit in Skate 3, but this was still a huge jump. The graphics are very underwhelming on max settings, It genuinely looks like a modern Roblox game to me. Since they're so obviously pulling inspiration from Fortnite... Fortnite is able to look great on max PC settings while scaling back for mobile/Switch. Why does it need to look like a mobile game for everyone?

Multiplayer: Squading up with your friends in this game is incredibly fun. You get up to 2x rewards on challenges, can challenge them or any other player to a points attack mode at any map location, and above all can just mess around and find spots to try impossible lines 500 times while on voice chat.

Music/Skate Culture: This is where the game lacks the most for me. There's no longer hilariously bad voice acting from pro skaters voicing themselves, and no skate culture to be seen other than some major brand names. The music, while good, isn't very "skater", it's just what the average indie/alternative Gen Z is listening to. The music is also very limited and you'll quickly turn it off in favor of running Spotify in the background. The general aesthetic comes off more vaguely hipster than anything rebellious or counterculture. It's obviously all meant for mass appeal and general inoffensiveness, and the vibe definitely suffers for it compared to previous games.

Conclusion: If none of the downsides I mentioned are deal breakers for you, and indie spiritual successors like Skater XL and replaying the originals just isn't scratching the Skate itch for you, this is worth a shot for sure. Especially if you have some friends to play with. It's a disappointing and discouraging reminder of the current state of the gaming industry for sure, but it's not a bad game. I don't think all the negative reviews are justified, it's just the overdramatic gamer outrage that happens every time a release isn't well recieved. Of course some people will genuinely not be able to get over the BS parts, but I think a lot of people didn't give it a genuine try.

A unique and compelling twist on the classic city building concept. The rougelike elements are fun, and I love the short amount of time you spend on each town you build. It really quells my perfectionism which is really my downfall in most city builders and why I don't usually stay engaged. If that's you too, this may be your new favorite in the genre!

The art is super charming, varied, and atmospheric. The game has a charming dark fantasy aesthetic and is creative in the world building, it's subtle but just enough lore to keep you engaged in the world. The music is phenomenal with decent variety, it's not one you'll get tired of and turn to 0% volume. The UI is readable, pleasing to the eye, and easy to navigate. The mechanics can get quite deep, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface at 10 hours. However the devs do an amazing job at easing you into it, and slowly building up mechanics and difficulty in a way that feels neither overwhelming nor tedious. The amount of content also seems quite good, and I can see myself playing for 50+ more hours before I feel the need to get any DLC. The devs also seem quite active and engaged with the community. Overall a super strong recommendation from me and while I did purchase it on sale, I'd happily buy it full price if I had to..

Fun and relaxing cozy game with an MMO twist. If you're into that sort of thing it's a lot of fun!

The best open-world zombie and parkour sandbox there is. The world and level design are absolutely unmatched. Villedor is stunning, the lighting with RT on is *chef's kiss*. Every single thing in the environment is meticulously placed to create limitless options for traversal and environmental combat. The opportunities for combat are everywhere you look, and the mechanics are much improved over the first game. Co-op is a ton of fun as well and very well implemented. All that said, it's not as tight and cohesive as the original. There's a lot of half-baked ideas and story beats you can tell they had to cut/scale back due to time and resource constraints. They had very overambitious plans while in development that progressively got cut more and more as release approached and the whole package suffered as a result. The progression is more grindy, the story worse, and writing even more cringy than the first game. (However, the atmosphere and world building through side quests and characters is great despite the incredibly uninspired main story.) Despite it's shortcomings, this is one of my favorite games of all time, and it's worth every penny even at full price. If you enjoyed parkour games like Mirrors Edge, and over the top gory zombie-killing action like Dead Island, Dead Rising, etc. you'll definitely have a great time with this game.

This game feels very much like a Bethesda game in terms of the gameplay loop (and jank), but it's lacking any of the soul or spirit of exploration of Bethesda games. The gameplay features in Bethesda games are always pretty weak and cobbled together, the only thing holding their games together is a big, dense, HANDCRAFTED world filled with (semi) interesting characters and enviornmental storytelling. This game lacks any of that. In my first 2 hours of gameplay, after going through the 5 or so loading screens it takes to get to the surface of a planet, I managed to already see the same dungeon twice. Everything feels the same, the side quests are 90% radiant ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and the main story's writing is cliche, uninspired, and in my opinion the weakest main questline they've done and that's saying a lot. Factions are hit or miss but mostly pretty boring. It has a massive, empty galaxy of 3x3 km squares with a scattering of maybe 15 dungeon templates and small outposts with no names characters. It really made me sad to play, and very concerned for TES 6. Especially considering Bethesdas handling of the feedback they've recieved from this game.

Oh, and if your PC can't run it at 60 fps despite being able to run Cyberpunk on Ultra, it's because you need to buy a new one, not because of poor optimization.

The devs have blatant anti-consumer practices that I just can't get behind. While they were early access (charging full price though), and pushing out updates at an absolute snails pace despite amazing sales, they charged extra money ($20 extra) for a premium edition to get access to the updates early. Did I not already pay for early access, effectively a paid beta? Why was I being paywalled from promised content I had already paid for? Plus, they are one of the handful of my 250 games that disables family sharing. They're greedy, and want to squeeze every cent possible from their playerbase despite making more than enough money. I can't in good faith recommend a product from a company like that. The games fine. Doesn't live up to the promised scope, but that's par the course for early access games these days. I'd rather play S.W.A.T. despite the dated graphics. It's just a better game.

More abandonware survival game junk. It looked really promising for a long time, but it's looking pretty dead now. The devs made a lot of really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ design choices and apparently have no desire to fix them and get back their playerbase. No updates for about a year, and the servers are a ghost town.

Plus for as pretty as it is up close, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ draw distance is garbage. Come on guys, my computer can handle loading more than five feet of a damn voxel game.

Not worth it for $40, not even for $20.

I bought this expecting it to be updated into a full game, and from the way it was advertised at the time it was a pretty reasonable expectation. The devs seem to be done with it, and it's still the exact same tech demo I bought while it was in early access, but with a few fixed bugs.

What's there is pretty fun, but expect nothing more than a fun combat system, a few short and I mean SHORT sets of levels from the devs, and workshop support for community maps and mods. Some of the community content is really good, and you can definitely get tens of hours of gameplay out of it, just keep your expectations in check I guess.

Personally I'm pretty disappointed with my purchase (having paid full price), and I'd DEFINITELY wait for a sale before buying it. But I wouldn't NOT recommend it if it seems like your kind of thing.